From Catholic News Service

Church official says all of Iraq is in danger

ROME (CNS) -- As killings increased in retribution for the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Iraq, the Rome-based representative of Baghdad's Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate said all of Iraq is in danger. "It's not just about Sunni and Shiite, because they started three weeks ago on Christians," said Father Philip Najim referring to the near-simultaneous attacks in late January in Baghdad and Kirkuk, a northern Iraqi city, launched just as some Sunday services had ended. Father Najim said he believed the people behind the mid-February attacks "came from outside Iraq and they (coalition forces) are doing nothing about it." He said that as an Iraqi, he could assure people "100 percent that no Iraqi man would ever do this. Not a Sunni, not a Shiite." The people behind the mid-February attacks "want to create division and chaos. They want to stop the process of a new political situation" of democracy and peace, Father Najim said, adding that he did not understand what U.S. and British forces were doing to help keep order. "Before we can talk about a constitution and democracy, we have to bring stability and unity," he said. "Instead, there is Iraq being divided and creating different camps. Each group is like a country in itself" with its own leader, people and army.

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China warns church after Chinese cardinal named

HONG KONG (CNS) -- Chinese church officials welcomed Pope Benedict XVI's appointment of Hong Kong Bishop Joseph Zen Ze-kiun as cardinal Feb. 22, but the Chinese government warned that church leaders should not interfere in the country's politics. "We have taken note that Joseph Zen was appointed as a cardinal by the Vatican," Liu Jianchao, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told journalists. "We advocate that religious figures should not interfere with politics." Liu also said he hoped the appointment would not disrupt social stability in Hong Kong. Liu added that Beijing's position on refraining from establishing diplomatic ties with the Vatican had not changed because of the appointment of Cardinal-designate Zen, who is know for his outspoken appeals for maintaining democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and human rights on the mainland. In mainland China, which is estimated to have 12 million Catholics, Bishop Luke Li Jingfeng of Fengxiang said China needed another cardinal, considering the country's large Catholic population. "If the Pope did not appoint a cardinal for such a large population," he told UCA News, an Asian church news agency based in Thailand, "I would feel that the Chinese Catholic communities do not have any status in the (universal) church."

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Bosnian bishops say Catholics in some regions near extinction

ROME (CNS) -- Catholics in the Balkan nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina have become "second-class" citizens and, in some regions, are on the verge of extinction, said a group of Bosnian bishops visiting Rome. While the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to ethnic violence and bloodshed between Serbs, Muslims and Croats, the bishops said the accords were flawed and unfairly enforced, resulting in a lack of true peace, justice and adequate human rights protections in the country. On the eve of the start of their weeklong "ad limina" visit to the Vatican, Bosnian Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo, Bishop Franjo Komarica of Banja Luka, and Auxiliary Bishop Pero Sudar of Sarajevo spoke to journalists at a Feb. 22 press conference hosted by Italy's Catholic Action movement. The bishops appealed to the international community to help transform Bosnia-Herzegovina from its current two-government existence to a unified, decentralized democracy that would no longer be split along ethnic lines. The bishops said they would be informing Pope Benedict XVI about their appeal and the situation of the country's Catholics.

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Nun discusses plight of child workers in India

NEW YORK (CNS) -- They are called domestic workers, but many of them are better described as slaves. They are children who work in private households, they do arduous labor from before dawn until after dark, and they are vulnerable to abuse -- physical, emotional, sexual. Sister Jeanne Devos, a Belgian member of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who has served in India for more than 40 years, has devoted herself to helping them and also women who are domestic workers. In 1985 she founded the National Domestic Workers Movement, based in Mumbai, to call attention to the appalling circumstances in which they are trapped and to work for change. A key part of her mission is to fight trafficking, the abduction or "buying" of children for domestic work. Sister Jeanne said trafficking agents often make false promises to poor families that a child sent into domestic work will receive care and education. Parents learn nothing of the actual conditions the children endure, and in reality, most child domestic workers are not sent to school.

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Priests keep vigil with Mexican miner families

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- As rescue workers slowly advanced through a collapsed mine in an effort to save 65 men trapped hundreds of meters below the surface, Father Juan Renovato was aboveground, trying to keep hope alive. "People are getting desperate and hysterical," Father Renovato said Feb. 20, talking on his cellular phone from near the entrance to the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, near the town of San Juan de Sabinas in Mexico's Coahuila state. Father Renovato and other priests were praying with and counseling the hundreds of family members and friends of the miners, who were trapped before dawn Feb. 19 when a gas explosion collapsed part of the mine. Bishop Alonso Garza Trevino of Piedras Negras instructed the 12 priests in the area to take turns being at the entrance to the mine so that one of them would be always be present for family members of the miners gathered there.

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