Europe

Europe urged to protect faith
CATHOLIC and Protestant leaders in Germany have made a joint call for the future constitution of the European Union to include provisions to protect religious rights.
The chairman of the German bishops' conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, and Manfred Kock, president of the German Evangelical Church, made a joint appeal to German delegates to the European Convention based in Brussels, Belgium.
They said:"The European view of humanity and the European Union's basic values bear the stamp of religion, and especially of Christianity."
Church leaders, have, in the past, criticised the lack of acknowledgement of Europe's religious heritage in European Union.
In a May statement, the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community said a planned European Union Constitutional Treaty should include recognition of " religious freedom in its individual, collective and institutional dimensions."
Children pray for world peace
MORE THAN 60,000 children prayed for world peace as they participated in the annual pilgrimage for minors to the Marian shrine of Fatima.
Bishop Manuel Dias of di Lamego said in the pilgrimage, which had the Pope's blessing, that" We are going to ask Our Lady to teach us to be friends of peace".
Police reported that over 300,000 people eventually turned up at the Fatima shrine.
Nun murdered in church loft
A GREEK Catholic nun has been found murdered in the loft of a church in the Ukraine.
Sister Anna Hlova, a member of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, was last seen alive on 1 June.
A post mortem revealed that Sister. Anna has been killed on the day she was last seen.
Her body was found in the Church of the Protection of the All Blessed Mother of God in Vinnytsya a week later.
She had been inhumanly beaten — her body was covered with bruises, her face unrecognisable, her hands twisted behind her back and tied with steel wire.
Bishop asks for legal protection
A BISHOP in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia has called for a law on religious liberty in order to protect Catholicism.
Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti told the charity Aid to the Church in Need that although such legislation has been discussed in the Georigan parliament for some years, no religious community could be legally re listered and recognised by e government until such a law can be passed.
He said: "Catholics are a minority whose numbers are difficult to estimate and there is till the problem of restitution of Church property confiscated under Communist rule."
Pope meets expelled bishop
THE POPE has met a Polish Catholic bishop who was kicked out of Russia.
Bishop Jerzy Mazur of St Joseph of Irkutsk, a Catholic diocese in Siberia, was forbidden re-entry to Russian territory after he left the country to visit his native Poland.
On his return to Russia, Bishop Mazur was made to board a plane for Warsaw.
The Polish bishop's visa had not expired and no reason was given for his expulsion.
In a statement in May, the Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls protested against the lack of explanations on the part of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry.
Since then, the Vatican has not said if Russia gave any reasons for the expulsion.
Catholics seek seized property
THE EASTERN-rite Catholic Church in Romania has demanded the return of 2,500 churches seized by the Communists.
In an open letter to Prime Minister Adrian Nastase and Culture Minister Razvan Theodorescu, Bishop Lucian, who heads the Romanian Eastern-rite Catholics, called on Parliament to adopt a solution that would allow "for the return of [Church] property abusively confiscated and now in the hands of the state."