Catholic News 2

Washington D.C., Sep 27, 2016 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A U.N. resolution against further nuclear weapons tests drew praise from the U.S. Catholic bishops, who repeated their support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the wake of North Korean weapons tests.

The U.S. bishops’ conference “welcomes the action of the U.N. Security Council as encouraging this important step toward a world without nuclear weapons,” Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, N.M. said Sept. 23.

The prelate, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, said the U.S. bishops have long supported ratification of a comprehensive test ban.

On Friday, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution that called on countries to refrain from nuclear weapons testing. It presented the avoidance of nuclear weapons testing as an international norm.

The resolution, proposed by the United States, passed with 14 votes and the abstention of Egypt. The Wall Street Journal said the resolution was largely symbolic.

Sept. 24 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

At present 166 countries, including the Holy See, have signed and ratified the treaty. A total of 183 countries have signed the treaty but have not ratified it, including the United States.

The U.S. failed to ratify the treaty in a 1999 Senate vote, although it has observed a national moratorium on nuclear weapons testing since 1992.

The nuclear test ban treaty will not take effect until the U.S. and seven other hold-out nations, North Korea, Egypt, Iran, Israel, China, India and Pakistan, ratify it.

North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9. It said it detonated a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on ballistic rockets, CNN reports. The explosion was estimated at about 10 kilotons, about two-thirds the power of the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.
 

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(Vatican Radio)  The state prosecutor of Bosnia-Herzegovina says he has opened an investigation into a Bosnian Serb referendum that was held on Sunday in defiance of the country's highest court. The announcement came after official results showed that about 99.8 percent of Bosnian Serb voters are in favor of keeping a disputed holiday that the Constitutional Court had said discriminates against non-Serbs.

Listen to Stefan Bos' report:

Bosnia's chief prosecutor Goran Salihovic expressed concern that the Serb region of his ethnically divided nation organized a referendum on whether to keep January 9 as a national holiday.

It commemorates the day in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state, now known as Republika Srpska, during the Bosnian war of the 1990s.

As expected, Bosnian Serbs voted overwhelmingly to maintain national holiday in Republica Srpska, in defiance of Bosnia's highest court.

Referendum organizers said that preliminary results showed that 99.8 percent of voters in Republika Srpska were in favor of the annual holiday and that turnout was nearly 56 percent.

Wild celebrations

That prompted celebrations among supporters of the vote. The Bosnian Serb republic's nationalist President Milorad Dodik was welcomed as a hero.

He made clear in his speech that the vote to maintain Statehood Day would go down in history as the "day of Serb determination" and added that he was proud of the people of Republika Srpska, of all those who came out and voted. 

Dodik spoke in Pale, the town near Sarajevo, which was the headquarters of Bosnian Serb wartime President Radovan Karadzic, convicted of genocide in the Bosnian war.

However non-Serbs living in Republika Srpska mostly boycotted the vote.

The Constitutional Court had banned the referendum, which was organized by the region's local government. It said the annual commemoration discriminates against non-Serb, including Muslims in the area.

Muslims remember

Many Muslims and other non-Serbs were expelled from the Serb region.

And some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces overran the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

The West is also considering sanctions against Republika Srpska and its leaders. However Russia, a traditional ally of Serbs, has expressed support for the referendum calling it an act of democracy.

Balkan observers see it as a dress rehearsal for an attempt to secede from Bosnia, which was divided after the war between the Serb-run region and the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

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(Vatican Radio)  A referendum was held on Monday in the Republic of Azerbaijan on proposed constitutional changes regarding presidential powers and term limits, just days ahead of Pope Francis' Apostolic Journey to the country.

Listen to Devin Watkins' report:

The proposed changes to the Azerbaijani constitution included raising presidential term limits from five to seven years and granting the president the right to disband parliament.

Voting on Tuesday wrapped up at 7 pm and initial counting showed a high turnout of around 70 percent of eligible voters.

Azerbaijan’s Central Election Commission chief, Mazahir Panahov, said that with nearly three-quarters of the ballots counted, over 90 percent of voters supported the extension of the presidential term.

President Ilham Aliyev assumed the top office in October of 2003 and is the 4th president of the country since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Officials say referendum results will be announced by October 21st.

Pope Francis is due to visit Azerbaijan this Sunday following his Apostolic Journey to Georgia.

Click here for more details of his Azerbaijan and Georgia trip.

It will be the Holy Father’s 16th pastoral visit and will focus on the themes of peace and solidarity, following on the message of peace that he took with him to the neighbouring Republic of Armenia last June.

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Vatican City, Sep 27, 2016 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- How does Pope Francis carry forward the reform of the Roman Curia? Gradually, step by step, by trial and error, according to Bishop Marcello Semeraro of Albano, who serves as secretary of the Council of Cardinals.

 
Bishop Semeraro delivered his evaluation of the work of the Council of Cardinals in a lengthy article for the Italian Catholic monthly “Il Regno,” published Sept. 19. There, the bishop provided the criteria that led the Council of Cardinals to their suggested reform of the Roman Curia.

The keywords to understand the reforming method are pastoral conversion, decentralization, and subsidiarity.

Curia reform is already underway, the bishop said.

There is unusual flexibility in the new management of the Vatican departments, known as dicasteries. At present, the newest dicasteries’ rules are approved on an experimental basis but without a time limit. Usually the Church places a time limit on experimental rules.

This decision allows adjustments and improvements as soon as any are needed.

Bishop Semeraro linked the Council of Cardinals’ actions to the “needs for a pastoral conversion” that Pope Francis stated in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.
 
The bishop reviewed Pope Francis’ instructions that established the Secretariat for Communications, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life and the Dicastery for Integral Human development. According to Bishop Semeraro, these show that Curia reform has a twofold meaning.

“First of all,” the bishop said, “the reform wants to make the Curia relevant to the current times, to better meet the needs of men and women.” Secondly, the reform aims at “making the Roman Curia more compliant to its task, that is, collaborating with the ministry of the successor of Peter.”

For Bishop Semeraro, the diverse backgrounds of the cardinals on the Pope’s advisory council bring much experience to their task.

He considered the demographics of the Council of Cardinals. Five are diocesan bishops from India, Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Two are bishops emeriti, one of whom currently heads a Vatican dicastery. There are two cardinals who have served as apostolic nuncios. Of these, one is now Secretary of State and the other is president of the Vatican City State Administration.
 
How often does the Council of Cardinals meet? To date, the council has gathered 16 times, usually for three consecutive days and with two meetings per day. That makes a total of 93 meetings.
 
The council started to consider a reform based on Pastor Bonus, the 1988 apostolic constitution of St. John Paul II that regulates the competencies and work of the Roman Curia.
 
Bishop Semeraro explained that the council made a systematic reading of Pastor Bonus, starting from the section about the Vatican Secretariat of State and continuing with the descriptions of congregations and pontifical councils. At first, the cardinals made a general overview and then went more in depth into topic.
 
“Some of the issues needed more and more meetings of reflection. When the study was finalized, the council made some specific proposal to the Holy Father,” Bishop Semeraro recounted.
 
At the Vatican, the traditional method is to study a general juridical and ecclesiological setting first in order to make concrete decisions afterward. The Council of Cardinals is doing exactly the opposite, operating by trial and error.
 
Bishop Semeraro noted that there was an early proposal to establish a moderator of the curia to coordinate the functions of the Roman Curia, a role that already exists in the separate administration of the Diocese of Rome. The council then suggested that Pope Francis drop the proposal.
 
The reform in general aims at reorganizing the Roman Curia. While the different names of congregations and political councils might suggest categories of two separate and unequal classes, this is not the case.
 
“The different names are about a different exercise of their power,” Bishop Semeraro explained. To avoid this impression, he added, the new dicasteries are labeled simply as “dicasteries,” since this terminology already is considered a synonym for both congregations and pontifical councils at the Vatican.
 
Bishop Semeraro also explained the rationale behind the establishment of the two new dicasteries on Laity, Family and Life and on Integral Human Development.
 
The Laity, Family and Life dicastery is born out of the need “to consider and value with ever more awareness the status of lay people within the Catholic Church.”
 
The cardinals wanted to emphasize the role of the laity with an institutional response in the Church’s administration, a response on a par to the consideration given to bishops, priests and religious brothers and sisters.
 
After that, the cardinals also thought that family could be properly linked to laity, and consequently to life. The proposal aimed “to keep these issues united in the Church’s organization and pastoral work,” Bishop Semeraro said.

Similarly, the Pope wanted to name a dicastery for Integral Human Development from the merging of the Pontifical Councils for Justice and Peace, Migrants, and Healthcare Workers and the human development-focused Pontifical Council Cor Unum, given the goals of Catholic social teaching.
 
This way, the dicastery works to avoid a situation in which major social principles remain “mere general indications that do not question anyone.”

Bishop Semeraro noted that the Pope himself wanted to take over temporarily the responsibility for the office of migrants and refugees. This choice underscores a specific focus on the world emergency, while his desire for temporary responsibility might be read “as a hope that this emergency will soon be solved.”

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