Catholics assist those impacted by Cyclone Fani in India, Bangladesh

CNA Staff, Feb 11, 2021 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis on Thursday named a 54-year-old successor to Cardinal Joseph Coutts as Archbishop of Karachi, Pakistan.

The Holy See press office announced on Feb. 11 that the pope had chosen Bishop Benny Mario Travas to lead Latin Rite Catholics in Pakistan’s largest city. 

Karachi, the capital of Sindh province in southern Pakistan, has an estimated population of more than 16 million people, making it the world’s 12th-largest city.

The pope also accepted the resignation of the 75-year-old Cardinal Coutts from the pastoral governance of Karachi archdiocese after nine years in charge. 

Travas was born in Karachi on Nov. 21, 1966, and ordained a priest on Dec. 7, 1990.    

He gained a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome, an institution belonging to the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

He served as the rector of the St. Pius X Minor Seminary in Karachi, vicar general of Karachi archdiocese, and vice president of the Catholic Board of Education. He was also a professor of canon law at the National Catholic Institute of Theology in Karachi.

In 2014, he was appointed apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Multan, southern Punjab. He became the bishop of Multan a year later. He is the chairman of Caritas Pakistan.

According to the website catholic-hierarchy.org, there were 197,700 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Karachi in 2019. The Diocese of Karachi was initially established in 1948 under the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Bombay, India. It was elevated to an archdiocese in 1950.

Coutts, an outspoken defender of persecuted Christians, received the red hat from Pope Francis on June 28, 2018. 

He served as president of the Pakistan Catholic Bishops’ Conference from 2011 to 2017, and was chairman of Caritas Pakistan from 1998 to 2017.  

There are around 1.3 million Catholics in Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country with an estimated population of 233 million.

In January, the charity Open Doors named Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most populous nation, as the fifth-worst country in the world in which to be a Christian. 

In a 2018 interview with CNA, Coutts reflected on the rise of extremism in his homeland.  

“We’ve always had these kinds of people on the fringes, but they weren’t dominant,” he said. “Now they are becoming more assertive.” 

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Hobart, Australia, Oct 3, 2018 / 03:23 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Government authorities in the Australian state of Tasmania have promised that low-cost surgical abortion will be provided starting in October, but general practitioners and the state’s Women’s Legal Service say they have not been provided any information on who the provider will be and how abortions will be delivered, according to local media reports.

The state’s only dedicated abortion clinic closed in late 2017 due to declining demand for surgical abortions, ABC news reported.

At the time, Tasmania’s primary abortion doctor cited medical abortion, which is allowed in the country up to nine weeks of pregnancy, and increased use of contraception as reasons for the drop in demand for the surgical procedure.

The state had been paying for women to travel to other Australian states to have abortions since the clinic’s closure. The Tasmanian health department said it had reached an agreement with a new abortion provider and reportedly signed a five-year agreement with the as-yet undisclosed provider in July.

Bastian Seidel, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, told ABC News that no information from the government about how the procedures would be delivered had yet been passed on to general practitioners. Susan Fahey, Women’s Legal Service chief executive, also expressed frustration that the government had so far provided so few details.

Under Tasmanian law, women are allowed to choose abortion up until 16 weeks of pregnancy, and after 16 weeks must seek the approval of two doctors before an abortion is allowed. Doctors are allowed to conscientiously object to the procedure, but are compelled by law to provide “provide the woman with a list of prescribed health services from which [they] may seek advice, information or counselling on the full range of pregnancy options.”

Tasmania’s current Health Minister, Michael Ferguson, voted against the liberalization of the country’s abortion laws in 2013.

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Dhaka, Bangladesh, Nov 13, 2019 / 11:01 pm (CNA).- After the dissipation of Cyclone Bulbul, Catholic organizations have provided aid to the victims in Bangladesh, and assessed the immediate and long term needs of those recovering from the storm.

The cyclone made landfall in India’s West Bengal state Nov. 9. It has heavily affected the coastal areas of Bangladesh and India, claiming at least 20 lives, according to the Guardian.

Authorities said more deaths would have occurred if it was not for the sake of increased evacuation efforts, the BBC reported.

Snigdha Chakraborty, Catholic Relief Services’ manager for Bangladesh, commended the efforts but said victims are still in need of more aid.

“While there are many people who will need significant support following this storm, the government’s robust preparedness activities have paid off. Most people were able to get into evacuation shelters and out of harm’s way,” she said Nov. 10.

The storm has damaged thousands of homes and nearly 500,000 acres of crops, Al Jazeera reported. It had also shut down the Kolkata airport in India and Bangladesh’s two largest ports, Mongla and Chittagong.

After evacuation efforts, more than 2 million people were forced to spend a night in a shelter.

Chakraborty expressed concern that the shelters will not be a sufficient fix for the long run, noting that some of these places do not have a safe water source. CRS said people need shelter repair support and farmers will need compensation for their damaged crops.

“We are concerned that the cyclone shelters are not sufficient for anything more than a very short stay. People are eating snack food and bread as the shelters have no facilities to cook,” Chakraborty said.

“Families will be in the shelters at minimum another two days under heavy rains, and for the people who return to find their homes damaged or destroyed, they are looking at even longer displacement … Caritas Bangladesh has provided their shelters with water jars sufficient through today, but this will be a critical need for the next few days.”

CRS has partnered with Caritas Bangladesh, both of which helped with evacuations. Among the 300 operational shelters, Caritas Bangladesh opened 40 cyclone shelters.

Chakraborty said that while CRS has continued efforts along the coasts, there are territories that are hard to reach inland. She said some damages have yet to be assessed.

“Right now, we are very focused on the badly affected Sathkhira and Khulna districts on the coast, which continue to experience heavy rain and high winds,” she said.

“Staff have not yet been able to reach some of the remotest locations due to ongoing rains, heavy winds and damaged roads. Initial reports in Khulna indicate significant crop losses and partial or total damage to poorly constructed houses. And we have early information about significant seas surges in remote areas of Sathkhira, but hope to get confirmation tomorrow.”

Chakraborty applauded the evacuation efforts on behalf of the government and volunteers. She said more needs to be done to support victims but lives were saved by following the evacuation protocol.

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