Religion misused in Brazilian standoff
Brazilian Christian leaders have expressed concern about how many members of the country’s Chamber of Deputies invoked religion when voting on April 17 to impeach President Dilma Rousseff.
Carlos Moura, executive secretary of the Brazilian bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission, said the commission experienced “an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment and dissatisfaction over the words uttered in the chamber”.
During five hours of voting, he said, legislators said they were casting their votes “in the name of their wives, children, political party and God, instead of sticking to the actual charges against the president”.
Romi Benke, general secretary of the National Council of Christian Churches in Brazil, described the willingness to justify votes by claiming they were in God’s name as “alarming”, and said the session revealed a widespread “instrumentalisation of religion”.
Few representatives mentioned how Mr Rousseff has been accused of mismanagement of funds and using loans from state-owned banks to mask large budget deficits.
No fences in Austria’s Burgenland diocese
There will be at least two gaps in a nine-kilometre fence along a stretch of Austria’s Hungarian border, a local bishop has said, as he will refuse to allow the fence on diocesan properties by the border.
The barrier in the eastern province of Burgenland is intended to prevent access to Austria by migrants seeking to avoid being stopped at authorised crossings, but Eisenstadt’s Bishop Ägidius Zsifkovics said barring from Church ground those seeking help would be contrary to the spirit of the Gospel.
Such a fence would also contradict “Pope Francis’ clear message to Europe, and in particular for a diocese that was in the shadow of the Iron Curtain for decades”, he said, adding, “we need to tackle today’s problems at their root and that means stopping organised human trafficking”.
Philippine Church considers ‘servant-leader’ candidates
Philippine Church officials have surveyed people’s views of five presidential candidates to see who are perceived to be the best “servant-leaders”.
1,200 registered Filipino voters were asked face-to-face whether candidates showed the following qualities: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualisation, foresight, stewardship, and commitment to the growth of people and building community.
Fr Anton Pascual, president of the Philippines’ largest Catholic radio network, said the questions were based on the concept of a “leader as servant”, a concept developed in the United States. The aim, he said, was to encourage voters to consider “which of these candidates are truly pro-family and show family values”.
None of the candidates scored above 75% when it came to overall servant-leadership qualities, lamented Manila’s auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo, head of the Philippine bishops’ Commission on the Laity, while Novaliches’ retired Bishop Teodoro Bacani said the survey could help voters, but it might be hard becauise “they are not looking for who is a servant-leader”.
One in three north Welsh churches to close
Almost a third of all Catholic churches in North Wales are to close within the next few years, it has been announced.
Some 22 of the 62 churches in Gwynedd and Anglesea are to close by 2020, Wrexham’s Bishop Peter Brignall revealed in a pastoral letter.
Explaining that the move was inevitable due to a decline in the number of priests under retirement age, of whom the diocese expects to have just 22 by 2020, Dr Brignall called on the faithful to treat this as an opportunity for renewal.
“Churches are going to be closed and I hope some new ones built; parishes are going to be suppressed and new ones established, and some Mass times will be altered. Not all of this will happen at once, but some of it will happen immediately, ie within weeks,” he said.