Photo: Reuters
Uruguayan Church’s ‘pain and shame’ at unpunished abuse
Uruguay’s bishops have apologised for sexual abuses committed by priests 20 years ago that went unpunished because the country’s statute of limitations expired.
A statement on the website of the South American country’s bishops’ conference says the Uruguayan Church feels “pain and shame” about “abhorrent acts committed by people who had promised to serve God and neighbour”.
The conference said the Church had launched an investigation following reports of three teenagers having been abused by clergy, these allegations having led one man to leave the priesthood and another to be removed from office.
“They happened some 20 years ago, but we only received the complaints last year,” said conference spokesman Montevideo’s auxiliary Bishop Milton Troccoli, adding that it was too late for criminal charges in those two cases, and that the survivor in the third case did not want the matter taken further.
Campaigning Congo priest dies
A leading Congolese priest who alerted the world to atrocities and abuses committed by Joseph Kony’s so-called ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ (LRA) has died at the age of 53.
Fr Benoît Kinalegu first reported a massacre committed by the originally Ugandan group during Christmas 2008 when more than 800 people in the Haut-Uélé region were killed by the militant cult.
His reports led the US government to send a special task force to the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic to hunt down LRA guerrillas. Fr Benoît subsesquently started a centre in Dungu for children who had been abducted by the LRA and forced to serve as sex slaves and child soldiers.
In 2012, Fr Kinalegu was awarded the Alison Des Forges award by Human Rights Watch.
Chaldean Patriarchate monitoring housing transfers
The Chaldean Patriarchate has announced the creation of a committee to monitor sales and transfers of houses and land belonging to Baghdad’s Christian citizens.
Patriarch Louis Raphael I has denounced the misappropriation of Christian property as a phenomenon which soared after 2003’s US-led invasion. He has identified the phenomenon, facilitated by the complicity of corrupt officials, as an additional corrosive factor for the Christian presence in Iraq.
In the statement issued to local media after meeting the heads of UN refugee programmes, the patriarch addressed how thousands of Christians in Mosul and Nineveh Plain had been forced to leave their homes before the advance of the so-called Islamic State.
Stressing the need for the Christians’ homes and land to be protected from any illegal or improper attempts at expropriation, he said their right to return to their towns and their villages, if and when the northern areas of Iraq are liberated from the domination of jihadist militants, should be guaranteed.
photo: CNS