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In a scathing indictment of Pakistan's treatment of Afghan refugees, a human rights group charged Monday that the country is forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees back to their homeland, which is still beset by war and crushing poverty. It also said that a $400 stipend the United Nations refugee agency gives to refugees who return to Afghanistan is tantamount to a bribe to convince reluctant Afghans to leave Pakistan. ``The exodus amounts to the world's largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times,'' the Human Rights Watch report said.. Both the U.N. and Pakistan denied the allegations. The report by the New York-based rights group was harsh in its criticism of the U.N. agency for not condemning what it insisted is Pakistan's forced return of the refugees. The number of Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan, already at the highest level in years, may increase this year if Pakistan maintains its forceful policies...
Myanmar is to investigate whether police have committed abuses against Rohingya Muslims, the government has said, after officials promised that allegations of atrocities against members of the Muslim minority would be looked into. The United Nations human rights office said in a report this month Myanmar's security forces had committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burned their villages since October in a campaign that "very likely" amounted to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing. Myanmar has denied almost all allegations of human rights abuses in northern Rakhine State, where many Rohingya live, and says a lawful counterinsurgency campaign has been under way since nine policemen were killed in attacks on security posts near the Bangladesh border on Oct. 9.The military said last week it was setting up a team to investigate alleged atrocities by the security forces and the interior ministry followed that up on the weekend...
Vatican City, Feb 10, 2017 / 04:53 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican has issued an updated version of their charter for healthcare workers, removing question marks from modern ethical concerns such as euthanasia and the creation of human-animal chimeras by offering a clear set of guidelines.In the past 20 years “there have been two to situations, two events” that have made the production of a new healthcare charter necessary, Professor Antonio Gioacchino Spagnolo told CNA Feb. 6.The first, he said, is “scientific progress. In these 20 years there has been a lot of scientific progress in the field of the beginning of life as well as in the phase of the end of life, in the context of living.”But alongside advancements in science the Church’s Magisterium has also produced several texts dealing with new and current issues, offering an authoritative take on how they should be handled.The charter, he said, “encompasses a sort of collection of the various...
Vatican City, Feb 10, 2017 / 06:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A newly released decree from the Vatican's congregation for religious life states that the founder of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, Luis Fernando Figari, may not have contact with members of the community.A Jan. 30 decree of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life addressed to the superior general of the Sodalitium, Alessandro Moroni Llabres, directs him to order that Figari be “prohibited from contacting, in any way, persons belonging to the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, and no way have any direct personal contact with them.”The Sodalitium Christianae Vitae is a society of apostolic life which was founded in 1971 in Peru, and granted pontifical recognition in 1997. CNA's executive director, Alejandro Bermúdez, and its global director of operations, Ryan Thomas, are both members of the community.The decree, obtained by CNA Feb. 10, is a fruit of an apost...
Washington D.C., Feb 11, 2017 / 06:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. has made significant strides in promoting religious freedom abroad in the last two years, says the outgoing U.S. religious freedom ambassador.One “success” of his tenure at the State Department was “the work that we’re quietly doing day in and day out on behalf of prisoners of conscience,” the former Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rabbi David Saperstein insisted at a panel discussion on religious freedom, held Thursday in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Religion News Foundation.These “prisoners of conscience” might be religious leaders, political dissidents or human rights activists jailed because of their public beliefs and advocacy. The State Department helps obtain “security” or “legal support” for these people, or helps them leave their country, Saperstein said. Their lawyers and defendants have credited the United States&...
Vatican City, Feb 11, 2017 / 09:21 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Saturday appointed Archbishop Henryk Hoser of Warszawa-Praga as a delegate of the Holy See to look into the pastoral situation at Medjugore, the site of alleged Marian apparitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.“The mission has the aim of acquiring a deeper knowledge of the pastoral situation there and above all, of the needs of the faithful who go there in pilgrimage, and on the basis of this, to suggest possible pastoral initiatives for the future,” stated a Feb. 11 communique from the Vatican Secretariat of State.“The mission will therefore have an exclusively pastoral character,” it added.Greg Burke, the Holy See press officer, strenuously reiterated the pastoral, and not doctrinal, nature of Archbishop Hoser's mission, while speaking at a press conference.“The special envoy won’t enter into the substance of the Marian apparitions, which is a doctrinal question in the compe...
Washington D.C., Feb 11, 2017 / 04:33 pm (CNA).- After President Donald Trump pushed for the creation of safe zones for refugees in the Middle East, advocates and humanitarian aid groups are divided over whether the policy will work.“We think it’s within the United States’ national security interests to support the creation of safe zones to at least stop the exodus of people leaving Syria and move that conflict more toward a resolution which is favorable to Christians,” Phillippe Nassif, executive director of the group In Defense of Christians, told CNA of Trump’s proposal.However, Bill O’Keefe, vice president of government relations and advocacy at Catholic Relief Services, said that “the Syrian conflict is such a hornet’s nest of proxy wars, and to think that in the midst of that a safe zone will be safe indefinitely is just unlikely.”President Trump was expected to call for the establishment of safe zones in the Middle East in...
Rome, Italy, Feb 12, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- One year ago marked a historic first meeting between a Pope and a Russian Orthodox Patriarch.Now, the Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate will celebrate the meeting’s anniversary with a conference at Switzerland’s Freibourg University.The conference will take place Feb. 12, exactly one year after the meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill at the St. Marti airport at the Havana.Christian brotherhood and unity were the focus of the 2016 meeting.“We spoke as brothers,” Pope Francis said of the meeting last year. “We have the same baptism. We are bishops. We spoke of our Churches.”Patriarch Kirill said their private discussion was conducted “with full awareness of the responsibility of our Churches, for the future of Christianity, and for the future of human civilization” and provided a chance to understand each other. He said the two Churches will work against war.Now, one ...
Vatican City, Feb 12, 2017 / 09:30 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Christ's Sermon on the Mount shows that he wanted to fulfil the law of Moses, not abolish it, Pope Francis said Sunday during his Angelus address.He “wants to help his listeners to achieve a reinterpretation of the Mosaic law. What was said in the Old Covenant was true, but it was not all: Jesus came to fulfill and to enact definitively the law of God, down to the last iota,” the Pope said Feb. 12 in St. Peter's Square.“He manifests the Law’s original purposes and He fulfils its authentic aspects – and He does all this by His preaching and even more by offering Himself on the Cross.”Christ “teaches how to do the will of God fully – and He uses this expression: with a 'justice superior' to that of the scribes and Pharisees – a justice animated by love, charity, mercy, and therefore capable of realizing the substance of the commandments, avoiding ...
New Orleans, La., Feb 12, 2017 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Venerable Henriette DeLille, born a “free woman of color” before the Civil War, had all the makings of a life of relative ease before her.Born in 1812 to a wealthy French father and a free Creole woman of Spanish, French and African descent, Henriette was groomed throughout her childhood to become a part of what was then known as the placage system.Under the placage system, free women of color (term used at the time for people of full or partial African descent, who were no longer or never were slaves) entered into common law marriages with wealthy white plantation owners, who often kept their legitimate families at the plantations in the country. It was a rigid system, but afforded free women of color comfortable and even luxurious lives.Trained in French literature, music, dancing, and nursing, Henriette was prepared to become the “kept woman” of a wealthy white man throughout her childhood.H...
