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(Vatican Radio) The Holy See and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (UAE) on the mutual exemption of visa requirements for holders of diplomatic and special passports of the United Arab Emirates and the Vatican.

The Memorandum was signed on behalf of the Holy See by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States; and on behalf of the UAE by His Highness Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The signing was witnessed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, and His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.

The signing of the agreement was part of the visit by Sheikh Mohamed to the Vatican, where he met with Pope Francis earlier in the day.

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(Vatican Radio) Catholic and Orthodox theologians are meeting in the Italian town of Chieti for the 14th plenary session of their international dialogue commission. The meeting from September 15th to 22nd brings together two representatives from each of the fourteen Orthodox Churches, alongside 28 Catholic participants, under the shared presidency of Cardinal Kurt Koch from the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and Archbishop Job of Telmessos from the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The meeting will focus on discussion of a draft document, drawn up at the previous two sessions, entitled “Towards a common understanding of Synodality and Primacy in service to the Unity of the Church”. Participants will also share moments of prayer together with local Christian communities, including a Mass in the cathedral of San Giustino in Chieti on Saturday and a Divine Liturgy at the shrine of the Holy Face in Manoppello on Sunday.

To find out more about the meeting, Philippa Hitchen spoke to Mgr Andrea Palmieri, undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. He noted that the issue of synodality and primacy is “one of the most delicate questions” in the relationship between Catholics and Orthodox. He says participants hope to arrive at a consensus that will enable them to publish a new document since the last publication was the Ravenna document which followed the plenary session of 2007.

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Commenting on the recent pan-Orthodox Council which took place in Crete, Mgr Palmieri noted that the ten Churches taking part in that encounter approved a document on Orthodox relations with other Christians. The consensus among those Orthodox Churches, he said, opens up new horizons and “demonstrates the will of Orthodox Church to continue the theological dialogue, not just with the Catholic Church but also with other Churches and Christian communities”.

Speaking of the encounter in Cuba last February between Pope Francis and the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, Mgr Palmieri said all such meetings and exchanges between Church leaders provide a positive context within which theologians can advance their dialogue. He also pointed to the historic encounter last April between Pope Francis, Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Athens Hieronymus on the Greek island of Lesbos.

The theological dialogues, he stressed, are not simply academic discussions, separated from the life of the Church but rather they are concerned with the very heart of the Church’s life. The themes of synodality and primacy, he said, are at the centre of attention right now for both Catholics and Orthodox, as they explore what it means to exercise one in relation to the other.  Discussing these themes, he said, means thinking together about ways in which a reconciled Church can better serve the mission of the Church to bring the Gospel to all people.

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The sainthood conferred by Pope Francis on Mother Teresa of Calcutta on Sept. 4 here in the Vatican, was greeted with great enthusiasm and celebration across the globe, especially in India, but more specially in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, the capital of eastern India’s West Bengal state, that the Albania-born nun adopted as her home town.  Among the estimated 120,000 faithful and admirers of Mother Teresa from across the world who were proud to be the first-hand witnesses of the canonization ceremony here in St. Peter's Square was Mr. Subrata Ganguly, a businessman from Kolkata.  Mother Teresa and Mr. Ganguly have much more in common than just being from the same city. 

From his surname,  Mr. Ganguly is a Hindu Brahmin, a non-Christian, but he is no stranger to Christian art.  Perhaps he is more versed in Christian art than most Christians.  A mechanical engineer turned businessman, Mr. Ganguly is the owner and CEO of Church Art,  a unit of Lokenath Engineering of Kolkata, engaged in designing and manufacturing a wide variety of art works for Christian churches, schools, institutions and museums all over India and also abroad.  

Ahead of the Sept. 4 canonization of Mother Teresa in the Vatican, Mr. Subrata Ganguly paid his special homage to Mother Teresa, immortalizing her in a life-size bronze statue that will endure the ravages of time for a very long time to come.  Mr. Ganguly headed the designing, sculpting and finally installing the 1.6 meter tall statue weighing about 240 kilos in the Archbishop's House in Kolkata, next to the statue of St John Paul II. The figure cast in Bangkok, Thailand, was financed and donated by entrepreneur and philanthropist, Mr Namit Bajoria, another Hindu, who is the Designate Honorary Consul of the Republic of Macedonia in Kolkata.   The Chief Minister of West Bengal state, Ms Mamata Banerjee unveiled the statue at a special function on August 26, on Mother Teresa's 106th birth anniversary. But there’s much more between Mother Teresa and Mr. Ganguly, as we come to know from this interview with him. 

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(Vatican Radio) Bolivia’s new ambassador to the Holy See met Pope Francis on Thursday and presented his Letters of Credence. Married with 3 children, the 51 year old envoy has a Master Degree in Business Communications and another in Constitutional Law and previously served as Executive Director of the Latin American Institute of Knowledge.  

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(Vatican Radio) Valerie, a dynamic teenager from DRC whose family has found refuge in South Africa; Luwam, a dancer from Eritrea, and Wahida,  an English teacher who fled Afghanistan are some of those telling their stories in a new series of Jesuit Refugee Service videos produced by the JRS “Mercy in Motion” campaign.   

Every week, as from Friday, 16 September, you can watch and listen to some uplifting, encouraging, sometimes sad or dramatic – but never – despairing stories of refugees from across the globe on Vatican Radio’s English Facebook page.

At a moment in time in which an unprecedented 65 million people are on the move in search of a safe place, peace and a decent, better future, these videos aim to contribute to a better understanding of who “refugees” are and why – as Pope Francis has said many times – it is important to build bridges and not walls, and that inclusion and integration are not a threat, a loss of identity or a potential impoverishment of our cultures, but an opportunity for growth and enrichment. 

Vatican Radio’s Linda Bordoni spoke to Giulio D’Ercole, JRS Mercy in Motion communications coordinator about the videos and about the message JRS hopes to get through:

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Giulio D’Ercole explains that the Mercy in Motion" is an advocacy and fund raising campaign that aims to double the number of refugees served by the Jesuit Refugee Service by 2020.

In order to do so JRS has promoted several initiatives, “one of them is to give visibility to the refugees and to their lives” he says.

D’Ercole explains that the video team that filmed and produced the videos has made a deliberate choice to not show the dramatic moments in which the refugees become refugees, “but to tell their stories in a much more in-depth way by describing their lives, their aspirations, their hopes, what their lives were before they became refugees, what happened and why they had to flee their own countries and become refugees or internally displaced people”.

At the end of each video you can also see what JRS is doing to help them build a future and realize their dreams thanks to its many educational and training programmes.

D’Ercole speaks of the objectives JRS has managed to reach since the beginning of the Mercy in Motion campaign which was launched in response to the Year of Mercy wanted by Pope Francis.

He also tells of how the video team travelled throughout Africa and in Asia Pacific regions - Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar to talk to refugees – men, women and children - from totally different backgrounds to be able to tell their stories.

“Each video has been recorded in a very ‘human’ way” he says. 

And he stresses, it wanted to show the lives of the refugees rather than only what JRS does for them. 

D’Ercole talks about some of his favourite videos including Valerie’s story – a young girl from DRC who is a refugee in an urban setting in South Africa.

“The reason I like her story very much is because despite the fact – or maybe because of the fact – that she is only sixteen, she’s incredibly smart and very outspoken and basically, what she says is that she can’t believe how Africans would kill one another and oppose one another and not be accepting and welcoming (referring to the xenophobia in South Africa). But what she says that is very important is that one must try and try and try because if you try there is no failure…” he says.

D’Ercole says JRS aims to produce 25 videos that will help us to give us a good idea of all the realities faced by refugees and also help us to understand that one becomes a refugee running away from war, from poverty, from persecution and from natural disasters.

He says that the 25 videos will end up illustrating a wide spectrum of problems and realities refugees face. 

“The Jesuit Refugee Service helps refugees accompanying them, serving them, advocating for them because it strongly believes that those are all human lives, and they all have a potential that needs to be nurtured, needs to be expressed, and needs to be given the possibility to become a reality”.

For more information on the Mercy in Motion campaign visit www.mercy-in-motion.org 

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Washington D.C., Sep 15, 2016 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- If the U.S. uses its moral authority' to pressure Vietnam on human rights issues, the southeast Asian country will change for the better, religious freedom advocates maintained at a conference on Monday.

“Vietnam wants to be part of the world, and I’m sure it does. It needs to not treat religious liberty as the poor sister of the human rights family, or worse, as the eccentric uncle of the human rights family,” Kristina Arriaga, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, stated at a Sept. 12 event hosted by the Hudson Institute on religious freedom in Vietnam.

“Without religious freedom, no other right exists,” she added.

The freedom of citizens to practice their religion in Vietnam “varies,” the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted in its 2016 annual report, because while “the government has made dramatic openings with respect to religious freedom,” officials – at both the national and local levels – can also treat certain religious leaders and communities with hostility, as supposedly “threatening to the state.”

Grave violations of human rights are still committed, such as the government requiring religious groups to register with the state, imprisoning human rights activists, and cracking down on protests, as when this past spring 4,000 Catholics were reportedly beaten for protesting a toxic waste dump that caused an environmental disaster.

Unregistered religious groups are at greater risk of harassment and persecution by government officials, the commission added.

However, the state can also wield its authority by trying to control registered groups. As USCIRF chair Fr. Thomas Reese and Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon noted after their 2015 trip to Vietnam, “the government kept the clergy on a short leash and continues to play a direct role in approving candidates for bishops selected by the Vatican.”

“Government officials become nervous when a local pastor has more credibility and authority in his village than the local party and government officials,” they added.

Elliot Abrams, a former commissioner with USCIRF and current fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, explained at the Hudson Institute event: “That is because the local pastor has moral authority and legitimacy, while the party and government officials do not. That is just what the regime fears.”

However, the U.S. has “moral authority” because religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment of its Constitution. Thus, it must use this authority to pressure Vietnam to improve its human rights record, both Abrams and Arriaga insisted.

They described President Obama’s recent trip to Vietnam as a missed opportunity. Obama completely lifted the arms embargo against the country, but advocates insisted that sufficient human rights concessions were not made in return.

“The question is whether the United States will use a closer relationship – that Vietnamese leaders want  – to promote religious freedom, or will we forget about it and pursue what is meant to be a policy of realpolitik,” Abrams asked.

“Whose independence and strength are we enhancing?” he asked about the lifting of the embargo, implying that the U.S. was strengthening the regime, but not the Vietnamese people.

The U.S. has an obligation to highlight abuses when its dignitaries travel to countries where repression occurs, Arriaga insisted.

“The U.S. government needs to name those names when they are in the country,” she said, calling it “inexcusable” for a government official not to do so when traveling to a country like China or Cuba, where the government represses the freedom of religion.

Although the state in 2015 released certain political prisoners including Catholic bloggers and activists, there are still reportedly “between 100 and 150 prisoners of conscience” there, USCIRF noted in its report.

The U.S. must also re-designate Vietnam as a “country of particular concern,” Arriaga insisted. That State Department designation is for countries where the worst violations of religious freedom are taking place, either with government consent or without sufficient prevention by the state.

Vietnam was put on the CPC list in 2004, “the last time that Vietnam made real improvements” she said. However, the country was taken off the list in 2006.

“In fact, we know American pressure can work to relax the degree of repression, to reduce the amount of thuggish behavior,” Arriaga said, “but only if the United States government applies that pressure and makes it clear that improved relations depend on this.”

Another area of concern for Vietnam is its draft law on religion, expected to go into effect later this year.

In June, the Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein testified before Congress that the current version of the law “will continue to require religious groups to undergo an onerous and arbitrary registration and recognition process to operate legally,” although authorities had shown “a willingness to receive domestic and international feedback on the draft law.”

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By Rhina Guidos

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Can you put a dollar value on religion? 

One Georgetown University researcher has attempted something close to it, releasing findings from a study that says organized religion and behaviors associated with it contribute, by one estimate, nearly $1.2 trillion to the United States.

Brian Grim, of the Religious Liberty Project at Georgetown University, unveiled on Sept. 14 findings of a study he conducted with Melissa Grim, of the Newseum Institute, and which analyzed the economic impact of 344,000 religious congregations, "from Adventist to Zoroastrians," around the country.

Depending on which factors one considers, religion contributes $378 billion, by the most conservative of estimates, and up to $4.8 trillion to the U.S. annually, Brian Grim said of the study sponsored by Faith Counts, a nonprofit organization of religious groups, whose aim is promoting the value of faith.

University of Pennsylvania professor Ram Cnaan, who also is program director for the Program for Religion and Social Policy Research at the school, said at the unveiling of the study that while some may consider putting a dollar value on religion a sacrilege, it's important to point out organized religion's benefits to society to balance out news about clergy abuse, extremism, fraud and other ills that are frequently reported on the news and that involve members of faith communities.

It's also important to consider the benefits of organized religion, the study said, when the U.S. seems to increasingly step closer to a more secularized society, such the one painted in the Pew Research Center study "'Nones' on the Rise," about the growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

Cnaan, who said he is not affiliated with a religion, said he believes it's important to gauge, not if religion is important but how much it is important, in terms of its dollar value to society. That's because churches and other centers of worship benefit society, financially and otherwise, through schools, hospitals, charitable institutions, by providing certain social services and volunteer work that help people in need in their local communities.

Think of organizations, Grim said, such as the Knights of the Columbus, 1.9 million members strong, who have provided help to communities in distress, physically and financially, at a moment's notice.

Given increasing secularism, "think of what would happen if everyone in America woke up like me. I'm not religious," Cnaan said, encouraging others to ponder a society in which the many social and financial benefits of organized religion are no longer there because there are fewer or no church members left. Would others pick up the slack?

Grim said there are organizations that are not faith-based that do good works.

"We wouldn't see the good of society disappearing but it would be significantly less," he said.

William Galston, of Brookings Institution's Governance Studies Program, said the $1.2 trillion estimate Grim offered, is the "Goldilocks estimate," not too high and not too low, but consider what it means to have programs, people and services originating from a religious base that contribute to 7 percent of the country's GDP, he said. That's exactly what the study finds if you go by the mid-range estimate, he said.

"It's a sensible number to use as a baseline for national discussion," Galston said.

Cnaan said in his interactions with clergy and religious leaders, he sometimes finds people who are apologetic. But the study shows that they should be proud and should be a boost of confidence to all communities of faith in the U.S., he said.

"I wish I could have gone to every place and every people and say, 'Be proud, you're part of something very big and very important,'" he said.

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Follow Guidos on Twitter: @CNS_Rhina.

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By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a change to church law, Latin-rite Catholic deacons may not preside at a wedding when one or both of the new spouses are members of an Eastern Catholic church.

The new rule is one of the changes to 11 canons in the Latin-rite Code of Canon law that Pope Francis approved in order to harmonize the laws of the Latin and Eastern Catholic churches on several issues involving the sacraments of baptism and marriage.

After more than 15 years of study and worldwide consultation, the conflicting rules were resolved by adopting the Eastern code's formulations for the Latin church as well, said Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

The bishop spoke to journalists Sept. 15 after the publication of an apostolic letter published "motu proprio" (on his own initiative) in which Pope Francis ordered the changes to the Latin Code of Canon Law, the 1983 text governing the majority of the world's Catholics.

In the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the blessing of a priest is necessary for the validity of a marriage. In the Latin-rite church, a deacon can preside over the sacrament. The new law specifies, "Only a priest can validly assist at the matrimony of two Eastern parties or between a Latin and Eastern Catholic or non-Catholic," meaning a member of an Orthodox Church.

Bishop Arrieta said that in most cases the changes made by Pope Francis involve rules for situations that the Latin code never envisioned, but that the Code of Canons of the Eastern Catholic Churches, published in 1990, did. With the large number of Eastern Christians -- both Catholic and Orthodox -- who have migrated to predominantly Latin territories since 1989, Latin-rite pastors need guidance, he said.

The changes regard practices for ministering not only to Eastern-rite Catholics, but also to members of the Orthodox churches when a priest of their church is not available, Bishop Arrieta said. Such ministry was foreseen in the canons of the Eastern Catholic churches, which often minister in places with a strong Orthodox presence.

"The Eastern code had a greater sensitivity in its ecumenical aspects," the bishop said. For example, one of the Eastern canons adopted for the Latin church says that when an Orthodox priest is not available, a Catholic priest can baptize a baby whose parents are members of an Orthodox Church and plan to raise the child Orthodox.

In such a situation, Bishop Arrieta said, the baptism would not be recorded in the Catholic parish's baptismal registry; the parents would receive a formal certificate and would register their child's baptism later at an Orthodox parish.

The additions to the Latin Code of Canon Law also specify that Latin-rite bishops may give priests "the faculties to bless the marriage of Christian faithful from an Eastern church not in full communion with the Catholic Church if they spontaneously request it."

The changes to the Latin code also decree that a Latin-Eastern couple are free to decide in which church to enroll their child; if they cannot agree, the child becomes a member of the father's church. If both parents are Eastern Catholics, even if the baby is baptized in a Latin-rite parish, the baptismal registry must note that the child is an Eastern Catholic and specify the church to which it belongs.

The Eastern Catholic churches include, among others, the Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Melkite, Romanian, Maronite, Armenian, Chaldean, Syriac, Syro-Malankara and Syro-Malabar churches.

The Latin and Eastern codes "respect, as they must, different juridical traditions, although obviously they give the same response to essential questions regarding the faith of the church," Bishop Arrieta wrote in an article for the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Conflicting rules in the two codes were evident from the time of the publication of the Eastern canons, he said. And as more Eastern Catholics migrated to predominantly Latin Catholic lands, a need to clarify the practical matters involving baptism and marriage became clear.

The changes approved by Pope Francis, Bishop Arrieta wrote, "respond to a desire to facilitate the pastoral care of the faithful especially in the so-called diaspora where thousands of Eastern Christians who have left their homelands live amidst a Latin majority."

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Follow Wooden on Twitter: @Cindy_Wooden

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Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.

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