Pope Francis, in his traditional Easter message, has lamented the killing of well over a dozen “defenseless” Palestinian protesters by Israeli troopers’ live fire near the Israeli-Gaza border, pleading for peace in the Holy Land.

The Pontiff, 81, on Sunday made the comments and appeal in his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the City and the World) message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to tens of thousands of people in the flower-bedecked square below where he earlier celebrated a Mass.

In an apparent reference to the massacre in the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, when Israeli soldiers and snipers shot dead 17 Palestinian demonstrators, the head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics also called for “a reconciliation for the Holy Land”, which “also experiencing in these days the wounds of ongoing conflict that do not spare the defenseless”.

During Friday’s bloody protest, around 30,000 Gazans marched on the fence with the occupied territories at the start of a six-week protest, dubbed “The Great March of Return,” demanding the right to return to their homeland.

The rallies coincided with the 42nd anniversary of Land Day, which commemorates the murder of six Palestinians by Israeli forces in 1976.

The demonstrations turned violent after Israeli forces used tear gas and live fire to force back demonstrators who had approached within a few hundred meters of the heavily-fortified fence, further wounding more than 1,400 other Palestinians.

Multiple Muslim nations around the world voiced their outrage over the Israeli military’s response to the mass demonstration in Gaza.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared Saturday a national day of mourning and urged a general strike in honor of the victims. He also said that Israel was “fully responsible” for the tragic killings of peaceful Palestinian protesters. The strike, which affected universities, schools, government organizations, was called for in the occupied West Bank in solidarity with Gaza.

Israeli military forces have shot and killed 16 Palestinians during massive anti-Israeli rallies staged by thousands along Gaza-Israel borders.

While the Muslim nations were outraged by the carnage, the deadliest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 2014 Gaza War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the troops via his official Twitter account late on Saturday for their actions which he claimed were aimed at guarding Israel.

On Friday, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting over the situation in Gaza, but the US blocked a draft statement which urged restraint and called for an “independent and transparent investigation” into Friday’s violence.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also called for “an independent and transparent investigation” into the incident.

Culled from Presstv

The Vatican bowed to pressure Saturday and released the complete letter by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI about Pope Francis after coming under blistering criticism for selectively citing it in a press release and digitally manipulating a photograph of it.

The previously hidden part of the letter provides the real explanation why Benedict refused to provide commentary on a new Vatican-published compilation of books about Francis’s theological and philosophical background that was released to mark his fifth anniversary as pope.

Benedict noted that one of the authors involved in the project had launched “virulent,” ”anti-papist” attacks against his papacy and teaching. He said he was “surprised” the Vatican had chosen the theologian to be included in the 11-volume “The Theology of Pope Francis.”

The Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications said Saturday it was releasing the full text of the letter due to the controversy over the “presumed manipulation” of information when the volume was launched Monday, on the eve of Francis’s anniversary.

It said its decision to withhold part of the letter at the time was based on its desire for reserve “not because of any desire to censure.”

The so-called “Lettergate” scandal has embarrassed the Vatican for the past week and fueled the growing chasm between supporters of Francis’s pastoral-focused papacy and conservatives who long for the doctrine-minded papacy of Benedict.

A Twitter hashtag #releasetheletter went viral among Catholic conservatives as the scandal widened.

The Secretariat for Communication, in particular, was accused of spreading “fake news” for having omitted key parts of Benedict’s letter and – as The Associated Press reported – digitally blurring a photograph of the document where Benedict begins to explain why he won’t comment on the book.

The scandal began when the prefect of the office, Monsignor Dario Vigano, read part of Benedict’s letter aloud at the book presentation Monday. In the parts Vigano chose to read, Benedict confirmed that Francis has a solid theological and philosophical training and he praised the book initiative for showing the “interior continuity” between the two papacies.

But Benedict’s full caveat was never made public in the press release or the photo, leaving the impression that the 91-year-old retired pope had read the volume and fully endorsed it, when in fact he hadn’t.

Source: Cruxnow

A 26-year-old man from Cameroon has been arrested in connection with the crime

Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin paid tribute to Fr Alain-Florent Gandoulou, the head of the archdiocese’s French-speaking ministry, who was murdered in his office.

Archbishop Koch said Fr Gandoulou, born in the Republic of Congo, “applied himself with great engagement to his community, whose members come from every French-speaking country in the world.”

“His musical talent that he brought to Masses and presentations deeply affected the community,” said Archbishop Koch. “Fr Gandoulou was like a father to believers (and he) was also approachable in social matters.”

The archbishop said Fr Gandoulou was a dynamic catechist who promoted teaching and faith-building for people of all ages. In addition to his parish duties, since 2011, he worked as a counsellor at Berlin’s Sacred Heart Parish.

The archbishop said he would celebrate a special Mass on March 2 to pray for the priest and for his murderer. Afterwards, Fr Gandoulou’s remains will be returned to his hometown in the Archdiocese of Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, for burial.

Late on February 22, police responded to a call from witnesses reporting a loud argument. Police say Fr Gandoulou sustained fatal injuries from being beaten with objects and was stabbed in the head with an umbrella tip, according to Bild newspaper.

A 26-year-old man from Cameroon was arrested in connection with the crime. The suspect has since been detained in a psychiatric ward. Police have not released the suspect’s name, and no motive has been established.

Source: Catholic Herald

Cardinal Sarah has pointed out that high-ranking prelates are trying to change Christian morality. The cardinal also said the West was ‘committing suicide’ by losing its Christian faith

Senior churchmen are undermining Church teaching on life, marriage and the family, Cardinal Robert Sarah has said.

In a speech in Belgium, the cardinal accused high-ranking prelates from “opulent nations” of trying to modify Christian morality, and attacked pressure groups that “with powerful financial means and ties to the media, attack the natural purpose of marriage and commit themselves to destroying the family unit.”

Cardinal Sarah made the remarks – reported in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino – in front of several senior Belgian churchmen, including Cardinal Josef De Kesel, the apostolic nuncio and Abbot Philippe Mawet.

Abbot Mawet had criticised Cardinal Sarah just days earlier in an article for Libre Belgique.

The cardinal said:

Some high-ranking prelates, above all those coming from opulent nations, are working to cause modifications to Christian morality with regard to the absolute respect for life from conception until natural death, the question of the divorced and civilly remarried, and other problematic family situations. These ‘guardians of the faith’ however ought not to lose sight of the fact that the problem posed by the fragmentation of the ends of marriage is a problem of natural morality.

He continued:

The great derivations became manifest when some prelates or Catholic intellectuals began to say or write ‘a green light for abortion,’ ‘a green light for euthanasia.’ Now, from the moment that Catholics abandon the teaching of Jesus and the Magisterium of the Church, they contribute to the destruction of the natural institution of marriage as well as the family and it is now the entire human family which finds itself fractured by this new betrayal on the part of priests.

During his visit to Belgium, Cardinal Sarah also gave an interview with Catholic media outlet Cathobel in which he repeated his criticism of fellow clergy.

“Faith has become lacking, not only on the level of the people of God but also among those responsible for the Church,” he said. “Sometimes we can ask ourselves if we really have faith.”

This lack of faith is also affecting the wider culture, he added:

“Not only is the West losing its soul, but it is committing suicide, because a tree without roots is condemned to death. I think that the West cannot renounce its roots, which created its culture and its values.”

The cardinal said “chilling things” were happening in the West, and Western nations were exporting those things to the developing world.

“I think that a parliament which authorizes the death of an innocent baby, without defence, is committing a grave act of violence against the human person.

“When abortion is imposed, especially on nations in the developing world, saying that if they do not accept it they will no longer receive aid, it is an act of violence. And it is no surprise.

“When God is abandoned, man is also abandoned; there is no longer a clear vision of who man is. This is a great anthropological crisis in the West. And it leads to people being treated like objects.”

Culled from the Catholic Herald

Supporters of the Islamic Movement (IMN) in Nigeria have staged yet another peaceful protest, demanding justice for a slain Muslim cleric and their leader Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, Press TV reports.

On Tuesday, hundreds of members of the Islamic Movement poured onto the streets of the capital Abuja to demand justice for the slain cleric Sheikh Qassim Umar. They said the perpetrators of the crime must be brought to justice.

Umar recently died of wounds he sustained during an earlier protest in January.

The procession further pressed for the immediate and unconditional release of their leader Sheikh Zakzaky, who has been held in custody for more than two years in Nigeria.

The top Shia cleric lost his left eyesight in a raid which was carried out by the Nigerian army on his residence in the northern town of Zaria in December 2015.

During the raid, Zakzaky’s wife sustained serious wounds too and more than 300 of his followers and three of his sons were killed. Zakzaky, his wife, and a large number of the cleric’s followers have since been in custody.

The raid occurred a day after Nigerian soldiers attacked a group of Shia Muslims attending a ceremony at a religious center in the city of Zaria, accusing them of blocking the convoy of the army’s chief of staff and attempting to “assassinate” him, which the Shia Muslims strongly denied.

Despite the ruling of a Federal High Court, which ordered his unconditional release in 2016, the Nigerian government has refused to set him free.

Last month, a UK-based NGO known as the Islamic Human Rights Commission, voiced concern over the health condition of the detained Muslim cleric. The commission in a statement also called on Nigerian authorities to immediately release Shiekh Zakzaky over his deteriorating health condition.

“In view of his deteriorating health, it is now more urgent than ever to allow Sheikh Zakzaky to be allowed access to immediate medical attention in order to assess the extent of his injuries caused by the stroke and access the necessary medical treatment,” read the statement.

Nigeria allowed Zakzaky to make a rare public appearance last month to counter rumors that he had died.

IMN’s followers have been subjected to a heavy-handed crackdown since two years ago when the army attacked a religious ceremony in their stronghold of Zaria.

Source: Presstv

Cardinal Tumi has spoken out against the recent use of military violence in the Southwest Region against Anglophone separatists, saying local forces need to respect human life.

“You don’t bring peace by violence and violence begets violence,” said Cardinal Christian Tumi, Archbishop Emeritus of Douala, in a recent video.

“I have heard about those destructions and killings…and I think that has to be condemned. So my opinion is simple, we as Cameroonians should respect lives and the life of everybody,” he continued.

Military forces have been burning down villages in Cameroon’s Southwest Region, seeking separatist forces. Most recently, the town of Kwa Kwa, Matoh and the surrounding area was set on fire, which destroyed homes and the rectory of the local Catholic church.

 Mass destruction in Kwakwa village Meme Division.Houses in ruins & the area deserted. Locals say the structures were set ablaze by soldiers.

 The attacks also claimed the life of a 96-year old woman who died in one of the buildings set on fire by military forces. In addition to causing deaths, the political crisis within Cameroon has also pushed thousands of refugees into neighboring Nigeria.

The crisis is rooted in conflict between the English- and French-speaking areas of Cameroon. The area was a German colony in the late 19th century, but the territory was divided into British and French mandates after the German Empire’s defeat in World War I. The mandates were united in an independent Cameroon in 1961.

There is now a separatist movement in the Southwest and Northwest Regions, which were formerly the British Southern Cameroons.

Unrest in Cameroon has been ongoing since 2016, when the country’s Anglophone community began protests to demand the return of federalism. These protests have gone so care as to call for secession from the current government, run by President Paul Biya.

Secessionist militants in the English-speaking region of Cameroon have also sought violence against government forces and began attacking military troops in November 2017.

Biya, who is likely to seek re-election after 35 years in office, is not expected to seek negotiations with the secessionists since 2018 is an election year, which could prolong the political tensions within the country.

“I am sure that if the President of the Republic knows what is happening, he will condemn it, but on the country, he congratulated the army to bring peace,” Tumi said.

The cardinal was born in what is now Northwest Cameroon, but has served as a bishop, since 1979, in Francophone regions of the country.

According to reports, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea told reporters that the Cameroon crisis could only be resolved through dialogue.

“Cameroon is a big nation whose crisis requires concern of all forces. There is no nation without its own crisis,” President Nguema said, according to Xinhua Net.

“What is required is to seek solution through dialogue and use it to find a common axis. Those seeking refuge in other lands need to sit down together and find solution through dialogue. It is only through that, they can find solution to the crisis.”

Source: Catholic News Agency

A high-ranking American cardinal has criticized Pope Francis over his recent remarks in Chile, saying the comments had caused “great pain” for victims of sexual abuse.

“It is understandable” that Pope Francis’ comments in Chile on Thursday were “a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by [the] clergy or any other perpetrator,” US Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who is a top adviser to the pontiff, said in a statement.

O’Malley’s rare criticism of the pope on Saturday came two days after Pope Francis defended a Chilean bishop named Juan Barros, who and has now been accused of protecting a pedophile priest close to him.

“There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?,” Pope Francis firmly told reporters in Chile who questioned him about Bishop Barros.

Barros has been accused of protecting his former mentor, Rev. Fernando Karadima, a convicted pedophile.

The Vatican in 2011 found Karadima guilty of abusing teenage boys over many years.

Karadima, however, denies the allegations, and Barros has sided with him.

The enigmatic Barros-Karadima link has for years fascinated people not only in Chile but also in neighboring Argentina, where Pope Francis hails from.

O’Malley’s statement further said, “Words that convey the message ‘if you cannot prove your claims, then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile.”

O’Malley headed a papal commission — the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors — that advised the pontiff on how to root out sexual abuse in the Church. The commission’s three-year term ended last month, and its future is not clear.

O’Malley admitted, however, that the Pope “fully recognizes the egregious failures of the Church and its clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones.” He said he could not “address why the Holy Father chose the particular words he used at that time.”

While the Pope has vowed “zero tolerance” for sexual abuse, his efforts have sputtered.

A plan to open a tribunal in the Vatican to judge bishops accused of covering up sexual abuse or mishandling cases never saw the light of day.

The much-touted commission headed by O’Malley was hit by two high-profile defections of lay members who had been victims of abuse.

Source: Presstv

Pope Francis said Monday that the world stood on the “edge” of nuclear war and admitted the situation terrified him.

The Argentine was speaking aboard the papal plane on his way to Chile and Peru, the day after a false missile alert sparked panic in the US state of Hawaii, already on edge over fears of a North Korean attack.

Asked about the threat of nuclear war in the wake of a flurry of nuclear and missile tests since last year in North Korea, the pope said: “I think we are at the very edge.

“I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things,” he told journalists.

The 81-year old, who has often spoken of the dangers of nuclear weapons, presented the press pack aboard his plane with a harrowing photograph taken in 1945 that shows a young Japanese boy carrying his dead brother.

The child, carried on the boy’s back, was killed when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki.

Francis had written on the back of the image just four words: “The fruit of war”.

“I wanted to reprint and distribute it because an image like this can be more moving than a thousand words. That is why I wanted to share it with you,” he said.

(Source: AFP)

“It was like I was watching a horror movie” is how the bishop of Mamfe diocese in Cameroon’s South West Region described the scene he saw in the village of Kembong village.

Mgr Andrew Nkea had visited the village in the wake of the deaths of four soldiers late December, killed by unknown assailants (although the government claimed they were secessionists). In a retaliatory move, Cameroonian soldiers had incinerated the whole village.

“I saw more than 20 houses burnt down by soldiers and one dead body still lying there, being fed on by dogs and chicken,” said Nkea. Of the village’s 5,000 or so residents, only 30 remained, all huddled in the house of the area’s priest because “they had nowhere else to go.”

The December attack is the latest in an ongoing crisis – pitting Cameroon’s English speakers (who make up 20 percent of Cameroon’s estimated 24 million people) against the Francophone-dominated government – that now risks exploding into a full-scale civil war.

With Anglophone Cameroonians having long complained that they are being marginalised, resentment burst into the open a year ago with teachers and lawyers in the English-speaking part of Cameroon taking to the streets to protest against the use of French in their schools and courts.

What started as a teachers’ and lawyers’ strike has escalated into a full-blown political crisis, with many in the English-speaking regions now calling for secession.

In fact, on October 1, 2016, secessionist leaders in the English-speaking part of the country announced a nominal declaration of independence, provoking a muscular reaction from Cameroon’s security forces, with the ensuing clashes leaving at least 17 people dead according to the government (although opposition leaders claimed at least 100 died).

Rift between Anglophone and Francophone bishops

The crisis has drawn sharp lines between Catholic bishops from the English-speaking and French-speaking parts of the country.

Anglophone bishops described the killings as “a growing genocide” and published a long and detailed statement on Oct. 4 in which they decried a “warlike atmosphere” of killings, looting and arson carried out by “young people” and acts of “brutality, torture, inhuman and unjustified treatment meted out” by the “forces of law and order”.

But the characterisation of the crisis as genocide was not shared by the bishops from the other regions of the country.

Archbishop Samuel Kleda of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, who is president of the country’s Episcopal Conference issued a statement condemning the violence, but refusing to use the inflammatory language of his Anglophone colleagues.

“In the name of our common citizenship, brotherhood and humanity, the defence of legitimate interests must go hand in hand with social harmony, which is what is being sought … Violence, regardless of its source, does not build, it destroys,” said Kleda.

The archbishop pointed out that all regions of Cameroon face problems which, he said, can be resolved through dialogue, arguing that decentralisation would resolve many regional problems in Cameroon, including the Anglophone problem.

That drew sharp criticism from the clergy in Anglophone Cameroon who have always seen the ‘Anglophone Problem’ as one that is unique.

Father Gerald Jumbam said that by lumping the ‘Anglophone Problem’ with all other problems in the country, Kleda was ignoring a key historical fact: that English and French-speaking Cameroons were two countries that had decided to come together and that that they had come together under agreed terms which have been jettisoned to the disadvantage of Anglophones.

In a lengthy missive to Kleda, Jumbam wrote that by virtue of their history, Anglophone Cameroonians “cannot be loyal subjects to the despicable and tyrannous Yaoundé government. Archbishop, you speak of decentralisation and you offer us it as the best gift you think fitting for the resolution of this crisis? We are determined to decline a gift so laden with spurious promises and deceitful propensities.”

Church leaders in Anglophone Cameroon have also accused the president of the National Episcopal Conference of failing to as much as acknowledge the ‘Anglophone Problem’, let alone condemn the arrests and detention of Anglophone leaders and the “grotesque campaign of human savagery and barbarism perpetrated on the people of Southern Cameroons by the government.” Instead, they said, the Prelate seems to be toeing the government line by reducing the ‘Anglophone Problem’ to just another Cameroonian problem.

Cardinal Christian Tumi, one of Cameroon’s most revered clerics who comes from the English-speaking part of Cameroon, says that such corrosive representation of the problem must be discontinued.  “I would say that the others should keep quiet when the bishops of [English-speaking] Bamenda Ecclesiastical Province write because they know better what is happening.”

Genesis of a crisis

French-speaking Cameroon obtained independence from France in 1960, with British Cameroons obtaining independence in 1961. Both sides agreed to reunite following an 11 February 1961 plebiscite, but they did so under a federal system of governance that guaranteed the survival of the political, cultural, educational and judiciary legacies of both sides inherited from the colonial masters.

Just three years after that reunification, English speakers began feeling they were being marginalised.

In a confidential letter to Cameroon’s first President, Ahmadou Ahidjo, Professor Bernard Fonlon, a senior official of the ruling KNDP party in the then Southern Cameroons (now the English-speaking part of Cameroon) summed up this feeling: “Since we came together, the KNDP has hardly done more than stand by and look on. For, talking sincerely, can we name one single policy in any field – economics, education, external affairs – that has been worked out jointly by the two parties? Can we point a finger at one idea that took birth in the KNDP and was welcomed and implemented by this government?

“There is disillusionment; discontent and frustration are sinking and spreading. There is nothing so calculated as to wring and crush the human spirit, before a lofty enterprise, as to know what should be done and yet to have to stand by impotent and see the opposite taking place. This desperation has become explosive.”

Even then, a controversial referendum scrapping the federal system in 1972 meant that whatever protections the federal constitution gave English speakers were simply destroyed.

Anglophone Cameroonians believe that the agenda has always been that of annihilating their identity as a people, which is why their simmering discontent exploded in late 2017.

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