News Briefs

Toledo, Ohio, Oct 25, 2019 / 10:54 am (CNA).- An Ohio teen is speaking out after being disqualified from an Oct. 19 cross-country meet because she was wearing a hijab.

Noor Alexandria Abukaram is a 16-year-old student at a private Islamic school. She … […]

New York City, N.Y., Oct 25, 2019 / 03:01 am (CNA).- While Christians in Iraq and Syria suffer in the aftermath of Islamic State genocide, a new “hot spot” of persecution has emerged in South and East Asia, a recent report finds.

“The situation for Christians has deteriorated most in South and East Asia: this is now the regional hot spot for persecution, taking over that dubious honour from the Middle East,” stated a report on global Christian persecution by the group Aid to the Church in Need, a pontifical foundation that provides relief to Christians in 140 countries.

ACN released its biennial study of the global persecution of Christians Oct. 23. The 2019 report “Persecuted and Forgotten?” compiled information on acts of harassment, violence, and discrimination committed against Christians over the span of 25 months from July 2017 through July 2019; details on the persecution were gathered by ACN on fact-finding trips.

One of the report’s chief conclusions was that of all persecuted Christians, “Christian women suffer the most, with reports of abductions, forced conversions and sex attacks.”

The report focused on 12 countries where Christian persecution was most severe: Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Sudan, India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, China, the Philippines, and North Korea.

“The words of Jesus to his disciples are there to remind us what His followers should expect: ‘If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you,’” stated Cardinal Joseph Coutts of Karachi in the report’s introduction.

“We unite our sufferings with those who suffer more than us and find inspiration in the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body,’” the archbishop said.

While the Islamic State genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria, beginning in 2014, drew international condemnation in recent years, the killings, beatings, and harassment of Christians in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma – along with ongoing persecution of Christians in China and North Korea – have created a regional problem that is now the worst in the world, ACN has warned.

After Sri Lanka’s civil war ended ten years ago, minority Christians and Muslims have suffered attacks by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists, but the scope of the violence changed dramatically on Easter Sunday.

A series of coordinated bombings, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, targeted churches and hotels during the Paschal Triduum, and killed 258 people while injuring around 500.

In the wake of the attacks, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo alleged that the government could have done more to prevent the bombings and told ACN that “five training camps for jihadists have been found.”

“The attack signaled that, while the Islamists had switched strategy away from territorial gain to guerrilla warfare, attacking Christians was still a primary objective,” ACN reported of the Sri Lanka bombings.

In India, Christian leaders have been warning of a rise in Hindu nationalism that threatens to marginalize minority religions through violence and intimidation.

There were reported attacks against Christians in 24 of the 29 states in India between July 2017 and July 2019, with one estimate counting over 440 anti-Christian incidents in 2017, more than 470 in 2018, and 117 attacks in the first quarter of 2019.

Some of the attacks were horrific, including the gang-rape of five female workers at a Christian NGO in the northeastern state of Jharkhand.

In one case in September 2018, an elderly Christian woman was beaten in Veppur village on the date of a Hindu festival for walking on the road and thus defiling it; rocks were thrown at Christians who tried to help her.

In another case in February, a church in Karkeli village was attacked by a mob, and as CNA reported in September, a Jesuit-run mission school in Jharkhand was attacked by a violent mob of Hindu extremists where students and staff were beaten, in some cases severely.

Yet attacks like these continue with “impunity” because of an apparent reluctance by the government to investigate and prosecute, ACN says.

In the spring of 2019, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a second term in office, sparking concerns by Christian leaders of a worsening persecution.

In East Asia, authoritarian governments in China and North Korea continue to inflict horrific abuses on Christians.

North Korea has long been recognized as “the worst place in the world to be a Christian,” ACN says, with “upwards of 70,000 Christians” detained in harsh labor camps with reports of “extra-judicial killings, forced labor, torture, persecution, starvation, rape, forced abortion and sexual violence.”

China reportedly arrested underground Catholic Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou and detained him for seven months just after an agreement had been reached with the Vatican on the selection of bishops. The government also banned the online sale of Bibles in April 2018 in order to promote “a new version compatible with Sinicization and socialism.”

In the Philippines, bombings during Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo killed 20 people and injured more than 100 in January.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Christians are still suffering the “full impact” of the Islamic State genocide even though the territorial caliphate of the Islamic State is no more, ACN says.

Christian communities which have existed for centuries have long been dwindling in Iraq and Syria due to the ongoing Syrian civil war, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Islamic State genocide. Current estimates of Christians in Iraq range from “well below” 150,000 to below even 120,000, a mere fraction of the 1.5 million who lived there in 2003.

According to local priest Father Amanuel Kloo, the Christian population in Mosul has all but disappeared; there were 35,000 Christians in the city in 2003, at least 6,000 in 2014, and now just 40 Christians remain.

In Aleppo, “once one of the most significant centres for the Church in the whole of the Middle East,” the Christian population has dropped by more than 80 percent in eight years, the report said. Young men are fleeing military service, and others cannot bear the economic hardship or the increasing marginalization of Christians in society.

The suffering of Middle Eastern Christians, however, “reached its zenith” in the last two years, ACN says.

Although the Islamic State caliphate no longer exists, many of the group’s militants are still present in the region and “extreme poverty” remains a serious concern to the future of Christians in Syria. Some Iraqi Christians have still not been able to return to their homes, while others who have are facing harassment by local militias.

In Egypt, Copts have suffered a slew of violent attacks albeit with decreasing scope and severity over time. Nevertheless, Christians especially in rural areas face regular attacks, harassment, and discrimination, and while the state authorized 340 churches to be built in 2018, 3,740 churches have yet to be approved, revealing one challenge to the growth of the Church in the Muslim-majority country.

Nigeria has continued to be a hotbed of Christian persecution, with the continuation of attacks by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram in the country’s northeast, and the rise of atrocities committed by Fulani herdsmen, most of whom are Muslim, in the country’s Middle Belt region.

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Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 25, 2019 / 12:38 am (CNA).- As violence continues to plague parts of Mexico, one priest in the country stressed the importance of strong families in overcoming the drug trade and establishing peace.

“If you think about it, the family may be one of the most attacked institutions in recent years. And it’s in the family where values arise, where citizens are formed,” said Fr. Omar Sotelo, director of the Catholic Multimedia Center, which tracks violence in Mexico.

He called for “a process of re-civilization,” adding that “the best school for re-civilizing society, without any doubt, is the family – there’s no other more powerful factor, no other more dependable institution.”

“The fundamental weapon for counteracting the violence we are going through is in the family,” he insisted.

Sotelo spoke to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language sister agency, about the increase in violence in Mexico. According to government figures, there have been more than 23,000 murders in the country so far this year. The El Universal newspaper estimated that the first half of the year was the most violent in the history of Mexico.

The priest said that drug trafficking has so deeply infiltrated Mexican society that “we have to speak about ‘narcoviolence,’ ‘narcopolitics,’ ‘narcoeconomy,’ ‘narcosecurity’.”

“If we look at a map of the Republic, we are surrounded by cartels and they are imposing the rules for the survival of a country,” he warned.

Those who enter organized crime, Sotelo said, have gradually lost a sense of respect and love for others. Many times, they are pushed into drug trafficking out of desperation, when they could not find any other work to support themselves, he said.

“Drug trafficking feeds on men and women whose course in life has been curtailed or perhaps trampled on.”

He warned that “today we have complete generations of drug traffickers, from small children to adults…We have one or two generations of drug traffickers in Mexico and so it’s going to be extremely hard to eradicate it.”

Fighting the drug trade, he said, “is like kicking a hornet’s nest,” and it’s easy to grow discouraged after years of effort with little success.

Still, the priest maintained, “the vast majority in Mexico can still reverse this deplorable evil.”

Solving the problem will take more than words, and will take cooperation from all sectors of society, he said. “It’s not just the problem of a president, of a government, of a political party, of an NGO. It’s everyone’s problem.”

But while the challenge may seem daunting, failure to act would be come at a high price.

“If we remain silent, things will continue like this,” he said. “If we don’t do something, those who are children right now…in 5,6,8,10 years may be the next drug traffickers, the actors of organized crime in our country.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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Springfield, Ill., Oct 24, 2019 / 07:01 pm (CNA).- The role of president in a bishops’ conference is not as powerful as one may assume, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield in Illinois told CNA Wednesday.

“It’s important to understand that the bishops’ conference is not some kind of a regulatory body or a supervisory body,” Paprocki told CNA Oct. 23.

The conference, in fact, “doesn’t have any authority over bishops in their own diocese.”

While it would be easy to draw comparisons between the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops  and the United States Congress, Paprocki said that this was not at all the proper analogy for a bishops’ conference.

It is not normally the role of the USCCB to create or pass legislation, the bishop said.

“The meetings of bishops are not normally legislators–I say normally because there are some exceptions to that, and the exceptions are very narrowly defined in Canon 455,” he explained.

These exceptions include setting certain transactional thresholds or the age of confirmation, as well as voting on a specific issue with the permission of the Holy See.

“An example of (the latter) would be the Essential Norms that the bishops adopted in Dallas in 2002, for the protection of minors that was in conjunction with the Charter for the the Protection of Children and Young People,” he said.

“So the Charter is an example of a voluntary document that the bishops adopted.”

A conference of bishops, Paprocki said, is a “grouping of bishops in a region or in a country that comes together for joint pastoral activities.”

These joint pastoral activities mostly involve “advocacy type efforts,” he said.

“That’s, that’s basically what the conference tries to do–the bishops working together as equals.”

The president of a bishops’ conference has more of an advisory role than anything else, said Paprocki.

While the president would author statements from the conference, as well as keep the general assemblies running in an orderly fashion, he does not have supervisory authority over other bishops in their dioceses, nor does the president alone set the agenda for the general assemblies.

“It’s not really an authoritarian position,” said Paprocki. “That position is not like a supervisor of the other bishops and in that sense of mission.” Bishops are only accountable to the pope, Paprocki said, who is represented in the United States by an apostolic nuncio.

Paprocki is one of 10 bishops who have been listed as candidates for the upcoming presidential and vice-presidential elections at the United States Conference of Cathoilc Bishops. Candidates are nominated by their brother bishops, and Paprocki told CNA he was “quite surprised” to see his name put forward.

The current USCCB president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, will conclude his term at next month’s general assembly in Baltimore. Typically, the vice president of the USCCB is voted in to lead the conference for the next term. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles is the conference’s vice president.

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Indianapolis, Ind., Oct 24, 2019 / 06:00 pm (CNA).- An Indiana guidance counselor has filed a lawsuit against an Indianapolis Catholic school which placed her on administrative leave after she contracted a same-sex marriage, and did not renew her contract when it expired.

Shelly Fitzgerald, who worked at Roncalli High School for 15 years, filed suit in federal court on Monday against the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the high school.

Fitzgerald civilly married another woman in 2014.

According to the Indianapolis Star, after her civil marriage was brought to the school’s attention, Fitzgerald was asked to resign of her own accord, dissolve the civil marriage, or to maintain discretion about the situation until her contract expired.

When she refused these options, she was placed on administrative leave at the beginning of the last school year, and remained on leave until her employment contract expired.

Fitzgerald claims the decision was discriminatory. She is seeking damages for emotional distress and the loss of wages.

David Page, Fitzgerald’s lawyer, argued in the lawsuit that his client was treated differently than heterosexual employees who have disobeyed other Catholic teachings.

The archdiocese has been embroiled in controversy in recent months over the subject of school employees in same-sex civil marriages.

Employment contracts in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis require teachers, whom it says are ministers of the Gospel, to “convey and be supportive of all teachings of the Catholic Church.”

A Jesuit high school in the archdiocese, Brebeuf Prep, appealed to the Vatican after the archdiocese revoked its Catholic status when it would not terminate an employee in a same-sex civil marriage. That appeal is still pending.

In August, Joshua Payne-Elliot, a teacher dismissed from Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, filed suit after he was dismissed for contracting a same-sex civil marriage.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that churches have a constitutional right to determine rules for religious schools, and that religious schools have a constitutional right to hire leaders who support the schools’ religious mission,” Jay Mercer, an attorney for the archdiocese, said in August.

“Families rely on the Archdiocese to uphold the fullness of Catholic social teaching throughout its schools, and the Constitution fully protects the Church’s efforts to do so.”

In September, the federal Department of Justice backed the school’s decision in the Payne-Elliott case.

“This case presents an important question: whether a religious entity’s interpretation and implementation of its own religious teachings can expose it to third-party intentional-tort liability. The First Amendment answers that question in the negative,” a the DOJ statement said.

In June, the archdiocese said of teachers that “it is their duty and privilege to ensure that students receive instruction in Catholic doctrine and practice. To effectively bear witness to Christ, whether they teach religion or not, all ministers in their professional and private lives must convey and be supportive of Catholic Church teaching.”

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