This involves dedication to promoting the common good, particularly through listening to and empowering people who are often overlooked.

The pope was speaking to a group of young Latin American leaders attending a course on politics and the social teaching of the church. The course was supported by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

"I invite you to live your faith with great freedom, never believing that there exists only one form of political commitment for Catholics, a Catholic party," he told the group last week.

Francis explained present day politics in Latin America needs "a new presence of Catholics".

This doesn't mean just putting "new faces in the electoral campaigns, but mainly new methods that are simultaneously critical and constructive".

Instead, Catholic politicians always look for "the possible good, even if it is modest," he pointed out.

Quoting St Paul VI, Pope Francis explained:

"In concrete situations and taking account of solidarity in each person's life, one must recognise a legitimate variety of possible options. The same Christian faith can lead to different commitments."

This is why Catholic politicians will join different parties and will work with people of other faiths in pursuing the common good, he said.

"Being a Catholic in politics does not mean being a recruit from a group, an organization or a party," but striving to serve others based on one's baptismal calling and strengthened by regular participation in a faith community.

Otherwise, there is a risk of facing "the challenges of power, of strategies, of action" alone.

He defined true democracy for Catholic politicians as recognising that one belongs to a community, to listen to the community and to respond to the real needs of people in the community.

Francis said contemporary Latin America has three groups that need particular attention.

Listening to them offers real hope for finding concrete solutions to the region's problems: women, the young and the poor.

Women, he said, are "a pillar in the building of the church and society," young people have "the dissatisfaction and rebelliousness that are necessary to promote true changes and not merely cosmetic ones" and, through service to and with the poor, he said, "the church shows her fidelity" to Christ.

Source

• Crux Now
• The Catholic Register
• Image: Catholic News Agency

The Women on Web site has a long history of helping those in countries where abortion is illegal obtain pills to terminate early pregnancies.

An online consultation with a doctor is involved.

A woman is told where she can get the pills locally that will bring about an abortion or, if necessary, the pills will be sent to her.

Revelations about the scale of the demand were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Guardian reported.

The researchers analysed data for 19 Latin American countries.

They compared the numbers of requests there with three countries - Chile, Poland and Uruguay - where there have been no health warnings about the dangers of Zika virus in pregnancy.

"There is a huge surge," said Dr Catherine Aiken from the University of Cambridge.

"It's over 100 per cent increase in demand in some of the countries we looked at - almost 110 per cent increase in Brazil."

In those countries with no Zika outbreak, there was no such rise in demand.

In a supplement to the study, the researchers have published some of the emails to Women on Web which reveal their fears.

"I need to do an abortion because of the great risk of infection with Zika here . . . Please help me. My economic situation is extremely difficult," said one woman in Brazil.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation advised people in countries where the Zika virus is spreading to consider delaying pregnancy.

In February, Pope Francis strongly rejected abortion as a response to fears about the Zika virus outbreak.

The Pope said abortion is not the lesser of two evils, but is a crime and an "absolute evil".

Sources

• The Guardian
• CNN
• Catholic News Agency
• New England Journal of Medicine
• Image: The Guardian

The papal criticism came in a letter from Francis to Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

Cardinal Ouellet is also the Prefect for the Congregation for Bishops, which plays a crucial role in appointing leaders of dioceses across the world.

The letter, released by the Vatican on Tuesday, followed a meeting between the Pope and members of the Latin America commission.

The role of laity in Latin American countries was discussed at the meeting.

Francis stated in the letter: "The laity are part of the holy faithful People of God, and are therefore the protagonists of the Church and the world; we are called to serve them, not to make use of them."

He stated that priests must trust that the Holy Spirit is working in lay people and that the Spirit "is not only the 'property' of the ecclesial hierarchy".

He noted that "no one is baptised a priest or bishop" and described clericalism as "one of the greatest distortions affecting the Church in Latin America".

Francis criticised the "homogenisation" of the lay person that clericalism brings about, as well as the notion that the only committed lay people are those who work in church roles.

"Without realising it, we have created a lay elite believing that only those who work in things of priests are committed laypersons; and we have forgotten, neglected the believer that many times has their hope burned away in the daily fight to live the faith," stated the pontiff.

Pope Francis spoke of the importance of giving encouragement and support to the efforts of the lay faithful who work in the public sphere.

He stressed "it is not the job of the pastor to tell the lay people what they must do and say" in those situations, adding "they know more and better than us".

Rather, pastors "must remain at the side of our people, accompanying them in their work and stimulating that capable imagination of responding to current problems".

Sources

• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter
• Vatican Radio
• Image: Todays Catholic News

Yet identification with Catholicism has declined throughout the region, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey that examines religious affiliations, beliefs and practices in 18 countries and one U.S. territory (Puerto Rico) across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Historical data suggest that for most of the 20th century, from 1900 through the 1960s, at least 90% of Latin America's population was Catholic (See History of Religious Change).

Today, the Pew Research survey shows, 69% of adults across the region identify as Catholic.

In nearly every country surveyed, the Catholic Church has experienced net losses from religious switching, as many Latin Americans have joined evangelical Protestant churches or rejected organized religion altogether.

For example, roughly one-in-four Nicaraguans, one-in-five Brazilians and one-in-seven Venezuelans are former Catholics.

Overall, 84% of Latin American adults report that they were raised Catholic, 15 percentage points more than currently identify as Catholic.

The pattern is reversed among Protestants and people who do not identify with any religion: While the Catholic Church has lost adherents through religious switching, both Protestant churches and the religiously unaffiliated population in the region have gained members.

Just one-in-ten Latin Americans (9%) were raised in Protestant churches, but nearly one-in-five (19%) now describe themselves as Protestants. And while only 4% of Latin Americans were raised without a religious affiliation, twice as many (8%) are unaffiliated today.

Much of the movement away from Catholicism and toward Protestantism in Latin America has occurred in the span of a single lifetime. Indeed, in most of the countries surveyed, at least a third of current Protestants were raised in the Catholic Church, and half or more say they were baptized as Catholics.

For example, nearly three-quarters of current Protestants in Colombia were raised Catholic, and 84% say they were baptized as Catholics. Continue reading

Sources

• PewResearch
• Image: CathNews USA

Cardinal Gerhard Müller spoke about the Pope during an interview with the Austrian Pontifical Missions magazine Alle Welt.

Cardinal Müller said the Western world would have to learn to see problems from the Pope's point of view, which was very different from the European one.

It was very good for the world Church not always to see things through European eyes, the cardinal said, and to discover how other people saw Europe.

The CDF prefect has considerable experience of life in Peru over several decades and is a close friend of the Peruvian liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez.

The Church criticises the one-sidedness of both capitalism and socialism and supports a social market economy, as a synthesis that avoided extremes, the CDF prefect said.

The main aim of Pope Francis's pontificate is to draw the world's attention to the poor and to change the global structures that lead to poverty, the cardinal noted.

Responding to his interviewer's comment that many American's, including US Catholics, see the European social market economy as "too socialist", Cardinal Müller was blunt.

"A balance must be found between freedom and social responsibility. One cannot simply absolutise US individualism, which has had a formative influence on US culture."

"When the United States acts as the world's policeman, the world does not become more peaceful.

"One cannot compromise and say, ‘To be sure - I'm a Christian - but count me out as far as Christian social teaching is concerned'."

Speaking about changing unjust structures, Cardinal Müller said history has shown that it wasn't sufficient to treat slaves well; rather, the abolition of slavery was needed.

"Both the structures and the mentality [that leads to poverty] must be changed so that an awareness of solidarity can emerge," he said.

Cardinal Muller said there had been a decline in "love of one's neighbour" in the Western world.

"People are judged by their usefulness and their contribution to the GNP and when they're old we don't know what to do with them," he said.

Sources

• The Tablet
• Catholic World News
• Image: Catholic News Agency

Within a week of Francis' election, the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro claimed that the new Pope's statements on the "option for the poor" were, in fact, inspired by Hugo Chávez from Heaven.

Argentina's President Cristina Fernández Kirchner, whose relationship with Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was conspicuously lacking in warmth, announced after her first meeting with him as Pope that she had asked him to mediate in Argentina's long-standing quarrel with Britain over the Falklands Islands (or Malvinas).

The Vatican remained diplomatically silent on this but Fernández has since paid a number of visits to Pope Francis in Rome.

By contrast, the Vatican has accepted a request from the Government of Venezuela, as well as from the Opposition, the Democratic Unity Table (Mud), to mediate a deal that would end the violence that has plagued the country for more than four months.

Originally, the request was for Cardinal Pietro Parolin, former apostolic nuncio to Venezuela and now the Vatican Secretary of State, to mediate.

Not surprisingly to those who know him, Parolin seems to have made himself respected and liked during his time in Caracas.

He is sure to remain involved, but the actual "witnessing" of the Government-Opposition talks is being done by his successor as nuncio, Archbishop Aldo Giordano.

So far, the talks have yielded no results. Continue reading.

Source: The Tablet

Image: PRI

"Obviously, I'm very proud. It's a piece I composed over 15 years ago. And slowly it's been growing and getting played at bigger venues. For me this is an incredible possibility. It's like a prize for the musical piece and a prize for me."

Take a look .

But not everyone likes it. Francis Tango Mass

The church may have lost privileged status in many nations, and is dropping some market share to a rapidly growing Pentecostal movement.

But the combination of increasing religious freedom and competition is also fuelling a Catholic renewal movement, and equipping the church with the community-based revival necessary to meet challenges from the prosperity gospel movement to the secularisation of many Latin American nations, analysts say.

Not to mention that concern over Pentecostal successes played a role in the election of the first pope from Latin America, an Argentinian archbishop who is winning widespread regional acclaim for his humble, pastoral approach.

Greater attendance at Mass. The flowering of a Catholic charismatic movement with lay leadership and culturally sensitive worship that also shares the Pentecostal commitment to evangelism. And a revered global leader emerging from its ranks.

A church in Latin America that was in danger of becoming a stale religious monopoly - witness the malaise throughout much of Western Europe - is reasserting itself in what is a vibrant religious landscape from Mexico to Brazil, according to some researchers. Continue reading.

David Briggs writes the Ahead of the Trend column for the Association of Religion Data Archives. He is executive director of the International Association of Religion Journalists.

Source: Huffington Post

Image: The annual celebration of Saints Peter and Paul in San Ana, Bolivia, Stephen Davies

They recognize Tutela Legal as a particularly valiant part of their movement that played a crucial role in establishing its legitimacy and in gaining respect for efforts to protect rights even in the midst of a civil war.

As one who has known Tutela Legal from its earliest days more than 30 years ago, collaborated with it closely during the organization's difficult and dangerous formative years, and had a hand in shaping its work, I am especially disturbed by the archbishop's sudden and poorly explained decision to shut it down.

Tutela Legal was established in 1982 by Salvadoran Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas.

His predecessor as archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, had been murdered by a sniper on March 24, 1980, as he was saying Mass.

The murder of Romero, whose candidacy for sainthood is being promoted by Pope Francis, was one of thousands of death squad killings in that period that helped plunge El Salvador into a terrible civil war that lasted 12 years. Continue reading

Archbishop Jose Luis Escobar of El Salvador recently closed the diocesan human rights office, Tutela Legal, with little explanation. People and organisations across the world have protested against the decision.

Aryeh Neier, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, shares the history of Tutela Legal, and argues that the creation and work of the office during the civil war in El Salvador "should be a matter of great pride for the Catholic church in Latin America", with the office's files protected to support those people still ensuring justice is done for the tens of thousands of victims of crimes during that period.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

Image: Open Society Foundations

Aryeh Neier is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and president emeritus of the Open Society Foundations.

Recalling the call for evangelisation issued by the Latin American bishops when they met at the Brazilian shrine of Aparecida in 2007, the Pope said: "Something beautiful took place here, which I witnessed at first hand."

Pope Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio — headed the committee that drafted the document. Foreshadowing his own pontifical style, it said the Church needs to "rid itself from all expired structures that do not favour the transmission of the faith".

When the Pope inherited the WYD schedule from Benedict XVI, he chose to add a visit to Aparecida, 200 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, where seven million pilgrims come each year.

In spite of intermittent rain and record cold weather, officials estimated that around 200,000 people turned out for his visit.

Pope Francis told them he wanted to encourage them in three respects — "hopefulness, openness to being surprised by God, and living in joy".

He stressed that God is always close to the faithful and always ready to help. "Christians are joyful; they are never gloomy," he said, because they believe "God is at our side".

Refusing to travel with a big security detail, the Pope made his way toward the basilica in a jeep mounted with a plexiglass covering but no windows. He paused several times to kiss babies and to chat briefly with people in the crowd.

Later he addressed a group of recovering drug addicts in a working-class neighbourhood of Rio, telling them that those struggling with drug dependency deserve the "closeness, affection and love" of all society.

He also referred to efforts in some parts of Latin America to de-criminalise and "liberalise" drug use, saying this "will not" reduce drug addiction.

The Pope lamented that selfishness often prevails, rather than the "attention, care and love" needed to fight chemical dependency. Societies need to be courageous, he insisted, in acting against drug-trafficking and its attendant violence."

Sources:

Vatican Radio

National Catholic Reporter

Catholic News Agency

Catholic Herald

Image: Yahoo! News

Professor Guzman Carriquiry, secretary for the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, said there is a growing tendency for Americans' faith to be lived with a lack of enthusiasm, lukewarmness and ignorance.

"How many Christians today have buried their baptism under a cloak of consumerism and indifference?" he asked during an international conference on America in the Vatican's Synod Hall.

Continue reading

(It turns out that the movie got the French slightly wrong. It's actually just the "Royal Cheese," but the point's the same.)

Although director Quentin Tarantino is nobody's idea of a Christian evangelist, there's nevertheless a missionary insight here: Whether we're talking about cheeseburgers or eternal salvation, the same product often has to be packaged in different ways for different audiences based on the languages they speak and the cultural worlds they inhabit.

That, believe it or not, is a way of introducing a report from the Oct. 7-28 Synod of Bishops in Rome on the new evangelization.

Whatever its defects, a synod is always a kind of graduate seminar about the realities of life in a global church, bringing together bishops and other church leaders from every nook and cranny of the planet. The opening week of this one has been devoted largely to surveying what works and what doesn't in terms of Catholic evangelization in various parts of the world, and some distinctive regional accents have already emerged.

To be sure, a bewildering variety of points are always made in the opening stages, and not all the voices from a given region are singing from the same hymnal. In broad strokes, however, here's what some leading Catholic voices seem to believe is required to make the church relevant in their neighborhoods:

• Asia: humility, simplicity and silence
• Africa: ministering to people scarred by poverty and violence
• Latin America: taking cues from what's already working, such as popular piety and small Christian communities (often called "base communities")
• Europe and the States: sound doctrine and sacramental practice as an antidote to the influence of a largely secular culture Read more

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: The Catholic Sun

"Often sincere people who leave our Church do not do so as a result of what non-Catholic groups believe, but fundamentally as a result of their own lived experience; for reasons not of doctrine but of life; not for strictly dogmatic, but for pastoral reasons; not due to theological problems, but to methodological problems of our Church," he told a delegation of Colombian bishops on June 21.

"What is important, then, is to become better believers, more pious, affable and welcoming in our parishes and communities, so that no-one feels distant or excluded," he said.

The Pope was referring particularly to Latin America, where the "increasingly active presence" of Pentecostal and Evangelical communities "cannot be ignored or underestimated".

Offering some practical advice, the Pope called for better catechesis — particularly to the young — as well as carefully prepared homilies at Mass and the promotion of Catholic doctrine in schools and universities.

Following this path, he said, would help awaken in Catholics "the aspiration to share with others the joy of following Christ and become members of his mystical body".

He said bishops should also try to facilitate "serene and open" dialogue with other Christian communities — "without losing one's own identity" — so as to improve relations and "overcome distrust and unnecessary confrontations".

Sources

• CNA
• News.va
• Image: Laloking97