Pope Francis’ health is stabilising, according to a spokesperson for the Vatican. The Pontiff was admitted to hospital yesterday with a respiratory infection, sparking fears for his wellbeing.

But he has reportedly had a good night’s rest and is now working from hospital.

Nurses are optimistic that he could recover in time for Palm Sunday celebrations, but a discharge date has not yet been confirmed.

Source: France 24

The most influential member of a Vatican commission on tackling clerical sex abuse said Wednesday he has quit over “structural and practical issues” which made it “impossible” for him to continue.

Hans Zollner, the public face of Pope Francis’s efforts to tackle the global paedophilia scandal, said he had “grown increasingly concerned” over how the papal advisory body works, “particularly in the areas of responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency”.

His resignation from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is the latest blow to a working group dogged by controversy.

US Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the body’s head, said early Wednesday that Zollner had resigned due to a heavy workload.

But German Jesuit priest and renowned academic Zollner, one of the leading experts in the fight against child abuse in the Catholic Church, said he had “noticed issues that need to be urgently addressed and which have made it impossible for me to continue further”.

In a statement, he slammed “a lack of clarity” regarding the selection process of members and staff, and “inadequate” financial accountability.

“Furthermore, there should be transparency on how decisions are taken in the commission. Too often, there was insufficient information and vague communication”, he said in a statement.

“It is due to these structural and practical issues that led me to disassociate myself from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors”.

‘Making him pay’

Zollner was the last remaining founding member of the group, which was set up by Pope Francis in 2014 as he strove to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of sex abuse by clerics.

Problems emerged as early as 2017, when abuse survivor Marie Collins resigned as a member of the commission, saying the body was under-resourced and faced fierce resistance within high echelons of the church.

Fellow commission member and survivor Peter Saunders also quit later that year.

The pope accepted Zollner’s request to step down “with the deepest of thanks for his many years of service”, O’Malley said.

Francis has vowed a zero-tolerance stance on abuse and has changed the law so that suspected cases must be reported, but victims’ associations say he still has not gone far enough.

Francesco Zanardi, founder of Italian survivors group Rete L’Abuso (The Abuse Network), told AFP Wednesday that Zollner had been “very honest” about the paedophile priest problem within the church “and the Vatican is making him pay”.

Zollner had been increasingly sidelined over the last few years, Zanardi said.

The pope has recently tried to strengthen the commission, which was originally limited in its mandate, by making it part of the Vatican office that processes clergy sex abuse cases.

He has also tasked it with helping local churches set up survivor centres, where those who have been abused can seek help and justice.

But Zanardi said that while Zollner had been a rare contradictory voice, the commission itself was “absolutely useless”.

Source: AFP

Pope Francis will visit Hungary in April and meet far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Vatican said Monday, with the Ukraine war and migrants expected to dominate talks.

Francis, who regularly champions the rights of refugees, will sit down in Budapest with Orban, who portrays himself as the defender of a Christian Europe against migrants.

During his April 28 to 30 trip, the pope will also meet with poor people as well as youths and refugees, according to a programme released by the Vatican.

It will be the 86-year-old pope’s second visit to the predominantly Catholic country in two years.

Francis made a one-day visit to the country in September 2021, spending just seven hours in the country to preside over a mass and meet privately with Orban.

The pope then received Orban for the first time at the Vatican a few months later, in April 2022.

During the private audience, he thanked the Hungarian leader for the protection his country had offered to refugees fleeing the war in neighbouring Ukraine, the Vatican later said.

Some 34,248 Ukrainians have so far been granted refugee status in Hungary.

‘Strategic’

The two men have conflicting views on a range of issues. Francis is a defender of European integration and the protection of minorities, while Orban champions nationalism and a deeply conservative Catholicism.

Orban has also come under fire in the past for his policies against non-European refugees, while pro-Orban media outlets in Hungary have slammed the pope’s views on immigration as “cretinous” and “senile”.

But Vatican watchers say Francis may be hoping that Orban, who nurtured close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin before the war in Ukraine, could help the pope in his quest to play peace broker in the year-long conflict.

Hungary has trod an ambiguous path on the war, with Orban condemning Russian aggression while refusing to criticise Russian President Vladimir Putin by name.

Francis has vowed to do “everything possible” to try to end the war, but his attempts to position the Vatican as a possible mediator appear so far to have fallen flat.

April’s visit “has a strategic purpose in relation to Russia’s war in Ukraine, given Hungarian PM Victor Orban’s long standing relationship with the Kremlin,” British religion reporter Christopher Lamb tweeted.

During his visit — the pope’s 41st trip abroad since his election in 2013 — he will visit children and address diplomatic corps.

He will also meet with bishops, priests and pastoral works. More than half of Hungarians are Christian, and at least 37 percent of the population identifies as Catholic.

Source: AFP

Hanah Zachariah is so determined to see Pope Francis in South Sudan that she walked nine days in sandals to reach the capital where he makes his long-awaited visit.

On Thursday, the 20-year-old reached the outskirts of Juba after walking most of the way from the central town of Rumbek — a journey of around 400 kilometres (250 miles).

She was not alone.

Sixty other young pilgrims and spiritual leaders trod the distance, waving flags, singing hymns and preaching unity in a country scarred by years of civil war.

“We are walking for peace. When we reach Juba, we are going to welcome the pope. I am very excited to see him,” Zachariah told AFP, as passing cars honked their horns and cheered at the colourful convoy.

Francis arrives on Friday for a three-day visit to South Sudan, the first by any pope since the predominantly Christian nation split from Muslim-majority Sudan in 2011.

Its history since independence has been marred by five years of ethnic bloodshed that left 380,000 people dead and much of the young country in ruins.

‘Blisters’

Many hope Francis can restore a spirit of unity and brotherhood, and South Sudanese are flocking to Juba to hear his message of reconciliation.

Among them is John Sebit, a pastoral worker who covered the distance from Rumbek along dirt roads in flip flops.

“When we started the journey, it was challenging. Some people had blisters on their feet… But with motivation, we kept going,” the 26-year-old told AFP.

Father Christian Carlassare, the bishop of Rumbek, confessed to having “sore feet” after setting off on January 25 but said walking was a powerful act of solidarity.

“You do not walk alone,” said Carlassare, an Italian who has lived in South Sudan for more than 15 years, and was shot multiple times at his home in 2021 after being named bishop.

“At every community we had the entire village –- really, hundreds of people — who were coming to welcome us on the way.”

To avoid the oppressive heat of the dry season, the pilgrims would start walking before dawn each day. They would set up camp each evening in classrooms along the way.

‘First time’ on tarmac

When the distance between stops was too great, support vehicles would assist with covering the outstanding distance, while a doctor onboard tended to cramps and bruises.

For some, the journey to the capital has proved eye opening.

“This is my first visit to Juba, and actually my first time stepping on a tarmac road,” said 23-year-old John Mareng as he walked along the highway just outside Juba.

“Now, I have seen how this is reality.”

Hailing from a broad cross-section of South Sudan’s myriad ethnic groups, the pilgrims would perform skits for their hosts about the importance of kinship.

“We are walking as a group, as one people,” said 20-year-old Tafisa Chol, a student in Rumbek.

“The message that we are hoping to give to the people, is that we should be one, and make peace among ourselves.”

Source: AFP

Pope Francis on Wednesday urged people in Democratic Republic of Congo, where decades of armed conflicts have killed millions, to grant each other a “great amnesty of the heart” and called on Christians engaged in battle to lay down their arms.

On the first full day of his trip, his third to sub-Saharan Africa as pope, Francis presided at an open-air mass for a crowd local authorities estimated at more than a million people on the grounds of a secondary airport in the capital Kinshasa.

The Congolese have given the pope one of the most vibrant welcomes of his foreign trips. On his arrival on Tuesday, tens of thousands lined his motorcade route.

At the sprawling site on Wednesday his popemobile moved slowly on the runway, with hundreds of thousands of people singing and dancing on either side before he began a mass from a large altar platform.

Many women wore dresses with his picture emblazoned on them, as is customary in many African countries to honour dignitaries, while children climbed on a disused plane for a better view.

The country’s people, the pope said in his homily, were suffering from “wounds that ache, continually infected by hatred and violence, while the medicine of justice and the balm of hope never seem to arrive”.

Armed conflict has left 5.7 million people internally displaced and 26 million facing severe hunger, according to the United Nations.

Francis said God wanted the people to find “the courage to grant others a great amnesty of the heart”.

“What great good it does us to cleanse our hearts of anger and remorse, of every trace of resentment and hostility!” he said.

Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence connected to the long and complex fallout from the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. Congo accuses Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group fighting government troops in the east. Rwanda denies this.

“We left because of the war,” said Lea Serundoru, 21, a high school student who fled fighting in Rutshuru territory near the border with Uganda, an area that was hit by fighting between the army and M23 last year.

‘Lay down your arms’

A papal stop in the eastern city of Goma, foreseen when the trip was originally scheduled for last July, was later scrapped because of the flare-up in violence last year.

Serundoru said she hoped “the armed groups would listen to the pope and put down their arms because he is a strong and powerful man, and we have faith that everything will return to normal”.

About half of Congo’s population of 90 million are Roman Catholics and in his homily, Francis addressed them as well as other Christians involved in the fighting.

“May it be a good time for all of you in this country who call yourselves Christians but engage in violence. The Lord is telling you: ‘Lay down your arms, embrace mercy,'” the pope said.

Thousands of people had spent the night praying at the airport in the build-up to the service.

“The country is not well. There are divisions, hatred, lots of massacres, especially in the east. After the pope’s homily, I hope peace will return,” said Patrick Mukaba, a 35-year-old lawyer, who was there with his wife Laetitia.

Congo has some of the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, gold and other precious metals, but its wealth has stoked conflict between government troops, militias and foreign invaders, as well as driving exploitation and abuses.

The pope will meet victims of violence from the eastern part of Congo later on Wednesday.

Thursday will be his last full day in Congo, before he departs on Friday for neighbouring South Sudan, another country grappling with conflict and hunger, on Friday morning.

For the South Sudan visit, he will be with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of Scotland Moderator, an unprecedented joint foreign trip by the three Christian leaders.

Source: Reuters

Pope Francis on Tuesday is expected to land in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s largest predominantly Catholic country, for a landmark three-day visit.

Here are five things to know about this vast nation:

Mineral wealth, dire poverty

The DRC is awash with minerals and precious stones, from gold, diamonds and coltan to tin, copper and cobalt.

Harbouring the Congo River — the second-largest in Africa after the Nile — the DRC also has huge hydroelectric potential, as well as 80 million hectares (197 million acres) of arable land.

But decades of war and chronic mismanagement means that little of the country’s enormous wealth trickles down to the population of some 100 million people.

About two-thirds of the Congolese population survive on under $2.15 a day, according to the World Bank.

Ethnic mosaic

Occupying a vast area the size of continental western Europe, the DRC is about 80 times larger than its former colonial power, Belgium.

It is the second-largest state in Africa after Algeria.

Some 250 different ethnic groups live in the DRC, speaking hundreds of different languages.

French is the country’s official language, and local tongues Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili are also officially recognised.

Despite its size and diversity — the former province of Katanga tried to secede in the 1960s — there is a fierce sense of national unity.

Troubled east

The DRC has been ravaged by brutal conflicts in recent decades. The first Congo war, between 1996-1997, resulted in the overthrow of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

The second Congo war, between 1998-2003, sucked in nine different countries, involved about 30 armed groups and caused millions of deaths according to some estimates. It also bankrupted the country.

Most of the DRC is now at peace, but its mineral-rich eastern provinces remain plagued by dozens of armed groups and civilian massacres are common.

Secular, religious

Secularism has been enshrined in the Congolese Constitution since 1974, which also recognises freedom of worship.

According to estimates, about 40 percent of the country is Catholic, 35 percent Protestants of various denominations, nine percent Muslims and 10 percent Kimbanguists — a Christian movement born in the Belgian Congo.

Official Vatican statistics put the proportion of Catholics in the DRC at 49 percent of the population.

Atheists are exceedingly rare in Congolese society, which remains deeply religious and influenced by the church. During the colonial period, education was entrusted to Catholic missionaries.

Rumba, survival

Congolese people are renowned for their sense of humour and resourcefulness in the face of trying conditions.

Many jokingly refer to “Article 15” of the constitution, which purports to instruct citizens to sort things out themselves.

Music also plays an outsize role in the country’s culture. UNESCO listed Congolese rumba as intangible cultural heritage of humanity in December 2021.

Congo is also famed for its so-called sapeurs — dandies known for their ultra-elegant clothing and sense of style.

Source: AFP