Chinese state media denies imminent plans to end two-child policy

Islamabad, Pakistan, Oct 8, 2018 / 11:09 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic Relief Services is among the 18 international organizations ordered closed by Pakistan’s new government without explanation. The move follows allegations related to the U.S. government’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, in which a doctor’s false vaccination campaign claimed to be linked to the NGO Save the Children.

Most of the groups under the order are U.S.-based, with the rest from the U.K. and the European Union, the Associated Press reported Oct. 5.

World Vision and International Relief and Development are among the other U.S. groups affected, while the U.K.-based ActionAid and the Denmark-based Danish Relief Council are also under orders to close, the Associated Press reports. According to the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, the Pakistani branch of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations is among the organizations.

Pakistan’s Interior Ministry issued the order. The organizations have 60 days to end operations in Pakistan.

Catholic Relief Services declined comment on the matter.

Beginning in 2015, the Interior Ministry required stricter and more detailed online registration application for NGOs. The move was prompted by fears that some NGOs were using their charitable status to spy on Pakistan – and one observer said it is connected to the U.S. government’s hunt for bin Laden.

Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, told the AP that ahead of the 2011 U.S. Navy Seal operation that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, a Pakistani doctor used a fake vaccination scam to attempt to identify the al-Qaeda leader’s home using DNA acquired from his relatives.

The Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, said he was working for the NGO Save the Children to gain access to the bin Laden compound.

According to Reuters, he had been recruited by the CIA to help find bin Laden. He has been in jail since 2011.

Save the Children has denied any links to the CIA, and said the doctor’s claimed link with the NGO was false, but its non-Pakistani staff were forced to leave the country, Agence France Presse reports.

In 2012 the NGO’s then-country representative David Wright charged that intelligence agencies had broken international law and put at risk the safety of aid groups around the world.

“The blame lies squarely with the CIA which use humanitarian work for intelligence gathering or worse,” he said, according to the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph. “If it continues then we won’t be able to do our jobs at all in 10 years’ time.”

Rana said that Pakistan, including its intelligence agency, also views many international aid organizations as advocates of “liberal, secular voices.”

In December 2017 Pakistan’s previous government ordered 10 other foreign-funded aid groups to close, including the Pakistani branch of the Open Society Foundations. That order was not enforced in time.

The U.K.-based Plan International also faces a denied registration. The NGO focuses on education and child rights and often partners with the government on water and sanitation projects and disaster management.

Imran Yusuf Shami, Plan International’s country director, said the NGO employs dozens of people, all of whom are Pakistani, and aids tens of thousands of the poorest people in the country.

Shami said the NGO closures will affect hundreds of thousands of people.

[…]

Pope Francis presides over the first-ever papal Mass on Mongolian soil in Ulaanbaatar’s Steppe Arena on Sept. 3, 2023. / Andrea Gagliarducci/EWTN

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Sep 3, 2023 / 03:30 am (CNA).

Catholics from across Asia traveled to Mongolia to attend the country’s first-ever papal Mass with Pope Francis on Sunday.

“For people in Asia … we do not have a lot of opportunities to meet the pope personally, so for many of us, for most of us, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it is like a dream come true for many many Asians,” Hee Jung Choi from Seoul told CNA at the Mass on Sept. 3.

While papal Masses on the pope’s other international trips can draw hundreds of thousands of people, the Mass in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar only had an estimated 2,500 in attendance — presenting a rare opportunity to personally meet the pope for many attendees.

“We came to Mongolia to ask the pope to visit Vietnam,” Father Huynh The Vinh of the Vietnamese diocese of Phu Cuong said.

Huynh is one of 90 Vietnamese Catholics who made the journey to Mongolia to see the pope, along with seven bishops from the country.

Catholics from South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan attended the Mass in the sports arena, according to the Vatican. The visiting Catholics nearly doubled Mongolia’s small Catholic population of 1,450 people.

Among the crowd were Catholics from mainland China, who risked retribution from their government to attend the Mass with the pope. At the end of the Mass, Pope Francis called Cardinal-elect Stephen Chow, the bishop of Hong Kong, and Cardinal John Tong Hon, Hong Kong’s bishop emeritus, to his side as he shared a special message to Chinese Catholics.

Pope Francis added that he wanted to “send a warm greeting to the noble Chinese people.”

“I ask Chinese Catholics to be good Christians and good citizens,” he said.

Pope Francis arrived in the Steppe Arena to enthusiastic cheers of “Viva Papa!” as he made his way around the arena in a small golf cart, stopping to kiss babies and shake hands.

In his homily, reflected on the words of Psalm 63, “my soul thirsts for you,” — words that he said accompany “our journey through life, amid all the deserts we are called to traverse.”

Pope Francis said that the words of the psalmist, who laments the thirst of his soul as if in a “dry and weary land,” have “particular resonance in a land like Mongolia: immense, rich in history and culture, yet also marked by the aridity of the steppes and the desert.”

The Gobi Desert, the sixth largest in the world, stretches across the bottom third of Mongolia. It has an extremely harsh climate with temperatures that can range from 113°F to -40°F.

Speaking in a place steeped in a nomadic tradition, Pope Francis said: “All of us are ‘God’s nomads, pilgrims in search of happiness, wayfarers thirsting for love. The desert of which the Psalmist speaks, then, is our life.”

“Many of you know both the satisfaction and the fatigue of journeying, which evokes a fundamental aspect of biblical spirituality represented by Abraham and, in a broader sense, by the people of Israel and indeed every disciple of the Lord,” the pope said.

Over the last half-century, as many as one-third of Mongolia’s people have left the countryside, where they lived as nomadic herders, to live in the capital Ulaanbaatar. With around 3.3 million people, Mongolia remains one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world.

In a country so familiar with the hardships of long journeys, the pope told the crowd that the Christian faith is “the answer to our thirst.”

“We thirst for love, for only love can truly satisfy us, bring us fulfillment, inspire inner assurance, and allow us to savor the beauty of life,” he said.

“Dear brothers and sisters, the Christian faith is the answer to this thirst; it takes it seriously, without dismissing it or trying to replace it with tranquilizers or surrogates. For in this thirst lies the great mystery of our humanity: it opens our hearts to the living God, the God of love, who comes to meet us and to make us his children, brothers and sisters to one another.”

Quoting Saint Augustine’s “On the Psalms,” Pope Francis said: “‘Lest we grow faint in this desert, God refreshes us with the dew of his word… True, he makes us feel thirst, but then comes to satisfy that thirst… God has been merciful to us; he has opened for us a highway in the desert: our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“‘He has offered us a source of consolation in that desert: the preachers of his word. He has offered us water in that desert, by filling those preachers with the Holy Spirit, so as to create, in them, a fount of water springing up to life everlasting.’”

Catholics prayed in Chinese and Russian during the prayers of the faithful after the pope’s homily. Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, the apostolic prefect of Ulaanbaatar and the world’s youngest cardinal, served as the main celebrant of the Mass.

“At the heart of Christianity is an amazing and extraordinary message. If you lose your life, if you make it a generous offering, if you risk it by choosing to love, if you make it a free gift for others, then it will return to you in abundance, and you will be overwhelmed by endless joy, peace of heart, and inner strength and support,” Pope Francis said.

“[W]hen we lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel, the Lord gives them back to us abundantly, in the fullness of love and joy for all eternity,” he said.

[…]

CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- A fire that burned some of the sacristy and part of the roof of St. Carthage’s Cathedral in Lismore, Australia is being investigated as a possible crime, authorities have said.

According to The Catholic Weekly, an Australian publication, the local fire department was alerted of a fire at the cathedral around 6:30 am on Sept. 18.

The fire, which seems to have started in the sacristy, had spread to the roof, from which “large volumes of smoke” were issuing before the fire was extinguished. A diocesan spokesperson told The Catholic Weekly that no one was inside the cathedral during the fire, and that the main part of the church, including the tabernacle, were unharmed by the blaze.

Lismore is a city in the far northeastern corner of New South Wales.

Authorities are investigating the “suspicious fire” as a crime scene.

“We’re obviously in the early stages of the investigation and we don’t know exactly how it was started, but the base of the outside door of the sacristy was on fire and even though the sacristy was well-secured the fire got into the building that way,” Acting Inspector Anthony Smith at Lismore Police Station told The Catholic Weekly. 

“There is a little bit of damage, but they have done really well to keep it out of the main part of the cathedral and all the relics have been kept safe,” Smith said. Construction of the cathedral, which is dedicated to St. Carthage of Lismore in Ireland, began in 1904 and was completed in 1919. Some renovations were done to the church in the 1970s and 2003. In 2007, the cathedral suffered major damage to the roof and stained glass windows, leading to subsequent repairs and renovations.
Bishop Greg Homeming, OCD, of Lismore said in a video to local Catholics that he was grateful for the work of the firefighters and he was glad no one was injured. “All we have is a damaged building. A damaged building is only a building, the Church remains undamaged because the Church is the people of God,” he said.

“The Church is you, and as long as you continue in your faith and in your love and care for others, the Church will go on strongly, perhaps even with greater strength. So I’m not disturbed by what has happened, it’s a building and I thank God that no one was injured.” Homeming added that he had “no idea” how the fire started and that he was awaiting the results of the investigation.
The fire comes five months after St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne was vandalized following Cardinal George Pell’s acquittal by Australia’s High Court of a sexual abuse conviction, and his release from prison.
Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, of Sydney told The Catholic Weekly that he called Bishop Homeming to offer his sympathies. Fisher said he has twice experienced fires at the cathedrals at which he served – once in Parramatta and once in Sydney. The cathedrals were “lost to fire and people were devastated for decades thereafter,” Fisher said. “Happily the fire at the beautiful Lismore cathedral was extinguished before it got out of control,” Fisher added.

“But whatever the damage, we will rebuild, as the Church must be rebuilt in every generation by every generation for every generation.”

[…]