Digos, Philippines, Dec 18, 2019 / 10:01 pm (CNA).- After a southern Philippines earthquake killed at least nine and displaced thousands of people on Monday, survivors emphasized their need for fresh water, and Catholic leaders called for prayer and ai… […]
Washington D.C., Dec 13, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Senior police officials in the Australian state of Victoria discussed by email the way that their 2014 investigation into Cardinal George Pell could deflect public scrutiny from an emerging corruption scandal in the force.
In a 2014 email exchange, then-Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton and Charlie Morton, assistant director of media and corporate communications for the Victoria police department, discussed how to respond to a high-profile scandal which would hamper the credibility of Victoria police operations.
In an email dated April 1, 2014, Morton advised Ashton not to make a media appearance in response to the “Lawyer X” scandal, because forthcoming announcements about Cardinal Pell could distract media and public attention.
“The Pell stuff is coming tomorrow and will knock this way off the front page,” Morton wrote to Ashton.
“Unless there are some serious appeals from convicted [criminals] which might get up as a result of this, then I can’t see this continuing with the same level of profile.”
The emails emerged this week as Ashton, now Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, gave evidence at a Royal Commission inquiry into the use of police sources and the Lawyer X scandal, in which criminal defense lawyer Nicola Gobbo was recruited to work as an informant against members of the Calabrian mafia, while she was representing several of them as an attorney.
Gobbo has claimed that her work as an informant for Victoria police from 1995-2009, despite issues of professional ethics and client confidentiality, led to 386 convictions, many of which are now believed to be tainted, subject to appeal, and could be overturned.
The email exchange between Ashton and Morton came after a news radio host in Melbourne referred on air to the about-to-break story as one of the “biggest law and order scandals in [Victoria state] history” and predicting it could result in “killers walking free.”
A subsequent High Court injunction prevented publication of Gobbo’s name, or any media reporting of the case from 2014, part of a years’-long, $4.5 million legal effort by Victoria police to keep details of the case from becoming public.
The reference to news about Pell being used to deflect negative coverage came just two months after Pope Francis had appointed Pell to reform Vatican financial affairs, placing him in charge of the newly-created Prefecture for the Economy in February, 2014.
It is not clear what information the two police officials were anticipating would be released the next day, though the previous week Pell had given evidence before the Royal Commission investigation into child sexual abuse in Church institutions.
In 2013, Victoria Police opened Operation Tethering, an open-ended investigation into possible crimes by Cardinal Pell, although no victims had come forward against him and there had been no criminal complaints made against him at the time. Although they had found no victims or criminal accusations, in 2015 the program was expanded and put on a more formal footing.
In 2017, Pell was charged with sexually abusing two minors. He was convicted in 2018 on the evidence of a single victim-accuser, the second supposed victim died of a heroin overdose on Aril 8, 2014 – one week after the Victoria police email exchange. That second victim had denied on several occasions that he was sexually abused by Pell.
The cardinal’s conviction was upheld on appeal by the Victoria Supreme Court in August. The Australian High Court will hear Pell’s appeal of that decision in 2020.
Since the court gag order was lifted in 2019, the Lawyer X scandal has tainted successive chiefs of the Victoria police force, all of whom were aware of Gobbo’s role a mob informer and practicing criminal lawyer.
Much of Gobbo’s work as a lawyer was with Australian members of the Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia organization, which has established a deep presence both in Victoria and across the country, with allegations of multi-million dollar bribes to judges and close connections to local Victorian politicians in both political parties.
The link between the Italian and Australian branches of the organization is known to be close and ongoing.
The Lawyer X scandal has tainted several former heads of the Victoria police, all of whom were aware of Gobbo’s role and allowed it to continue. Ashton was first told of her work in 2007 when he was serving as assistant director of the Office of Police Integrity, an anti-corruption body.
Ashton told the Royal Commission on Tuesday that he saw no reason to suspect “anything untoward was going on” when he learned the lawyer was acting as a police informant against her own clients.
Gobbo, who is the niece of a former Victoria Supreme Court judge, has since said she fears retribution by police because of the scandal, refusing to go into witness protection and claiming police have threatened to take her children into protective custody to compel her cooperation.
Earlier this week, she told Australian media that “It’s not the first time that they [Victoria Police] threatened me in relation to toeing the line and doing things their way or they would take my children.”
The Victoria police force has been the subject of numerous scandals over the years. In addition to the allegations concerning Gobbo, a 2017 report found that nearly half (46%) of Victoria Police employees believe they would suffer personal repercussions if they reported corruption, with almost one in five saying it would cost them their job.
Canberra, Australia, Dec 12, 2019 / 12:47 am (CNA).- Following religious groups’ criticism of an Australian bill intended to protect religious freedom, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Attorney-General Christian Porter have released a second ver… […]
New Delhi, India, Dec 11, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is expressing concern about a controversial bill which passed India’s legislature Wednesday enshrining a pathway to citizenship for immigrants that specifically excludes Muslims.
“The [bill] is a dangerous turn in the wrong direction; it runs counter to India’s rich history of secular pluralism and the Indian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law regardless of faith,” USCIRF said Dec. 9.
“USCIRF fears that the Indian government is creating a religious test for Indian citizenship that would strip citizenship from millions of Muslims.”
USCIRF recommended that should the legislation be signed into law, the United States should consider imposing sanctions on the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah and other leaders.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill would grant Indian citizenship to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis (a Zoroastrian community), and Sikhs who fled Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan before 2015, while leaving out Muslims, Reuters reports.
Muslims make up about 14% of India’s population.
The upper house of India’s parliament began debating the bill Dec. 11, after it had already cleared the lower house. It passed the upper house 125-105 and is set to be signed into law by president Narendra Modi.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which came into power during 2014, during summer 2018 conducted a citizenship test in one of India’s states that may be expanded nationwide, the New York Times reports.
Under the test, around 2 million of Assam state’s 33 million residents were determined to be illegal immigrants and could face incarceration, even if they have lived in India for generations.
The ruling party has also come under fire for its August decision to strip the semi-autonomous, disputed region of Kashmir, which is majority-Muslim, of its semi-autonomous status and to remove its statehood.
Protests against the bill have intensified, Reuters reports, as violence broke out in the northeast of the country while parliament debated the bill.
Under Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, conditions for religious minorities, including Christians, have deteriorated in recent years.
According to USCIRF’s 2019 report, “religious freedom conditions in India continued a downward trend” in 2018.
The commission said India’s “history of religious freedom has come under attack in recent years with the growth of exclusionary extremist narratives—including, at times, the government’s allowance and encouragement of mob violence against religious minorities—that have facilitated an egregious and ongoing campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities. Both public and private actors have engaged in this campaign.”
Mob violence against Christians by Hindus has been particularly acute. In August, 40 Catholics were physically or verbally assaulted while on a Marian pilgrimage, as assailants believed to be affiliated with the radical Hindu Munnani group blocked the road and destroyed the pilgrims’ Marian statue.
In September, around 500 armed Hindu extremists attacked a Jesuit mission in the Archdiocese of Ranchi. Armed with sticks, chains, iron bars, knives, and pistols, the mob beat tribal students including two who were seriously injured, and also seriously damaged the school’s facilities.
In May, a Protestant pastor in the central state of Madhya Pradesh has been acquitted of charges held against him under state-level anti-conversion laws.
A group of Hindu nationalists had stormed the church three years ago during a service and began beating and harassing worshipers, ADF International reports.
The police came and arrested the pastor, his wife, and his six-year-old son, stripped them of their clothes, beat them, and kept them detained without bail for three days, finally convicting the family in March of this year of forcing conversion to the Christian faith.
The right to choose one’s own religion is found in Article 25 of the Indian Constitution.
Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal has said numerous mob lynchings of Christians have occurred in which the victims are accused of eating beef or otherwise harming cattle, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.
Violence against Christians in India does not end with lynchings, however. The United Christian Forum and ADF India documented 80 “violent mob attacks” across India in the first quarter of 2019 alone.
Quezon City, Philippines, Dec 10, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- Listening is the first step in evangelization, the newly-appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples said Tuesday in Quezon City.
“Evangelization is communication. God is a God who communicates, who dialogues. But He is also a God who listens,” Cardinal Luis Tagle said Dec. 10, according to ABS-CBN News.
He was speaking during a meeting of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, which included the groundbreaking of the Veritas Asia Institute of Social Communications.
Cardinal Tagle encouraged a “spirituality of listening, to God, to neighbors and to the signs of the times.”
“Listening comes first,” he stated. “Many people are longing for someone and a community to listen. Even if you have no words, you communicate your presence, your compassion, your unity.”
The cardinal commented that “we are all in a hurry, rushing to say something, to issue a statement even when we have not heard yet. We have already something prepared without knowing what the question or statement is.”
He added that the Church needs people “who generate greater trust and confidence, as “in our world today [there is] so much fear, suspicion and prejudice. We don’t know whom to trust. We need people who can generate that atmosphere of trust.”
Cardinal Tagle also reflected that “having a beautiful building in itself does not guarantee evangelisation; it is the training and formation of people,” saying that “some of the most memorable catechetical lessons were learned under a tree” when he was a child. “If I were asked where we had these catechetical lessons, I could not name any building. Children were gathered. We had cookies. We had candies. And we came to the lessons.”
The cardinal, who is 62, was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples Dec. 8. He had served as Archbishop of Manila since 2011.
He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Imus at age 24, and was appointed bishop of that see in 2001.
Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec 7, 2019 / 03:25 pm (CNA).- Authorities in Indonesia are expected to deploy 160,000 security personnel to ensure Christmas and New Year’s celebrations safe, according to local media.
According to UCA News, the number of se… […]
Hong Kong, China, Dec 4, 2019 / 04:56 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Joseph Zen, former bishop of Hong Kong, has renewed his criticism of the Vatican-China deal, warning that he thinks Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is exercising undue influen… […]
Beijing, China, Dec 3, 2019 / 04:30 pm (CNA).- A Chinese bishop has said that Catholics in the country must put their loyalty to the state before the faith. Bishop John Fang Xingyao made the statement during a Communist Party sponsored meeting in Beiji… […]
Canberra, Australia, Dec 2, 2019 / 02:01 pm (CNA).- Australia’s Catholic bishops support “nationally consistent” reporting standards for the abuse of minors, but cannot support new national legal standards that would force priests to … […]
Harrisburg, Pa., Dec 2, 2019 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- The Pennsylvania Senate is debating a bill that would require the burial or cremation of human remains after miscarriage or abortion.
HB 1890, the Final Disposition of Fetal Remains Act, was passed by the state House Nov. 18 by a vote of 123 to 76. It would require health care facilities to bury or cremate fetal remains not claimed by the child’s parents.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Frank Ryan, R-Lebanon, said that “we wanted to craft something that was voluntary, that provided the family with the ability for closure, the ability to understand that a human life was lost.”
Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has said he would veto the bill if it makes it to his desk.
In November, Wolf vetoed a bill that would have banned the abortion of children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. He also vetoed, in 2017, a bill that would have limited abortions to 20 weeks into pregnancy, and banned dilation and evacuation abortions.
Similar bills regarding the treatment of fetal remains are being considered in Ohio and on the federal level.
The portion of an Indiana law requiring aborted babies to be cremated or buried was upheld by the US Supreme Court in May. In an unsigned opinion, the court cited a previous decision that states have a “legitimate interest in proper disposal of fetal remains.”
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