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(Vatican Radio) The so-called Islamic State have warned that last Friday’s attack at a café in Bangladesh was just a glimpse of what is to come.

In recent weeks, Bangladesh has experienced a rise in extremist violence, with a string of targeted killings on secular bloggers and religious minorities, with the most deadly attack taking place on July 1st, which saw 20 civilians of different nationalities murdered. However the Bangladeshi government has discredited claims that the so-called Islamic State carried out the attacks, instead blaming homegrown local militant groups.

A spokesperson for the South Asia Team for Christian Solidarity Worldwide spoke to Georgia Gogarty, about the current situation in Bangladesh and what needs to be done to stop this rise in violent extremism.

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People in Bangladesh are extremely fearful and there is a sense of insecurity and instability according to CSW’s spokesperson. When asked why there has been such a rise in violent extremism, they said that we must “look back to the history and the political context” of Bangladesh, which separated from Pakistan following the War of Liberation in 1971.

Our spokesperson explained that Bangladesh is 89% Muslim and much of the population feel that Hindus, as well as foreigners are “trying to dilute the Islamic feeling in the country”. What started out as the murders of secular bloggers has now “expanded towards local people, also targeting religious minorities”, which include Hindus and Christians, as well as those who are outspoken about fundamentalism.

When asked which measures can be taken to curb this onslaught of violent extremism, the CSW spokesperson stressed that the government has to be more honest about who is responsible for these killings. “This outright denial that ISIS or al-Qaeda or some external extremist groups is not helping the situation”, they said.

Despite the fact that the so-called Islamic State actually claimed responsibility for the July 1st attack, CSW’s spokesperson went on to say that the “Awami League are using the situation to extract the political advantage by actually blaming the opposition party”.  They stressed that the government and police need to act in a much clearer manner to find the people responsible.       

Pope Francis offered his prayers and condolences for the families of those killed in Friday’s attack. With a population of 160 million of which 0,5% is Christian, the CSW spokesperson expressed that people still look towards the Pope’s spiritual leadership and “take heed” of his advice. His words provide a “statement of reassurance” and solidarity during a time of trauma and fear. 

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Eid ul-Fitr in Bangladesh has been dampened this year with a shocked nation still trying to get over its worst nightmare.  In the deadliest terror attack ever in its history, 20 hostages were slaughtered after 7 heavily armed attackers stormed a restaurant on the night of July 1, in Dhaka’s upscale Gulshan neighbourhood.  Security forces killed six of the attackers and freed 13 hostages in the rescue operation the following morning.  The slain hostages included 9 Italians, 7 Japanese, an Indian and 3 students at American universities.  Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.  The total death toll from the attack stood at 28, including 2 Bangladeshi police officers and 6 terrorists. ‎It w.as the worst in a recent series of militant attacks in Bangladesh, and the escalating violence has raised global concerns about whether the predominantly Muslim nation is capable of coping with Islamist terrorism rearing its ugly head in its deadliest form.  But what is most shocking about this terrible massacre and which the nation of some 162 million cannot easily get over, is that these attackers were not foreigners or poor but home-grown Muslim youth from well-to-do middle class families who attended elite educational institutions.   

Well, to know about this and other related questions, we called Archbishop Patrick D’Rozario of Dhaka, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bangladesh (CBCB).   The archbishop who is also president of the United Forum of Churches, Bangladesh (UFCB), talked to us on his mobile phone, analysing the situation in his country both from the Church’s point of view as well as a Bangladeshi citizen.  On July 4, the second day of national mourning called by Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, he joined Apostolic Nuncio of Vatican ambassador to Bangladesh, Archbishop George Kocherry, at a memorial Mass for the victims in Dhaka.  In his telephone interview, Archbishop D’Rozario tried to probe the religious as well as political motives behind the heinous act.  He first expressed his feelings about the terror attack. 

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A 36 years old Nigerian asylum seeker, Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi, has died Wednesday in the Italian town of Fermo, situated in the central region of Marche. Emmanuel died of injuries sustained in a racist attack by right-wing football fans.

According to Italian media, Emmanuel and his partner were walking along via 20 September Street in the town centre Tuesday evening. As they walked, supporters of a local football club accosted them and began to insult and heap racial abuse on them. They referred to Emmanuel’s partner, Chinyere aged 24, a “Monkey.” Emmanuel reacted to the racist insults directed at Chinyere and in the process of defending her from the abuse, one of the group beat Emmanuel with a steel bar that was ripped out of a road sign.

The Italian Catholic newspaper, Avvenire reports Thursday that Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told the press that an Italian man, Amedeo Mancini, has been arrested and charged by the Police for killing Emmanuel. The Interior Minister, who rushed to Fermo, said the Italian government was keen to prevent a contagious atmosphere of hate.

“Italians are a great nation who are at the forefront of demonstrating to the world, hospitality to refugees,” Alfano is quoted by Avvenire as saying. 
Fermo’s Mayor spoke of his sadness at the racist motivated death. He expressed solidarity with Fr. Vinicio Albanesi, who leads those caring for refugees in the region.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, who personally knows Fr. Albanesi also phoned the priest to express solidarity. In a Thursday tweet, Renzi wrote, "The government today is in Fermo with Fr. Vinicio (Albanesi) and local institutions in memory of Emmanuel.”

From September last year, Emmanuel and his partner, Chinyere, were being hosted by a Catholic seminary in the central Italian Marche region. 

Emmanuel and Chinyere fled Nigeria for fear of Boko Haram terrorists in the North East. After a Boko Haram attack, Emmanuel lost his parents and a sibling. Fleeing Nigeria, the couple passed through Libya where they were robbed and beaten by thugs. Embarking on the perilous journey via the Mediterranean Sea to  Palermo in Italy, Chinyere suffered a miscarriage. 

In the Tuesday attack, Chinyere was also beaten and suffered bruises to the arms and leg.

UNHCR chief for Southern Europe, Stephane Jaquemet expressed deep sorrow and dismay at the killing of Emmanuel. "Encountering death in Italy, after suffering violence and abuse in Libya and having survived the Mediterranean is unacceptable," said Jaquemet. 

The UNHCR hopes that the law will take its course and that some form of settlement and support will be found for Chinyere, Emmanuel’s surviving partner.

(Email: engafrica@vatiradio.va)

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Vatican City, Jul 7, 2016 / 06:43 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Thursday the Vatican announced Pope Francis’ decision to nominate Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago as a new member of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.

The Pope’s appointment of Archbishop Cupich to the Vatican department was announced in a July 7 communique from the Vatican.

The Congregation of Bishops, currently headed by Cardinal Marc Oullet, is responsible for what pertains to the “establishment and provision of particular Churches and to the exercise of the episcopal office in the Latin Church” – primarily, overseeing the process of selecting and appointing bishops.

Cupich’s nomination to the congregation comes just two years after he was tapped to lead the Archdiocese of Chicago. He was appointed as Archbishop of Chicago by Pope Francis Sept. 20, 2015, replacing Cardinal Francis George.

He was also among the 45 bishops appointed by Pope Francis to participate in the 2015 Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family.

Born in Omaha, Neb. In 1949, he was ordained a priest in 1975 and studied at the College of St. Thomas in Minnesota as well as the Pontifical College of North America in Rome. In 1998, he was named bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, and in 2010, he was named bishop of Spokane. He took over for Cardinal George in Chicago in 2014, due to the cardinal’s failing health.

In December 2013, nine months after his election to the papacy, Pope Francis made significant changes in the congregation’s membership, appointing several new members and confirming others in the roles they already held.

Among those appointed at that time was Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., who also serves on several pontifical councils, as well as committees of U.S. bishops. He served as relator general for the October 2012 Vatican Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, and was also among those tapped by Francis to participate in the 2015 Synod of Bishops.

Other members of the Congregation appointed by Pope Francis in 2013 include: Cardinals Francisco Robles Ortega; Ruben Salazar Gomez; Kurt Koch; and João Braz de Aviz; as well as Archbishops Pietro Parolin; Beniamino Stella; Lorenzo Baldisseri; Vincent Nichols; Paolo Rabitti; and Bishop Felix Genn.

Those whose membership he confirmed were: Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone, Zenon Grocholewski, George Pell, Agostino Vallini, Antonio Cañizares Llovera, André Vingt-Trois, Jean-Louis Tauran, William Levada, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Leonardo Sandri, Giovanni Lajolo, Stanislaw Rylko, Francesco Monterisi, Santos Abril y Castelló, Giuseppe Bertello, and Giuseppe Versaldi as well as Archbishops Claudio Maria Celli, José Octavio Ruiz Arenas and Zygmunt Zimowski.

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Washington D.C., Jul 7, 2016 / 06:46 am (CNA/EWTN News).- After the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ abortion clinic regulations last week, a new report claims that these clinics are ignoring health standards and continuing to put women at risk.

“It just shows that, over and over again, the abortion industry is more concerned about putting profit ahead of the safety of women,” said Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee and founder of the pro-life “And Then There Were None” ministry, which helps abortion clinic workers leave the industry.

The #NotOver campaign is a “multi-phase” project launched after the Supreme Court struck down safety regulations of Texas abortion clinics on June 27. It aims to draw attention to poor health standards at abortion clinics and push Congress to pass clinic regulations.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas regulations of abortion clinics – that they be constructed to the safety standards of ambulatory surgical centers and that abortionists have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles – unconstitutionally put an “‘undue burden’ on a women’s right to decide to have an abortion.”

Pro-life advocates contested that the regulations, passed in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell scandal, protected the health and safety of women at the clinics.

“It’s really just holding you to the same standards that any other surgical center is held to,” Johnson said of the laws.

The #NotOver campaign released a White House petition on June 29, asking for Congress to require clinics to adopt the building standards of ambulatory surgical centers.

According to 12 inspection reports of Houston-area clinics by the state’s health services department, clinics were flagged for “unsanitary” and “unsafe conditions for women,” Johnson said, with multiple health and safety infractions. Two of those reports from 2015 can be seen now on the #NotOver website, with nine more reports to be released.

For example, in an El Paso abortion clinic, six out of six charts for patients who were minors showed no “proper documentation of parental consent,” she told CNA. “So we don’t know if they had parental consent or not, to have the abortion. Parental consent is a law here in the state of Texas.”

In another clinic, instruments “were not being properly sterilized” which poses a “huge infection risk for women,” Johnson said. Tables that women lay on to have abortions had torn fabric. A registered nurse didn’t have the required competency to administer drugs.

“I don’t want anyone to have an abortion, period,” Johnson said, “but the health and safety of women is important to me. And I think that this shows sort of a systemic breakdown of women’s healthcare in our country, that the Supreme Court would rule that it’s perfectly fine for women to walk into facilities that are dirty and unsanitary and pose a very dangerous risk for them.”

During her time as a Planned Parenthood clinic worker, Johnson said that seeing an abortion on live ultrasound “changed my heart” and that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, intentionally tries not to use ultrasounds during an abortion so as to conduct it in a “blind manner.”

To do so would have cost them an “extra three minutes of time,” Johnson said, and “time is money in the abortion industry.”

“That’s just one example of many that I saw, where it really wasn’t about putting women first, it really wasn’t about women’s health care,” she said.

“It was always about that bottom line, funneling women through the abortion system as quickly as we could to turn a profit.”

 

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IMAGE: CNS/Paul Haring

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Three months after the publication of Pope Francis' exhortation on marriage and family, bishops and bishops' conferences around the world are studying practical ways to apply it. Some still disagree on what exactly the pope meant.

In the first week of July, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput's pastoral guidelines for implementing the exhortation's teaching in his archdiocese went into effect; an Italian blog published reflections on the document by Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, former president of the Pontifical Council for the Family; and La Civilta Cattolica, an Italian Jesuit journal, released a long interview with Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, the theologian Pope Francis chose to present the document to the press.

Pope Francis continually insists that the exhortation, "Amoris Laetitia" ("The Joy of Love"), is about the importance and beauty of marriage and family life and the church's obligation to support and strengthen it. But much of the debate has focused on access to the sacraments for couples in what the Catholic Church traditionally defined as "irregular situations," particularly people who were divorced and civilly remarried without an annulment.

Emphasizing Jesus' own words about the indissolubility of marriage and centuries of church practice, Archbishop Chaput urged pastors to accompany such couples, but insisted "church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy."

"Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly remarried to receive reconciliation in the sacrament of penance, which could then open the way to the Eucharist," said the guidelines issued by Archbishop Chaput, who was a member of the 2015 Synod of Bishops on the family and is chairman of the U.S. bishops' ad hoc committee on implementing "Amoris Laetitia."

Pastors, the archbishop said, have an obligation to educate Catholics because "the subjective conscience of the individual can never be set against objective moral truth, as if conscience and truth were two competing principles for moral decision-making."

Cardinal Antonelli, in the text published by the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, said the objective truth taught by Pope Francis is what the church always has taught. "It is held in the background, however, as a presupposition. In the foreground is placed the individual moral subject with his conscience, with his interior dispositions, with his personal responsibility," which "is why it is not possible to formulate general regulations."

In an age when Christianity was dominant, he said, the focus was on objective truth: Is this person living according to church teaching or not? "Anyone who fell short of the observance of the norms was presumed to be gravely culpable" and excluded from the Christian community.

However, he said, because the influence of Christianity is waning "it can be hypothesized that some persons live in objectively disordered situations without full subjective responsibility." That is why, he said, St. John Paul II believed it was "appropriate to encourage the divorced and remarried to participate more fully in the life of the church," although without access to the Eucharist.

"Pope Francis, in a cultural context of even more advanced secularization and pansexualism, is going even further, but along the same lines," the cardinal wrote. "Without being silent on the objective truth, he is concentrating his attention on subjective responsibility, which at times can be diminished or eliminated."

"The pope is therefore opening an outlet even for admission to sacramental reconciliation and eucharistic Communion," Cardinal Antonelli wrote.

Such an approach brings risks, including a mistaken view that the church is accepting divorce and remarriage, he said, so he asked Pope Francis for more explicit, "more authoritative guidelines."

La Civilta Cattolica, which is reviewed before publication by the Vatican Secretariat of State, did a lengthy interview with Cardinal Schonborn, touching many of the same questions. The journal gave a copy of the interview to Catholic News Service before publication.

"It is possible, in certain cases, that the one who is in an objective situation of sin can receive the help of the sacraments," said the cardinal, a theologian who was the main editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

But the Austrian cardinal said Pope Francis insisted Communion for the divorced and remarried was not a central question, which is why the pope put his response in a footnote in "Amoris Laetitia."

The basic questions are: Who is in need of God's mercy and how does that mercy reach people, he said. The answer is that all people "are called to beg for mercy, to desire conversion."

No one has "a right to receive the Eucharist in an objective situation of sin," the cardinal said, which is why the pope does not grant a blanket permission and insists that civilly remarried people go through a whole process of discernment and repentance under the guidance of a priest.

Referring to the exhortation by its initials, Cardinal Schonborn said, "AL is the great text of moral theology that we have been waiting for since the days of the (Second Vatican) Council and that develops further the choices that were already made by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by 'Veritatis Splendor,'" St. John Paul's 1993 encyclical on the church's moral teaching.

The discernment called for by Pope Francis, he said, "takes greater account of those elements that suppress or attenuate imputability" and seeks a path that would move a person closer to the fullness of what the Gospel demands.

Although not yet meeting the "objective ideal," helping a person move closer to perfection "is no small thing in the eyes of the Good Shepherd," the cardinal said.

"Amoris Laetitia," he said, leads the church away from "a defensive pastoral style in which evil becomes an obsession" and toward one that focuses on recognizing the value of encouraging what is good.

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Follow Wooden on Twitter: @Cindy_Wooden

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