Archbishop Andrews Thazhath Kenyan bishops urge uptake of Covid-19 vaccines
Days after a Catholic doctors’ association urged Kenyans to shun Covid-19 vaccines, the country’s bishops have told the citizens to accept the inoculations.
The bishops said it was licit and ethically acceptable to receive all the vaccines the government recognised as clinically genuine, safe and effective. They also said they would make the Church’s health care facilities network available so the vaccine rollout could be well-coordinated.
Their comments came after Kenya received the first shipment of one million vaccines from the global Covax initiative and started vaccinating groups considered more exposed.
“Receiving the available Covid-19 vaccines ought to be understood as an act of charity toward other community members,” said Archbishop Philip Anyolo, chairman of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Church struggles over Indian state’s education order
Catholic Church leaders are up in arms over a government ordinance in India’s Kerala state, saying it infringes on their constitutional right to manage educational institutions.
“The new ordinance will adversely affect the functioning of colleges we fund and manage in the state,” said Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, chairman of the public affairs commission of the Eastern-rite Syro-Malabar Church.
Church leaders, who studied the law for three weeks after it was promulgated on February 20, say they plan to join other groups in court seeking the withdrawal of the law.
The law promulgated by the communist-led government in the southern state stipulates that all self-financing colleges, funded and managed by private entities, should follow state guidelines on the appointment of teaching and non-teaching staff and their service conditions.
Jews, Christians can learn from shared Scriptures
Jews and Christians can learn from each other’s shared Scriptures, according to two renowned academics.
Such dialogue, they said, can help to move a divisive society “from polemic to possibility. At a time of tremendous incivility in the US, we felt it was really important to model how one could be civil in the most serious disagreements,” said Bible scholar Marc Zvi Brettler of Duke University in North Carolina during a recent webinar hosted by the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations, or IJCR, at Jesuit-run St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Mr Brettler joined fellow scholar Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt Divinity School in Tennessee in discussing their book The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, published last October.
Slaying of nine Filipino activists sparks outrage
A Catholic bishop and a lay group have joined rights organisations to denounce and call for an investigation into the killing of nine activists by security forces in raids in four Philippine provinces March 7.
Police and soldiers shot the activists while serving search warrants to look for firearms and explosives, UCA News reported.
Several victims, including a married couple, were members of human rights group Karapatan, a staunch critic of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on illegal drugs.
The killings have sparked a public outcry, with the Church leading calls for justice. “The blood of these fellow Filipinos is literally crying for justice as they are wiped off the floor tiles of their homes,” the Council of the Laity of the Philippines said in a statement March 8.