Welcome to the weekly news roundup. This week while the headlines have been dominated by Pope Francis’ motu proprio Traditionis Custodes , this round-up will cover other news we missed during the week of July 16 to the July 24 2021.
- “The Diocese of Calgary is committed to providing a monetary contribution to a forthcoming local/regional financial appeal,” said the diocese in a July 16 letter published on its website. The fund will benefit survivors of 25 residential schools in the province of Alberta.
- The diocese said it would announce the amount of the compensation in September. This gesture “expresses the commitment of the Diocese to the ongoing work of justice and healing in our country with the Indigenous Peoples and their communities,” the diocese explained. “Bishop William McGrattan has been in consultation with other bishops and diocesan collaborators to be in solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples and their leaders on the next steps in supporting survivors and in addressing the intergenerational harm caused by the Residential Schools,” said the statement.
- According to Slovakian media, health minister Vladimír Lengvarský said at a press conference on July 20 that “the condition for participation in Holy Masses and other events will be full vaccination.” Lengvarský said that this decision was established in cooperation with the Slovakian bishops’ conference. In his own statement to reporters, Archbishop Stanislav Zvolenský of Bratislava, the president of the bishops’ conference, said that the bishops “see this decision in the context of our demand that as many people as possible should be able to participate in the meetings with the Holy Father.”
- A Coptic Orthodox church in British Columbia was destroyed in a fire on Monday, July 19, just days after an attempted arson attack damaged the church’s door. Local police said they were alerted to a fire at St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in Surrey, BC, around 3:17 a.m. on Monday. By the time the fire was extinguished, the building was almost entirely demolished, and only a single wall was left standing. No one was reported injured in the fire.
- Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai has implored Lebanon’s patron saint to help save the country from “total collapse” amid one of the worst financial crises the world has seen in decades. In a homily for the feast of St. Charbel, the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Catholics said that he sought the intercession of the 19th-century Lebanese saint for “the miracle of our salvation from this total collapse.”
- During Mass on Sunday, the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba prayed to Our Lady of Charity for the release of young people still under arrest for participating in recent protests of Cuba’s communist government. While saying Mass July 18 at the Basílica Santuario Nacional de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre in Santiago de Cuba, Archbishop Dionisio Guillermo García Ibáñez asked the faithful to pray for the country to “the Mother of Charity, the Mother and Patroness of Cuba, the Mother of all Cubans.”
- A request has been made to open the beatification cause of Carmen Hernández, co-founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, who died five years ago at 85. On July 19, the anniversary of the Spanish woman’s death, Cardinal Carlos Osoro, the archbishop of Madrid, offered Mass in the Cathedral of Santa María la Real de la Almudena. At the Mass, Cardinal Osoro was presented with the “Supplex Libellus,” a collection of documents requesting that the diocesan phase of Hernández’s cause for beatification be officially opened.
- On July 21, 2021, a delegation of the Chaldean Church, led by Patriarch and Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, held a series of meetings in Erbil with representatives of other Churches and ecclesial communities present in Iraq in an attempt to start a process aimed at redeveloping and relaunching instruments of contact and ecumenical organisms “frozen” for years in a state of substantial inertia. With some of his collaborators, Patriarch Sako met among others Mor Nicodemus Daoud Matti Sharaf, Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul, Archbishop Nathanael Nizar Samaan, at the head of the Syrian Catholic Diocese of Hadiab (Iraqi Kurdistan) and representatives of the Assyrian Church of the East. In the meetings – the accredited sources of the Chaldean Patriarchate report – the exponents of the various Churches focused on the need to find new ways of fraternal cooperation. In light of the many emergencies that afflict the Iraqi people, ecclesial communities are called to confess the same faith in Christ.
