CNA Staff, Jul 30, 2020 / 12:17 am (CNA).- Catholic leaders in the Philippines have spoken out against President Rodrigo Duterte’s call to reinstate the death penalty for illegal drug use and other crimes.
Fr. Silvino Borres, president of the Co… […]
CNA Staff, Jul 29, 2020 / 03:50 pm (CNA).- Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney on Wednesday called the New South Wales government a “disgrace” for failing to enact anti-slavery legislation.
The Australian Parliament had passed such a law t… […]
CNA Staff, Jul 27, 2020 / 04:08 pm (CNA).- After several failures to secure dismissal of charges in lower courts, a Catholic bishop whom a nun has accused of rape has asked India’s Supreme Court to dismiss the case.
Bishop Franco Mulakkal of Jullundur has been charged with raping a nun repeatedly over the course of two years, allegations he denies.
His effort to dismiss the charges was rejected in a trial court in March, then again in the Kerala High Court July 7. The court agreed with prosecutors that there was evidence to proceed, The Tribune of India reports.
Mulakkal claims he was falsely accused after he questioned alleged financial irregularities of the victim’s convent.
Bishop Mulakkal was arrested in September 2018 amid protests calling for a police investigation of the allegation. He was subsequently released on bail. The bishop was charged in April 2019 with rape, unnatural sex, wrongful confinement, and criminal intimidation. He faces imprisonment of 10 years to life if found guilty.
He was temporarily removed from the administration of his diocese shortly before his arrest.
The bishop’s charges stem from a member of the Missionaries of Jesus who has said he raped her during his May 2014 visit to her convent in Kuravilangad, in Kerala. In a 72-page complaint to police, filed in June 2018, she alleged that the bishop sexually abused her more than a dozen times over two years.
The Missionaries of Jesus is based in the Jullundur diocese, and Bishop Mulakkal is its patron.
The bishop has also claimed the allegations were made in retaliation against him because he has acted against the nun’s sexual misconduct. He said the nun was alleged to be having an affair with her cousin’s husband.
A witness in the case against the bishop, who is also a member of the Missionaries of Jesus, told investigators Sept. 9, 2018 that from 2015 to 2017 she participated in sexual video chats with the bishop, having been pressured by him, and that he groped and kissed her April 30, 2017, at a convent in Kannur.
The trial was originally set for Nov. 11, 2019, then delayed three weeks. It was then deferred again to Jan. 6 because Mulakkal requested more time for the case.
The bishop skipped a hearing on July 1 at district court in Kottayam, claiming that his house was in a coronavirus containment zone. The prosecutor said this was not true and accused Mulakkal of deliberately delaying the case.
On July 14, officials announced that the bishop had tested positive for coronavirus and was displaying symptoms.
CNA Staff, Jul 24, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- An Islamic political party in Indonesia said Tuesday that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could spark a civilizational clash because of his calls for an Islamic “reawakening” amid the establishment of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque.
A recent tweet from Erdogan “summoned Muslims ‘in every corner of the earth’ to follow Turkey’s lead in reawakening the Islamic nation, or ummah, which was largely united under the political and military leadership of a caliph from the 7th century CE until the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924,” Indonesia’s National Awakening Party said in a July 21 statement.
Recent statements from the Turkish president “are attacking the rules-based international order; inflaming emotions ‘wherever Muslims dwell throughout the earth;’ and threaten to
rekindle a clash of civilizations that afflicted humanity for nearly 1300 years, along a fault line stretching ‘from Bukhara (in Central Asia) to al-Andalus (Spain),’” the statement added.
While “President Erdogan has defended the conversion of Hagia Sofia into a mosque by citing Turkey’s right, as a sovereign nation state, to do as it pleases with the former Orthodox Christian cathedral,” the effects of the president’s call for an Islamic reawakening “extend far beyond Turkey’s borders and threaten both Muslim- majority and non-Muslim nations worldwide,” the National Awakening Party said.
Hagia Sophia, the church of “Holy Wisdom,” was built in the year 537 and served as the cathedral of the Patriarch of Constantinople. It stood as the largest known building in the world and the largest Christian church, for a period of time.
In the year 1453, Turkish armies sacked Constantinople and the church was turned into a mosque. In 1934, the cabinet of then-Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—head of a secularist government—converted the mosque into a museum and opened it to visitors from around the world.
On July 2, a Turkish court ruled that the 1934 conversion of Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum was unlawful. The decision was announced July 10, and Erdogan subsequently announced that Hagia Sophia would be converted back into a mosque.
Erdogan made his announcement in a lengthy July speech that was littered with historical, geographical, and religious references to the old Islamic world, connecting Hagia Sophia’s reconversion to a much-broader “Islamic renaissance.”
In his speech, the Turkish leader predicted that Hagia Sophia’s reconversion would herald the liberation of al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in the old city of Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam.
Dr. Elizabeth Prodromou, a former vice chair on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told CNA July 17 that the president’s speech aimed to “justify what he [Erdogan] sees as a kind of religious destiny, and also a geopolitical model for Turkey’s revisionism and expansionism.”
Erdogan specifically chose these “historical figures” to promote the depth of Turkey’s history and to “encompass Turkic tribes from Central Asia into the Ottoman Empire,” she said.
It was a speech “heralding the liberation of the full Muslim world,” Prodromou said.
Christian and political leaders around the world condemned the decision to reconvert Hagia Sophia. Orthodox and Catholic leaders have declared July 24 a day of mourning for the decision.
For its part, the National Awakening Party said that “Erdogan’s statements were swiftly endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and a wide range of Islamic supremacists worldwide, including Indonesian Muslims who seek to transform the multi-religious and pluralistic Republic of Indonesia into an Islamic State or caliphate.”
“The Islamic world is in the midst of a rapidly metastasizing crisis, with no apparent sign of remission. Among the most obvious manifestations of this crisis are the brutal conflicts now raging across a huge swath of territory inhabited by Muslims, from Africa and the Middle East to the borders of India; rampant social turbulence throughout the Islamic world; the unchecked spread of religious extremism and terror; and a rising tide of Islamophobia among non-Muslim populations, in direct response to these developments,” the party said.
That crisis, the statement added, has led to humanitarian problems in many parts of the world, and increased Islamic militant radicalization.
“In the midst of these circumstances, it is the height of irresponsibility for Recep Erdogan to further inflame Muslim emotions in pursuit of his domestic political agenda and to serve as a cover for his violation of international norms—by drilling for natural gas within the territorial waters of Cyprus and Greece; supporting al-Nusra (an affiliate of al-Qaeda) in Syria; and intervening in the Libyan conflict on behalf of the Islamist-dominated interim government—in an effort to enhance Turkish regional power and assert maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean,” the party said.
The National Awakening Party was founded in Indonesia in 1999, and holds 47 of 560 seats in the country’s lower legislative house. It is generally identified as a centrist party, and is aligned with centrist Christian Democrat parties in Europe.
Las week, Indonesian Sheikh Yahya Cholil Staquf, leader of the largest independent Muslim organization in the world, said that “campaigns of mass killing, displacement, and terror that threaten to break the already badly frayed bonds of trust that make a shared communal life between Muslims and non-Muslims possible.”
Staquf is the general secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization with more than 90 million followers. He has also co-founded a global movement promoting a “humanitarian Islam” that shuns the ideas of a caliphate, Sharia law, and “kafir,” or infidels.
In a July 7 essay in Public Discourse, he called for “a global strategy to develop a new Islamic orthodoxy that reflects the actual circumstances of the modern world in which Muslims must live and practice their faith.”
CNA Staff, Jul 24, 2020 / 07:30 am (CNA).- As Hagia Sophia opened for Muslim prayers Friday for the first time in 86 years, a leading Asian cardinal said that the decision to turn the building back into a mosque will reopen wounds and intensify divisio… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 24, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- Part 3 of a three part series examining the situation of the Church in China. Part 1 examined the Church on the mainland, Part 2 examined the situation in Hong Kong.
With negotiations ongoing for an extension of the 2018 Vatican-China deal, the fate of Vatican-Taiwan relations may prove inextricable from the future of the deal – and of the Church in China.
When the 2018 deal was signed, ceding some control over episcopal appointments to the Communist Party, the Holy See stressed that it was a “pastoral” not “political” agreement, aimed at bringing together the underground Church loyal to Rome and the communist-controlled, schismatic Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA).
But the “pastoral” split among China’s Catholics is rooted in the diplomatic split between Communist China and the Holy See. While the Vatican may insist its goals are purely ecclesiastical, the Chinese government is unlikely to make such a distinction. And with an extension of the deal under discussion, many are now asking if the Holy See is preparing to accept recognizing “one China” as the price of a unified Church.
The Holy See has recognized the government of Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, since 1942, while the Communist People’s Republic of China has had control of the mainland since the conclusion of the Chinese civil war in 1949. While the Church has maintained an embassy in Taiwan since then, it has had no official diplomatic presence on the mainland since 1951, when it was officially expelled – creating the split between the CPCA and the underground Church.
The communist government has always made claim to Taiwan as a rebel province, insisting that there is only one China, and one Chinese government. Isolating Taiwan and curtailing international recognition of it as a sovereign democratic nation was, and remains, a central foreign policy priority.
China succeeded in getting the United Nations to cease recognition of the Taiwanese government in 1971, and since that time the vast majority of member states have severed official ties, often as a condition of increased aid from or trade with China. Taiwan has lost five diplomatic allies since 2016, with developing nations such as El Salvador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic cutting ties under pressure from Beijing.
Although its embassy in Taipei has been led by a chargé d’affairs, not a full ambassador, since 1971, today the Holy See remains the last European government, and the most prominent international body, to recognize Taiwan.
Ever since the 2018 agreement was signed, China and Vatican watchers have waited to see if there would be a further shift in the Vatican’s China diplomacy, and the signs, while subtle, have been there to be seen.
In March 2018, the Vatican-China deal was under negotiations and widely discussed in the media. Taiwan’s Archbishop John Hung Shan-chuan of Taipei voiced his own opinion, saying Taiwan did not anticipate that the Holy See and mainland China would establish diplomatic relations, because to do so requires sharing “common values with each other.”
“The values the Vatican holds are different from those of the Chinese Communist Party. Building ties with the Vatican requires values including freedom and democracy,” he said at the time.
Yet, since then, overt support for these values from Rome has been scant regarding China. The Vatican has not commented on the more than 1 million Uyghurs interned in concentration camps, subject to forced sterilizations, torture, and anti-religious indoctrination. Nor has it spoken publicly on the continued persecution of Christians across the mainland, including the harassment, arrest, and detention of faithful Catholic bishops.
Instead, Cardinal Pietro Parolin has praised Chinese president Xi Jinping’s campaign of “sinicization” of religion and culture in the country, saying it relates to the Catholic concept of inculturation “without confusion and without opposition.”
At the same time, the Chinese government has launched a crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, first in response to protests against a 2019 law to authorize extradition to the mainland, and more recently following the imposition of sweeping new “national security” measures on the supposedly self-governing territory.
At the beginning of the year, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, wrote to Pope Francis in response to his message for the 2020 World Day of Peace. The president used her letter to explain the parallels between Chinese attitude to, and actions against Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“I am in complete accord with your statement that walking the path of peace requires us to set aside every act of violence in thought, word and deed, whether against our neighbors or against God’s creation,” Tsai wrote to Francis in January, as she detailed a list of China’s actions that she said constitute “abuses of power” in Hong Kong, the persecution of religious believers on the mainland, and its aggression toward Taiwan.
“The crux of the issue is that China refuses to relinquish its desire to dominate Taiwan. It continues to undermine Taiwan’s democracy, freedom, and human rights with threats of military force and the implementation of disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and diplomatic maneuvers.”
Yet, as negotiations with the Communist government continue, the diplomatic discourse between the Holy See and Taiwan appears distinctly one-sided.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Holy See was the only diplomatic ally of Taiwan which did not make an appeal to allow Taiwan to participate in the World Health Organization’s assembly meetings. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in May that the Vatican would voice its support for Taiwan through other channels.
Earlier this month, the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post quoted a Vatican source saying that the Holy See could even move its embassy from Taiwan to the mainland.
“Taiwan should not be offended if the embassy in Taipei is moved back to its original address in Beijing,” the Vatican source was quoted saying.
While such a move would be seen by many observers as a dramatic diplomatic coup for Beijing, Taiwan’s newly installed Archbishop Thomas An-Zu Chung downplayed the significance of the possibility, telling the Morning Post that the Taiwan mission “should be maintained” even if the official Vatican embassy is moved to Beijing.
Such a move “could happen soon if the mainland Chinese government is more open-minded and receptive towards the Roman Catholic Church,” Chung said, adding that “in reality, the Sino-Vatican agreement has not had an actual impact on Taiwan’s relationship with the Vatican.”
The Vatican has been vocal in its desire to see a unified Catholic Church in China, presumably encompassing the official and underground Churches on the mainland, as well as the for-now independent dioceses of Hong Kong and Taiwan. If the mainland government hopes to press the Holy See into accepting a “one China” policy as a price of a “one Church in China,” the signs suggest it may work.
In 2018, some in Rome might have hoped to see the freedoms of Taiwanese and Hong Kong Catholics protected as it moved towards uniting the Church on the mainland. Yet in the two years since the Vatican-China agreement was signed, the Communist government has made it abundantly clear that they – not Rome – will be the supreme authority over Catholics in the country.
While it remains, in the eyes of many Chinese Catholics, a deeply unpleasant offer, the Holy See is still at the table.
CNA Staff, Jul 23, 2020 / 04:32 pm (CNA).- Sister Ruth Lewis, a Pakistani nun who dedicated her life to helping underprivileged people with disabilities, died Monday following coronavirus complications.
Sister Ruth, head of Dar-ul-Sukun, a Karachi hom… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 23, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- Part 2 of a three part series examining the situation of the Church in China.
As the Vatican and China negotiate an extension of the 2018 deal that ceded a measure of control over episcop… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 22, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- China is using advanced technology to monitor both public and private religious gatherings, witnesses told a federal hearing on Wednesday.
“As low-cost processors, sensors, and cameras h… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 22, 2020 / 07:30 am (CNA).- Part 1 of a three part series examining the situation of the Church in China.
In recent weeks, China has become the focus of international attention and opprobrium, first for its handling of t… […]
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