HONG KONG (SE): “The Chinese party-state is tightening the vice on both foreign and domestic non-government organisations (NGO) sending strong new signals of its determination to repress unwelcome foreign influences and activities that spread western values,” Stanley Lubman, from the Berkley School of Law at the University of California, says in an article published by ChinaRealTime on June 16.

The Church in eastern Asia is facing a drop in vocations, turning religious congregations and mission societies into an aging group.

In China, religious life remains a sensitive topic to discuss and research. Foreign missionaries were expelled in the 1950s and when religious activity was revived in the 1970s, virtually no religious congregations still existed on the mainland.

HONG KONG (SE): One of the criticisms directed against the recently released encyclical penned by Pope Francis entitled, Laudato Si’: On care for our common home, is that he does not adequately take the ingenuity of the human being into account.

But the type of ingenuity displayed by logging and mining companies on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao that uses every trick in the book to get around national laws designed to protect the environment is well recognised in his landmark work.

What better way to cool our brain in the summer heat than to read some stories from Chinese mythology? 

The 10 suns and archer Yi 

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, one of the oldest sources of myths in Chinese culture, it was recorded that Di Jun (Lord Superior) had 10 sons. They were the 10 suns. They lived in Scald Valley in the east. 

John Gummer, the Lord Deben, chairperson of the United Kingdom’s independent Committee on Climate Change, writes in the Catholic Herald that both those who have welcomed Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’ and those who have dismissed it have missed the point of its disconcerting and prophetic call.

VATICAN (CNS): The working document (instrumentum laboris), issued at the Vatican on June 23, intended to guide discussions at the Synod of Bishops on the Family in October, incorporates a wider array of issues affecting the family than the final document released after the synod last year.

Where last year’s relatio synodi had 62 paragraphs, the new working document has 147.

Kathmandu (UCAN): In the aftermath of the magnitude 7.8 and 7.3 earthquakes that struck Nepal on April 25 and May 12, authorities have been wary of the scourge of child-trafficking.

“Child trafficking is particularly prominent during time of disasters. And unfortunately, the districts hit by the earthquake belong to the remote, rural and poor communities and the children from there are an easy target now,” said Tarak Dhital, chief of the government’s Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB).

WASHINGTON (CNS): The results of a study released on June 1 by the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate, based at Georgetown University, revealed that the highest growth rates in Catholicism are in Africa and Asia.

LONDON (CNS): “We know how people get their information. We know how people want to respond to the information they are getting and they feel just because it’s the Church, it shouldn’t be less professional than any civic organisation. You can’t do that if you are operating in silos,” said Chris Patten, the last colonial governor of Hong Kong and head of the 11-member Vatican Media Committee that has been advising the Holy See on media and communications since last July.

We no longer have enough young men to farm our land or join the prayers in the mosque,” said a 50-year-old cleric Wazi Ullah from Leda village in the southern district of Cox’s Bazar, nearly 400 kilometres southeast of Dhaka, Bangladesh, according to an AFP report on May 21.