News/International

{mosimage}QUEBEC CITY - An international gathering of Catholics to focus on the Eucharist would be missing something essential if there were no sacrament of Reconciliation.

To that end, Quebec City's exposition grounds, where the 49th International Eucharistic Congress is taking place all week, were turned into a massive “City of Forgiveness” June 19 in order to prepare the hearts of the faithful for the Eucharist. Hundreds of priests heard countless confessions, seated in nooks and crannies around the Expo City, and thousands of pilgrims availed themselves of the sacrament.

{mosimage}When G8 leaders meet in Japan July 7-9, they won’t be alone with their diplomatic and economic advisors. Fifty-nine religious leaders, including Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ president Archbishop James Weisgerber, will be in Japan tackling the same agenda.

It will be the second Religious Leaders Summit held in parallel with a G8 Summit. At Cologne in 2007 the religious leaders pointed out that the world’s leading economies were not on target to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and that sub-Saharan Africa has been left out of the benefits of globalization.

{mosimage}ORLANDO, Fla. - Declaring that stem-cell research does not present a conflict between science and religion, the U.S. bishops overwhelmingly approved a statement June 13 calling the use of human embryos in such research “gravely immoral” and unnecessary.

In the last vote of the public session of their June 12-14 spring general assembly in Orlando, the bishops voted 191-1 in favour of the document titled “On Embryonic Stem-Cell Research: A Statement of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. ”

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - As world leaders were meeting in Rome to work out a response to the global food crisis, the Vatican weighed in on two levels — morality and macroeconomics.

Pope Benedict XVI laid out the moral principles in a message June 3 to the World Food Security Summit, saying that hunger and malnutrition were unacceptable in a world that has sufficient levels of agricultural production and resources.

{mosimage}TORONTO - In Sierra Leone and Kenya, women die from child birth or related complications on a weekly basis. But Dr. Robert Walley, president of Matercare International, hopes to change that by raising $5.5 million to equip both countries with the specialized services women need.

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - The Vatican’s doctrinal congregation has decreed formally that a woman who attempts to be ordained a Catholic priest and the person attempting to ordain her are automatically excommunicated.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The Burmese people have fallen back on their spiritual resources as they struggle to recover from Cyclone Nargis, a source inside the tightly controlled Stalinist state has told The Catholic Register.

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - A Vatican representative said the recent rise in global food prices threatens the lives of the one billion people who spend most of their daily income in search of food.

{mosimage}CHENGDU, China - Catholics joined other Chinese in observing three minutes of silence May 19 to pray for and mourn those killed by the earthquake that hit southwestern China a week earlier.

The Chinese government declared an unprecedented three-day period of national mourning May 19-21 for victims of the magnitude 7.9 quake. Entertainment businesses were to be closed and the Beijing Olympics torch relay in Zhejiang and Shanghai was suspended until May 22, reported UCA News, an Asian church news agency.

{mosimage}CHENGDU, China - Chinese priests had to work around disrupted telephone systems and damaged roads as they tried to assess the damage from the May 12 earthquake centred under Sichuan province.

Responding to appeals for aid and prayers on Catholic web sites, Catholics across China have begun donating money and clothes to help survivors, the priests told the Asian church news agency UCA News.