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Washington D.C., Oct 27, 2016 / 06:36 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Leading religious freedom advocates called for the release of all “prisoners of conscience” worldwide on International Religious Freedom Day.

“For the sake of these and other prisoners of conscience we dare not be silent,” wrote Fr. Thomas Reese and Daniel Mark, chairman and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“We call for their immediate release, and we ask free people everywhere to urge Pakistan, Iran, and Eritrea to release every religious prisoner of conscience they hold,” they stated.

Oct. 27 is International Religious Freedom Day. The day marks the 18th anniversary of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, a bill that helped solidify the role of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.

The law created an office within the State Department for international religious freedom. Additionally, it created the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as “an independent, bipartisan federal body to monitor religious freedom abuses abroad and provide policy recommendations to the president, secretary of state, and Congress.”

“The rights to exercise one’s freedom of thought, conscience, and religion are fundamental human rights and bedrock American principles,” John Kirby, Assistant Secretary of State, said on Thursday. “We believe everyone deserves these freedoms.”
 
However, “nearly two decades later, standing for religious freedom worldwide is as important as ever,” Fr. Reese and Mark insisted, noting that billions of people worldwide “live under governments that perpetrate or tolerate serious abuses against freedom of religion or belief.”

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) defines a “prisoner of conscience” as someone “whom governments hold for reasons including those related to religion.”

Common instances of this type of imprisonment include governments jailing dissident clerics and members of non-state sanctioned faiths, and convictions on “blasphemy laws,” which in some cases don’t carry a punishment for false accusations, and which are often used to persecute religious minorities.  

USCIRF’s 2016 annual report noted that “the incarceration of prisoners of conscience” still “remains astonishingly widespread, occurring in country after country” like China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan.

For instance, 80 year-old Abdul Shakoor, an Ahmadi Muslim living in Pakistan, was “falsely accused of selling to an undercover police officer an Ahmadiyya commentary on the Qur'an and other publications,” which is against the law in the country, Fr. Reese and Mark noted, adding that Shakoor received “concurrent sentences of five years and three years in prison” in January.  

There is also the case of the “Baha’i Seven,” members of the Baha’i minority religious sect in Iran. Two of them were arrested in 2008 and “given 20-year sentences on false charges of espionage, propaganda against the ‘Islamic Republic,’ and establishment of an illegal administration.”

“The plight of these prisoners highlights the abysmal status of religious freedom in the countries that persecute them,” the op-ed insisted.

The U.S. can also do more for these prisoners, Fr. Reese and Mark insisted.

For instance, the State Department could “compile a comprehensive list of religious prisoners which would better enable State to advocate” for their liberation.

They added that the State Department should “follow USCIRF's long-standing recommendation to designate Pakistan a country of particular concern (CPC), marking it as one of the world's worst abusers of religious freedom.”

The CPC list identifies countries where the worst persecutions of religious freedom take place, either at the hands of the state or by non-state actors in states that do not stop the abuses.

The list is used to pressure these countries to improve their human rights records. Currently, the State Department lists Burma, China, Eritrea, North Korea, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia as CPCs.

USCIRF has recommended more countries be added to the list: Central African Republic, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

“As we mark International Religious Freedom Day, let us stand for the freedom of all people to practice their religion alone and in groups, in public and in private, and let the United States and the international community hold governments accountable for the protection of this inalienable human right,” Fr. Reese and Mark concluded.

 

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Rome, Italy, Oct 27, 2016 / 03:26 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Helping the victims of human trafficking is not enough – we must go to the root to solve the problem, said one survivor at an event with Pope Francis on Thursday.

“When we are spending money only for the victims, more are coming (through trafficking), hearing the news that if you come, you have a place to stay, you have food to eat, you have clothes to wear, and you can go to school,” Princess Inyang told CNA Oct. 27.

Inyang herself became a victim of human trafficking in 1999, when she was promised that she would receive a good job in Europe as a cook, the job she had in her home country of Nigeria.

But instead, she was trafficked. Her captors brought her through London and France and eventually to Italy, where she was forced into prostitution and to pay back her “debt” of 45,000,000 euros. She was eventually able, with help, to escape her traffickers, and has since founded the organization PIAM Onlus to help victims of prostitution.

“I am a living testimony of the dangers and atrocities to which many Nigerian women are subjected,” she wrote in a testimony. “My heart bleeds for joy whenever I can help one.”

Inyang said there are several important root causes of trafficking in Nigeria which must be addressed. First, it is essential to break up the networks of traffickers leading from Nigeria through Niger and into Libya, and from there to Europe.

In addition, the lack of jobs must be taken into consideration. One of the reasons many youth, especially from rural areas, are tricked into joining traffickers is due to a lack of jobs, she said.

Young people often drop out of high school and are then unable to pursue additional education, she said, recalling that when she talks to victims, many say, “I dropped out from secondary school because my parents did not have money.”

One solution, according to Inyang, would be for the local government to establish farms and factories to employ young people.

“Because most of the people in Nigeria, after they finish school – they don’t even have a job. So they are confused. Why should I continue going to school, when after I don’t have any job? So our government should at least create some job opportunities for the youth.”

Another major issue Inyang identified is the lack of leadership and provision by fathers.

Often, when a man has two or three wives, he has many children and ends up neglecting his family, she said. Because of this, it is frequently only the women who are working to support the family and there is not enough money.

“And then it is that most of the men don’t work for the family, but they want the youth to work for them.”

“The Bible says that we should train up our child in the way of the Lord, so that when he will grow, he will not depart from it,” she said.

This must be taught “in the churches, in the schools, that your children are not the ones who suffer for you, that you are the parent.”

Inyang, along with two other victims of trafficking, Al Bangura and Crystal, shared their testimonies with Pope Francis during an audience between the Pope and members of the Santa Marta Group Oct. 27.

The Santa Marta Group is an alliance of international police chiefs and bishops from across the world who work together with civil society to eradicate human trafficking and provide pastoral care to victims.

The group was launched by Pope Francis in April 2014 with the goal of developing strategies in prevention, pastoral care and re-integration through the international network.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, and president of the group was also present at the meeting, which took place as part of an Oct. 26-27 conference sponsored by the group.

In the audience, Pope Francis said that what is needed in the fight against trafficking is a “concerted effort, effective and consistent, both to eliminate the causes of this complex phenomenon, and to meet, assist and accompany people who fall into the snares of trafficking.”

These victims, he said, “are the most vulnerable, who are stolen dignity, physical and mental integrity, even their lives.”

“The Lord will reward what is done to these little ones in today’s society,” the Pope continued. “Jesus said: ‘I was hungry ... I was thirsty ... and you helped me’; today he could also say: ‘I was abused, exploited, enslaved ... and you’ve helped me’.”

In his homily at Mass the morning of Oct. 27, the Pope said that God the Father became man in order to “weep” for the victims of trafficking and for those who “sell people’s lives.”

“It is good for us to think that our God the Father became man in order to weep and it is good for us to think that our God the Father weeps today: weeps for this humanity that does not understand the peace that he offers us, the peace of love,” he said.

 

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Vatican City, Oct 27, 2016 / 04:51 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Doctrine and theological reflection are to be formed by its evangelizing purpose and by pastoral concerns, Pope Francis told the faculty and students of the John Paul II Institute on Thursday.

“Theology and pastoral care go hand in hand,” the Pope said Oct. 27 at the Vatican's Clementine Hall. “Theological doctrine that doesn’t let itself be directed and formed by its evangelizing purpose and by the Church’s pastoral concerns is no less unthinkable than pastoral activity that doesn’t know how to use revelation and tradition to better understand the Faith and preach it as Jesus commands.”

Francis' address marked the opening of the new academic year for the institute, which will be celebrating its 35th anniversary. The address to open the academic year had been scheduled to be delivered by Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, but he was replaced by the Pope earlier this month.

Pope Francis began, saying that the “fruitfulness and value of the far-sighted intuition” of St. John Paul II “can be recognized and appreciated ever more clearly today. His wise discernment of the 'signs of the times' has enabled us to refocus, in the Church, and in society as a whole, our attention on the depth and sensitivity of the relationship that springs from the marriage covenant between a man and a woman.”

He lamented the forces that strain the marriage bond and families ties, citing “a culture that glorifies narcissistic individualism, the idea that freedom can be unhinged from our responsibility for one another, growing indifference to the common good, the imposition of ideologies that directly attack the traditional family, together with poverty that threatens the future of so many families.”

Mentioning the complexity of “newly developed technologies that make possible courses of action that are in conflict with authentic human dignity,” the Pope advised “a much closer relationship between the Saint John Paul II Institute and the Pontifical Academy for Life.”

The proximity of that relationship is facilitated by Pope Francis' recent appointment of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia as grand chancellor of the St. John Paul II Institute and as president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The institute's previous grand chancellor had been, ex officio, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome, currently Cardinal Agostino Vallini.

The Pope said that culture's individualism, “leading 'me' to prevail over 'us' and the individual over society … goes against God’s plan, the plan that has entrusted the world and history to the covenant between man and woman. By its very nature, this covenant calls for cooperation and respect, generous commitment and shared responsibility, and the ability to recognize difference as being richness and promise, not a justification for subjugation and abuse.”

To understand the dignity of both man and woman “requires a proper appreciation of the relationship between the two. How can we know fully our own concrete humanity other than through an appreciation of the complementary difference between ourselves, man or woman, and the other sex?”

This knowledge is reached, he said, “as man and woman speak to each other, question each other and act together, with mutual respect and good will. It is impossible to deny the contribution that modern culture has made to the rediscovery of the difference between the sexes.”

“For this reason, it is very troubling that this same culture appears unable to get beyond a tendency to eliminate difference rather than addressing the problems that threaten it,” he added.

Francis reflected that it is “only in the cradle of the family” that the covenant of marriage between man and woman can first be nourished, and that “when all is well between man and woman, all is also well in the world and in history. If not, the world becomes unwelcoming and history grinds to a halt.”

The Pope said that the “witness of the thoroughgoing humanity and pure beauty of the Christian ideal of the family should inspire us to our very core … The love that is in the Church commits itself to the development, in doctrine and in pastoral practice, of its own ability to make understandable, to people of our own time, the truth and beauty of God’s creative plan.”

To make this plan effective today “requires a special and loving understanding, as well as a complete commitment to evangelization that is animated by great compassion and mercy toward the vulnerability and weakness of human love.”

“The dynamism of the relationship among God, man and woman is a golden key that unlocks the meaning of the world and of history and of all that is in them, as well as, after all, something of the depth of the love that is God Himself. Can we embrace the greatness of such a revelation?” he asked. “Do we know how to keep the new generations from giving up and bring them back to the boldness of this plan?”

In the face of this, Pope Francis recalled the reality of sin, saying that “we have to learn not to resign ourselves to human failure but rather to support the fulfillment of God’s plan by every means possible.”

He quoted from his apostolic exhortation on love in the family, Amoris laetitia, saying it is right to admit that at times “we have presented a theological ideal of matrimony that is too abstract, almost artificial, far from the concrete situation of families and from what they are capable of in their day-to-day lives. This excessive idealization, particularly when we haven’t reawakened any trust in grace, hasn’t made matrimony more desirable and attractive, it has made it less so.”

The justice of God “shines forth in His faithfulness to his promise, and the splendor of that faithfulness …  is the mercy He bestows,” Francis commented.

He stated that the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family “were in agreement about the need to broaden the Church’s understanding of and love for the mystery of human love that reveals God’s love for everyone,” and that Amoris laetitia “emphasizes this wider understanding of love and calls on the whole People of God to make the family dimension of the Church more visible and more effective.”

Christian families should become proud of putting grace “at the service of all those who, poor and abandoned, despair of ever finding it, or getting it back. Pastoral discourse today isn’t just about how far many Christians are from the ideal and the practice of the Christian truth about matrimony and the family,” he said.

“Much more important is the idea of the Church’s 'closeness' – closeness to new generations of married couples in making the Church’s blessing of the matrimonial and family ever more central to their lives, and in helping them confront human weakness so that grace can deliver, give new life and heal.”

The Pope called the “unbreakable bond between the Church and its sons and daughters” the “clearest witness we have of God’s faithful and merciful love.”

The John Paul II Institute is tasked with supporting “the necessary openness of intelligence formed by faith in the service of the pastoral mission of Peter’s Successor,” he told them, recalling the importance of pastors – and theologians – of “smelling like the sheep”.

“Theology and pastoral care go hand in hand,” he said. “Theological doctrine that doesn’t let itself be directed and formed by its evangelizing purpose and by the Church’s pastoral concerns is no less unthinkable than pastoral activity that doesn’t know how to use revelation and tradition to better understand the Faith and preach it as Jesus commands.”

Pope Francis concluded his address, saying the Church's mission “must be rooted in the happiness that faith brings and in the humility that marks joyful service to the Church. The Church that is, not imaginary churches that we think should be.”

“The living Church in which we live, the beautiful Church to which we belong, the Church of the one Lord and one Spirit to which we commit ourselves as servants who are 'worthless' but who offer their best to the Lord, the Church that we love so that all can love it, the Church in which we feel ourselves loved more than we deserve, and for which we are ready to sacrifice with perfect happiness!”

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Laura Elizabeth Pohl,

By Rhina Guidos

BALTIMORE (CNS) -- Many mornings Carolyn Y. Woo has arrived to the relative solitude of a chapel at the Baltimore headquarters of Catholic Relief Services, and as the bustling city comes to life, she has looked inside the serene space for a particular quiet spot, the place where she arms herself with prayer.

"That plant is my coffee table," she said inside the chapel, pointing to a leafy pot nearby where she hides papers, coffee or whatever she might be holding on her way in.

"I do my readings for the day," she said, explaining her morning routine during an October interview with Catholic News Service, one of the last she'll do as CEO of the agency. "I sit with the Blessed Mother. There's one chair there ... that's where I do my prayer and then I start the day."

Prayer is something she's needed while managing one of the largest charities in the country. The days have meant little sleep and lots of meetings, lots of visitors, lots of travel and challenges, joy and sadness, some which she never expected she'd see at the official international humanitarian agency of the country's Catholic community.

The end of 2016 will mark the end of her five-year stint with CRS but also more than four decades of a demanding professional life largely rooted in the halls of business academia and board rooms, and one which led her to the halls of Vatican, as well to the world's poorest communities.

Soon, she'll be trading that in for drawing classes, piano lessons, line dancing, flower arrangement and trying to learn to speak Spanish so she can sing with others at Mass.

"Everybody tells me that I'm going to be bored," she said speaking of her upcoming retirement. "But I'm so excited. They say women look forward to their retirement while men dread it. I think of it as 'refirement,' not retirement."

The way Woo, 62, sees it, some of the best parts of her life are about to start.

"My life always had a set of professional identities: professor, administrator, dean, and so on. ... I'm now going to that phase of my life where I'm going to let go of those titles for my most important roles: mother, wife, sister, aunt, friend and a servant of God," she said.

However, when you're the kind of person the pope has invited to help present one of his most important encyclicals -- which Woo did when she helped present "Laudato Si'" in 2015 -- it's hard to just ride off, or line dance, into the sunset.

"I'll continue to serve on several boards. I write a column for CNS, that will continue. There are speeches, but more important, I want to experience and do things that I'm not good at," she said.

For now, she's busy wrapping up the past five years of her life, reviewing the challenges, successes but also the opportunities of managing the U.S. bishops' overseas relief and development agency. She's been witness to the work of her colleagues in the 100 or so countries where CRS serves the poorest and most marginalized communities on the planet.

She said that while she didn't know as much as her colleagues about international relief and development when she took over in 2012, she knew about business, especially about strategy, which could help CRS position itself for the future. She comes alive when talking about the intricacies of strategy, how she got students to explore it at the University of Notre Dame when she was the dean of the top-rated Mendoza Business School. She gave up tenure there after CRS tapped her to become its CEO in 2011.

"I actually don't know of any other Chinese immigrant who has given up tenure," she said. "I've worked for stability. Security and stability were my brass rings. Everything else just happened to come along because I tend to over-prepare."

At CRS, she has aimed to make the agency a more effective organization, she said, one that develops its leadership from within, one that looks at the short-term and long-term benefits for those it serves, and one that communicates its Catholic identity to the world.

"The most important thing to me is that we represent the church well, and that we understand the privilege of being able to serve the people that God sends to us, the people we serve," she said.

That means having enough resources to help alleviate poverty, to respond to increasing natural disasters such as the recent hurricane that swept through Haiti or to the historic displacement of people around the world who are forced to flee their homelands.

Her tenure has seen one of the largest displacements of people in history: 65.3 million at the end of 2015, according to figures from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. It surpasses the number of those displaced after two world wars, one which led to the founding of CRS in 1943, as the Catholic bishops of the United States established the agency to help war-torn Europe and its refugees recover. As it did in the past, CRS has helped the present wave of displaced people with basic necessities, as well education and counseling.

"The magnitude of the problems exceeds the resources in the world, but it does not exceed our ingenuity and our ability to solve problems, if we can work together," she said.

That's not an easy task when you consider that most people haven't come in contact with the displaced, whether refugees or migrants, making it hard to understand what they face, said Woo.

"They just watch this on television. There are different stories. There are stories about migrants. There are stories about terrorism. They're all kind of put together," she said. "I think when we run across situations, where people don't see things the way we do, when they don't agree. I think the key is not to label them, it's not to get frustrated, but it's to say, 'Would you like to meet some of these people?'"

Fighting, attacking, labeling, none of it helps to carry out the work of the Gospel, she said, and she's certainly seen her share of it at the helm of the agency.

She remembers a particularly difficult day that began with an email about a blog post accusing CRS of storing and distributing condoms in Madagascar, saying that the bishops there were angry at the agency because Catholic Church teaching prohibits artificial birth control and the agency was violating that teaching.

"This was so far from the truth," she said. "You can imagine the type of sadness, to be accused of something that is completely false."

Meetings with the Madagascar bishops, New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had to be arranged, translators had to be hired, schedules across several time zones had be arranged, all just to clean up a baseless attack, she said.

"The day when I got that email was a very bad day," she recalled. "In addition to addressing these particular issues, it's sort of a loss of idealism to recognize that there a bodies within the church that would do that ' not only is it false, not only is it malicious, but actually it prevented us from spending our energies serving the people who needed help."

The Madagascar bishops refuted the reports and publicly supported CRS in 2013 but the attacks continued.

"I could not imagine this type of malice to be in the church," she said. "I think that was the part that I was unprepared for."

While attacks may come and go, the mission of CRS remains, she said, and it's one that began with Christ and will continue when Sean Callahan, the present chief operating officer, takes over the top spot at the start of 2017.

"The mission of CRS comes from the Gospel, which is where Jesus told us to go out serve, particularly raising up those who are without power, those who are without wealth, those at the margins of society," Woo said.

It's a mission she hopes to continue but on a different path, and one kept in focus by the fleeting images of those she's met on her CRS journey, of families like hers, selling everything they own to help a son or daughter escape toward a safer or better future, of a young man who reminded her of one of her two sons but lives with shrapnel embedded in his body.

"We can pat ourselves on the back and say, 'We served 100 million people,' or we could ask the question 'what about the (others who aren't receiving help)," she says. "I hope that's one thing I've done, to say have courage ' step up. ' I'd like to have our colleagues not be afraid to hold ourselves accountable because we do all this to serve (people) and to serve God. And if we trust in the Lord, the Lord will take us there."

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Follow Guidos on Twitter: @CNS_Rhina.

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