Catholic Herald – Page 2

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CAFOD appeals to Catholic community to help bring Sudan back ‘from the brink’

Posted on April 25, 2024by Catholic Radar JI

(Catholic Herald. Charles Collins).

Britain’s leading Catholic aid agency is making an emergency appeal to support families impacted by the conflict in Sudan.

Over 8.5 million Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes in Sudan since the war between rival militaries erupted in April 2023, according to the United Nations.

CAFOD is the official international aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, and its workers are on the ground in Sudan and say there is a short window to act before the agricultural growing season begins in June, as fears grow of an impending – yet preventable – famine.

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Catholic Irob minority has lost its home in Ethiopia’s Tigray region

Posted on April 24, 2024May 10, 2024by Catholic Radar N

( Catholic Herald).

A Catholic minority in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region is “in danger of disappearing” after three and a half years of brutal and violent occupation by the Eritrean army, according to a recent article in the Italian press.

The tragedy of the Irob community is unfolding against the larger tragedy across the Tigray region caused by two years of civil war that has resulted in at least 600,000 deaths, millions of displaced persons and a famine, reports Avvenire, a leading Italian daily newspaper.

The Irob, who number around 50,000 people, have lived for centuries in the rural and mountainous territory on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, primarily as farmers. Speaking the Saho language and with the majority following the Catholic Faith, this has set them apart from the rest of the population of the surrounding region who speak Tigrinya and belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

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Twenty-nine Nigerian Christians slaughtered in three-day pogrom

Posted on April 23, 2024April 23, 2024by Catholic Radar JI

(The Catholic Herald).

Suspected Fulani Islamist militants carried out on a three-day massacre in Pankshin Diocese in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, killing 29 Christians, injuring a further two, and burning down churches and houses.

The attacks took place across the villages of Kopnanle, Mandung, Bokkos Town and the Mbar district of Bokkos.

Speaking to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the Catholic charity for persecuted Christians, Father Andrew Dewan, director of communications in Pankshin Diocese, gave exclusive details about the attack.

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Cardinal Sarah denounces ‘atheistic’ Western bishops who prefer the world to the cross

Posted on April 17, 2024May 9, 2024by Catholic Radar Is

(Catholic Herald. Paul Haring).

Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah has accused Western bishops of worldliness and of succumbing to the temptation of “practical atheism” as they lose faith in the teachings of the Catholic Church.

The former prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments said that so many bishops desired to be “loved by the world” that they have forgotten that Christianity calls them to be “signs of contradiction”. The 78-year-old cardinal also repeated his criticism of Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican document that provides for the blessings of couples involved in same-sex unions, insisting that it’s not just traditional African culture but Catholic teaching itself which makes the document unacceptable. Speaking to the episcopal conference of Cameroon, Cardinal Sarah accused many bishops of “a failure of nerve” when confronted by the successive cultural revolutions convulsing the West.

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Could Archbishop Gänswein be made papal nuncio to Baltic states?

Posted on April 16, 2024April 16, 2024by Catholic Radar JI

(Catholic Herald – Joohn L. Allen Jr).

ROME – Rumors set in motion this week by a journalist close to Pope Francis, Elisabetta Piqué of Argentina’s La Nacion, suggest the pontiff may be on the verge of naming his erstwhile bête noire, German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, as his apostolic nuncio, meaning ambassador, to an unspecified foreign country.

Yesterday, veteran Vatican writer Gian Guido Vecchi of Corriere della Sera speculated that the assignment might be to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, a post vacant since March 11 when Archbishop Petar Rajič, the previous occupant, was named the new papal envoy to Italy and San Marino.

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France’s clash between church bell ringing and stroppy ‘rural newcomers’

Posted on April 15, 2024April 15, 2024by Catholic Radar JI

(Catholic Herald – James Jeffrey).

The French government aims to pass a law that could help protect the ringing of church bells across the country’s rural regions that are the bastion of French Catholicism.

The move follows tensions in rural areas following a rise in noise complaints attributed to residents who have moved to the countryside from big cities “bemoaning the way livestock, church bells and other rural sounds impinge on their newly claimed right to pastoral quiet”, reports the Guardian.

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Policing belief: the impossibility and terrible dangers of the State trying to control our thoughts and values

Posted on April 11, 2024April 12, 2024by Catholic Radar JI

(Catholic Herald – Alex Klaushofer).

Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act is part of a trend in the Western world for the State to police our thoughts and values.

Designed to eradicate prejudice against groups who have historically suffered discrimination, and motivated by the new focus on gender identity, Scotland’s new law, and those like it, are ostensibly secular. But inevitably the attempt to limit the expression of beliefs and values, especially those to do with gender and sex, affects the freedom of religious expression.