JAKARTA (UCAN): Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, paid his first visit as head-of-state to the headquarters of the Bishops’ Conference of Indonesia in Jakarta, on August 24, to improve ties and to stress the need for religious institutions to preserve and maintain diversity within the nation.
 
The conference’s chairperson, Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo of Jakarta, and its secretary-general, Bishop Antonius Subianto Bunjamin of Bandung in West Java, as well as eight other bishops, welcomed the president.

VATICAN (SE): “Oh you’re looking for the mercy people,” was the response an Italian doctor, Sandro Calvani, got when he asked his associates in Thailand where he could meet Catholic people. 
 
Calvani, a lifetime worker with the World Health Organisation, told a gathering at the Vatican that Catholics in Thailand are often known as the mercy people, as local people see them as putting mercy at the centre of their lives. “That’s how they have come to be recognised,” he explained.