Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
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VATICAN MEDIA<br />
WORLD<br />
NEW VOICES — Pope Francis has named Vatican communications<br />
staffer Matteo Bruni (left) and Brazilian<br />
Vatican Radio journalist Christiane Murray (right) as his<br />
new spokesman and deputy spokeswoman. The pair<br />
take over for interim Holy See Press Office Director<br />
Alessandro Gisotti, who has been filling in since American<br />
Greg Burke and Spaniard Paloma Garcia Ovejero<br />
both resigned from their roles at the end of 2018.<br />
Benedict’s surprise daytrip<br />
Summer breaks aren’t just for students.<br />
On July 25, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI left Vatican City for<br />
the first time in four years to pay a surprise visit to the papal<br />
summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, where he walked the<br />
garden paths where he used to pray.<br />
According to Italian media, his next stop was to pray at a<br />
15th-century Marian sanctuary in the town of Rocca di Papa.<br />
He finished the day with dinner at the house of Bishop Raffaello<br />
Martinelli of Frascati, a small diocese outside of Rome.<br />
Benedict’s last venture outside of Vatican City was in July<br />
2015, when he spent two weeks in Castel Gandolfo at Pope<br />
Francis’ invitation. <br />
The capital of<br />
the crisis of faith?<br />
Germany’s Christian churches — both<br />
Protestant and Catholic — lost more than<br />
400,000 members last year, according to<br />
data published by the German Bishops<br />
Conference and the Evangelical Church in<br />
Germany.<br />
Church membership in Germany is officially<br />
recorded by the government, which<br />
collects donations for religious groups<br />
through a “church tax.” The tax requires<br />
members of a church to pay up to 9 percent<br />
of taxable income, which the state gives to<br />
the church they are registered with. Church<br />
membership can be renounced at any time,<br />
and the state doesn’t require a reason to<br />
leave.<br />
The Catholic Church in Germany, which<br />
counts 23 million members, lost 216,078 in<br />
2018.<br />
“Every departure hurts,” president of<br />
Germany’s Evangelical Church Heinrich<br />
Bedford-Strohm told Vatican <strong>News</strong>. “Since<br />
people today, unlike in the past, decide out<br />
of freedom whether they want to belong to<br />
the church, it is important for us today to<br />
make even clearer why the Christian message<br />
is such a strong basis for life.”<br />
If membership trends continue, Germany’s<br />
Christian population could drop by half by<br />
2060, according to a study by the University<br />
of Freiburg. <br />
Cardinal Louis Sako at a conference in Rome last month.<br />
Join the army, but don’t start one<br />
If you want to fight ISIS, join the army or get active in politics.<br />
But just don’t get involved with so-called “Christian militias,”<br />
Iraq’s senior prelate told the country’s Catholics.<br />
“We respect individual decisions to join Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi or<br />
to get involved in politics,” read a statement by Cardinal Louis<br />
Raphaël I Sako, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, “but<br />
not to form a Christian ‘brigade,’ since forming a Christian<br />
armed militia contradicts the Christian spirituality that calls for<br />
love, tolerance, forgiveness, and peace.”<br />
Plans to create Christian militias to help fight against the Islamic<br />
State in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain, two areas with historically<br />
large populations of Christians in Iraq, have emerged<br />
in the past years as violence has threatened the area.<br />
One such militia, known as the Babylon Brigades, has been<br />
relatively successful, giving rise to a political movement, the<br />
Babylon movement, which won two out of five seats reserved for<br />
Christians in Iraq’s 2018 elections. <br />
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/PAUL HARING<br />
4 • ANGELUS • <strong>August</strong> 2-9, <strong>2019</strong>