Students help out in Mexico
A NUMBER of U.S. and Mexican students are spending their summer vacations working on projects aimed at helping Mexico's Indian population. The projects are sponsored by the country's National Centre for Aid to Indian Missions.
The centre, set up two years ago under the Mexican Bishops' Committee for the Apostolate Among the Indians, gives economic and social help to Mexico's 160 Indian missions. Serving the missions are 106 priests, 44 doctors, 104 nurses and a number of lay apostles.
One team is building a nursing school in a community which already has a centre for training leaders, Another team is building a school for girls in Huejutla. Hidalgo. In San Miguel dcl Rioeon. Michoacan, a team is building a boarding school for Indians.
Indians themselves are working on other projects sponsored by the centre. In Sabartilla, Durago, they are completing the building of 72 homes and in San Mateo del Rincon. Indians are working on irrigation projects.
Erection plea CARDINAL CAGGIANO, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, has called on the people of Argentina to pray for peace as elections to bring hack constitutional government approach.
"We are already close to election day", he said. "We are experiencing anguish and mistrust, and we proceed hopelessly amid forebodings of violence", the Cardinal said in a pastoral letter before leaving for the conclave in Rome.
National elections will be held on July 7. Argentina has been under a partial dictatorship since March 30, 1962, when President Jose Maria Guido became president after a bloodless military coup deposed President Arturo Frondizi. There have been three major military uprisings in the past 15 months.
"For our part." the Cardinal said, "we believe that the time has come to mobiliee the most effective energy which is that of prayer."
Race relations
A group of religious leaders in Washington has formed the Interreligious Committee on Race Relations to work for equality of opportunity for Negroes in a wide range of activities.
Archbishop O'Boyle of Washington was named chairman of the 42-member committee. Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord, of the Washington area; Episcopal Bishop William F. Creighton of Washington; Rabbi Lewis A. Weintraub, Washington Board of Rabbis president. and Bishop Smallwood Williams of Bible Way Church Worldwide, are co-chairmen.
The committee announced that it would attack racial discrimination on four fronts—employment discrimination; housing, apprentice tratning, person-to-person communication and moral issues.
Land reform
ARCHBISHOP 13 ALLON. O.F.M. of Arequipa has called for agricultural reform in Peru which would include combining small farms, improving farm methods, expropriating unproductive farms and giving farm workers a share in profits and ownership.
The proposals were presented in a pastoral which was widely covered by the nation's press.
A COMMUNITY of Sisters in Seoul is getting so many vocations that it is sending five Korean applicants to a vocation-short convent in Auckland. New Zealand. They will study English while they are training in Auckland.
SOME 2.000 volunteers from a society of Catholic workers in Madrid have collected 180 tons of scrap paper to finance vacations at slimmer camps for more than 1.000 of Madrid's underprivileged children.
MGR. J. BURKE. a U.S. missioner in Chimbote. Peru, has started distribution of 1,275 acres of Church-owned farm teed in central Peru's Nepena A PROGRAMME "Mass by Television", has been started in Nicaragua, for hospital patients, the aged and others who cannot attend Mass.
UNITED NATIONS Emergency Force troops in the Gaza Strip have given a tape recorder to the Pontifical Mission Centre for the Blind there. The centre is the only school for the blind in the Gaza Strip, a UN-administered coastal territory between Egypt and Israel.