News/International

VATICAN CITY - A Vatican decree established new statutes and norms for Caritas Internationalis, giving Vatican offices, including the Secretariat of State, greater authority over the work of the Vatican-based umbrella group of Catholic aid agencies.

The decree strengthens the roles Vatican offices and the Pope play in working with the charity confederation, including naming and approving new board members and approving its texts, contracts with foreign governments and financial transactions.

DUBLIN - The primate of All Ireland has said he will not resign despite criticism of his role in a 1975 canonical inquiry into a pedophile priest, Norbertine Father Brendan Smyth.

In a statement issued in Armagh, Northern Ireland, May 2, Cardinal Sean Brady defended his involvement in the inquiry and accused the BBC documentary "The World: The Shame of the Catholic Church" of making a number of claims that overstated and misrepresented his role.

DUBLIN - A series of censures has brought to the fore the divisions within the Irish Church between those who seek a leaner and smaller Church that adheres more strictly to the magisterium and those who seek space to discuss Church issues.

Up to 250 nuns, priests and laypeople held a silent protest outside the Vatican Embassy April 29 to protest the doctrinal congregation’s censure of five Irish priests over their stance on issues such as the ordination of women, the ban on artificial birth control and homosexuality.

LONDON - The leader of the Catholic Church in Nigeria has criticized his government for allegedly failing to protect Christians in the north of his country from attack by Islamist terrorists.

Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Nigeria, said he could not understand why the government appeared powerless to prevent the killings of Christians.

Speaking April 30, a day after 21 people were killed and 20 others injured in co-ordinated attacks on Sunday services at a university campus in Kano and a Protestant chapel in Maiduguri, the archbishop said the incidents showed "that government security is not working."

VATICAN CITY - The co-founder of Wikipedia told a Vatican audience that his online encyclopedia could contribute to peace by promoting "a more thoughtful world," even as the site was under fire for how it referred to those who oppose and support legalized abortion.

Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, was invited to address the annual assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The meeting at the Vatican April 27-May 1 focused on Blessed John XXIII's 1963 encyclical "Pacem in Terris" and continuing challenges to promoting peace and justice in the world.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The March visit to Cuba by Pope Benedict XVI has helped reawaken people's interest in the Catholic Church, according to two Cuban bishops visiting the United States.

But it also has stirred criticism of the church's efforts to work with the government more and may be connected to a fire of suspicious origin that gutted a travel agency that organizes charter flights from Florida to Cuba.

Remarks at an April 24 forum at Harvard University by Havana Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino about the church's role in Cuba riled some of the outspoken critics of the Castro government in both Havana and Florida.

LOS ANGELES - A cross will be restored to a war memorial in a remote part of a national park in the California desert, according to a settlement agreement approved April 16 and announced April 24.

District Court Judge Robert Timlin signed off on an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union to swap the half hectare parcel at Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve for land of equal value elsewhere in the preserve that was donated for the trade. The memorial site will be owned by the Veterans Home of California-Barstow, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 385E.

OXFORD, England - Portuguese Catholic officials criticized government plans to suppress two religious public holidays as part of an austerity drive and urged postponing the plans until next year.

Fr. Manuel Morujao, spokesman for the Portuguese bishops' conference, told Catholic News Service that Church officials understand that government leaders are trying to solve the nation's economic crisis by improving economic competitiveness. In addition to removing two religious holidays, the government plans to eliminate Portugal's Oct. 5 Republic Day and Dec. 1 Independence Restoration Day.

The religious holidays will be negotiated between the Foreign Ministry in Lisbon and Vatican officials, under the terms of Portugal's 2004 concordat with the Vatican.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI named the members of a papal commission he established in March to investigate a series of leaks of letters exchanged among Vatican officials and between the officials and the Pope himself.

Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, 82, a former president of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, will lead the commission. The two other members are 88-year-old retired Slovakian Cardinal Jozef Tomko, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples; and the retired archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi, 81.

JUBA, South Sudan - Three staff members of a Catholic aid agency working in southern Darfur were arrested by security forces in Nyala as they were making preparations to return to South Sudan.

The Sudan Catholic Radio Network reported security forces also closed the Nyala office of Sudan Aid, an affiliate of Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic church's aid and development organization.