A local Catholic agency intends to stand by the US city of Flint, Michigan during its public health crisis, the organisation’s president and CEO has said.
Vicky Schultz, of the Flint-headquartered Catholic Charities of Shiawassee and Genesee Counties, says the city developed water problems when it stopped purchasing treated Lake Huron water, instead sourcing water from the Flint River on cost-saving grounds. The river had long been a disposal site for industrial waste from automobile companies, sewage and local runoff.
In August 2014, Flint officials advised the public to begin boiling their water after E. Coli was found in it, and in September 2015 the number of children in the city with lead in their blood was found to have doubled from 2.1% to 4%.
The challenges brought by the water crisis raise serious questions as to what the future of Catholic Charities’ services will entail, Ms Schulz said, admitting “there’s so many pieces, and we’re not set up with the infrastructure to deal with the crisis,” adding, “I just don’t think we were prepared for anything like this, and we’re just trying to find our way through it”
Germans bishops call for doors to stay open
German’s bishops have urged their country to continue accepting refugees, despite demands for new restrictions after New Year’s Eve violence in Cologne and other cities. “We need a reduction in numbers, but fixing an upper limit would be difficult,” Trier’s Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier has said in an interview, adding, “We also need flexibility. But it’s up to politicians to say how this can be achieved in practice, and it can’t be done only at a national level.”
Hamburg’s Archbishop Stefan Hesse, the German Church’s special representative for refugees, said he believed a cap would violate the Geneva Convention and Germany’s Basic Law, the country’s constitution. “Christians cannot allow people who’ve faced untold suffering and are needing help to encounter closed borders,” he said.
Germany received 1.1 million refugees in 2015.
