News/International

{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.

{mosimage}NEW YORK - Salt+Light TV producer Kris Dmytrenko thought covering the Pope’s visit to the United States April 15-20 would be like “being a pilgrim with access.”

“It was very different than what I imagined,” Dmytrenko, 28, said. “I thought I’d have free access to roam around, a ‘backstage pass.’ ”

{mosimage}WASHINGTON - The Rev. Jim Wallis finds it unexpected and refreshing that the majority of “God talk” in the U.S. presidential election season has been among and about Democratic candidates and that the dialogue takes a broad view of what’s important to religiously motivated voters.

{mosimage}NEW YORK - As his Alitalia Boeing 777, dubbed “Shepherd One,” lifted off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, Pope Benedict XVI had reason to smile. During his April 15-20 visit to the United States, he had been received warmly by hundreds of thousands, faced the sex-abuse crisis head on and offered a message of hope in Christ to American Catholics.