A priest in Nicaragua was arrested following Mass on New Year’s Eve.

At least 14 priests, two seminarians and a Bishop have been arrested in recent days in the country ruled by left-wing dictator Daniel Ortega.

Fr. Gustavo Sandino, the pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows, was arrested on 31 December following Sunday Mass in the Diocese of Jinotega, Nicaragua.

In Managua, Fr. Fernando Téllez Báez, pastor of Our Lady of the Americas, was taken in the early hours a day earlier, and Fr. Jader Hernández, pastor of the Mother of the Divine Shepherd, the evening of 30 December.

Earlier in the year, Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos of Matagalpa was sentenced to 26 years in prison without due process.

Representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that Nicaragua is moving “increasingly” away from the rule of law and “fundamental freedoms” by persecuting “political and indigenous leaders, members of the Catholic Church, activists, and journalists” with “repeated cases of arbitrary detention.”

Data shows that Christian persecution is on the rise globally, but that repression remains largely overlooked in the news cycle, according to one religious freedom expert.

“It is important to … remember persecuted Christians in many countries around the world. Their suffering gets no coverage at all by major media,” said Joop Koopman, director of communications for Aid to the Church in Need in the United States.

More than 360 million of the world’s estimated 2.6 billion Christians — or one in seven Christians globally — currently experience “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” according to Open Doors U.S., an advocacy group that provides Bibles and support to persecuted Christians in more than 70 countries.

One in five Christians in Africa and two in five in Asia experience persecution which notes that over the last three decades, the number of countries where Christians suffer high and extreme levels of persecution has almost doubled to 76.

Direct forms of persecution include attacks on life and property, assassinations, imprisonment, torture, restricted access to churches and Bibles, forced conversions, and violence against women, while indirect attacks take the form of educational and employment discrimination, legal restrictions and denial of rights, according to the nonprofit International Christian Concern.

The Government will carry out a financial assessment of church assets with a view to pressuring the religious orders in talks on reparations for former mother and baby home residents. Mother and baby homes existed in many countries with only a small minority in the English-speaking worth being run by Catholic organisations. None have reparation schemes specifically for mother and baby homes.

Last May, a special Government negotiator, Sheila Nunan, took control of the talks after Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman failed to reach a deal with eight Catholic congregations and the Church of Ireland. A Church of Ireland body ran Bethany home.

With talks at an impasse, Ms Nunan has told the congregations she will engage financial experts to examine their assets.

While the Department of Children had nothing to say about the mandate for the financial assessment, the Irish Times reports that the aim is to examine what payments individual orders could sustain in any deal.

While most church bodies had no comment on the talks, a figure linked to a congregation said the orders knew little about the looming financial assessments other than it exists.

The latest effort to advance talks with church bodies comes more than two years after drug company GlaxoSmithKline ruled out making reparation payments for clinical trials on mother and baby home children between 1934 and 1973.

The Nicaraguan police have arrested the bishop of Siuna, Isidoro del Carmen Mora Ortega, making him the second prelate arrested by the left-wing dictatorship headed by President Daniel Ortega.

Ortega has been in power since 2007 and has increasingly directed attacks against Catholic institutions and various members of the clergy.

The arrest of Bishop Mora, 63, came a day after the bishop celebrated a Mass in Matagalpa and asked people to pray for their bishop, Rolando Álvarez, who was placed under house arrest in August 2022 and unjustly sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison in February this year.

Currently Bishop Álvarez is imprisoned in the prison known as “La Modelo,” where political prisoners of the regime are commonly sent.

Almost three months after his arrest, a Catholic priest in northern India charged under the country’s controversial anti-conversion laws after a complaint from a member of a Hindu nationalist organization has been granted bail and is set for release.

Father Sebastian “Babu” Francis had been taken into police custody Oct. 2.

On Oct. 1, a local leader of the right-wing BJP party of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with a group of supporters, reportedly barged into a Pentecostal prayer service falsely accusing the pastor of religious conversion. When police arrived on the scene, they also detained the pastor’s brother, who is a Catholic.

Eventually four members of the family were arrested, and, when they phoned Fr Francis for help, the 56-year-old too was taken into custody.

Bishop Gerald Mathias of Lucknow told Crux the accusation of conversion is “baseless,” ascribing the arrest to the high-handedness of the police, “who are simply under control of the right-wing BJP party.”

“The fundamentalists are going around as vigilantes to prevent even prayer meetings and worship of the faithful,” Mathias said. “Police simply arrest Christians without verifying facts, with no evidence just because someone has complained.”

China’s assimilationist policies in Tibet as well as its stringent religious restrictions have been condemned in the latest report on EU-China relations Report adopted by the EU Parliament.

The report says the assimilationist policies violate the educational, religious, cultural and linguistic rights of the Tibetan people and ultimately threaten to eradicate Tibetan culture and identity.

In particular, the report calls for immediate abolition of the compulsory forced-assimilation boarding schools and preschools in Tibet and urges sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for designing and implementing the system.

The report also condemns China’s promulgation of the “Administrative Measures for Religious Activity Venues” also known as “Order number 19”, which came into force on Sep 1 this year. Its aim is to further curtail religious freedom in Tibet and across China. It urges China to respect and guarantee the right to freedom of religion or belief and refrain from monitoring, harassing, detaining or intimidating leaders and members of religious groups both online and offline.

A lawyer representing embattled Catholic democracy activist Jimmy Lai said the Hong Konger is unlikely to receive a fair trial in the legal system that is now controlled by Chinese Communist Party authorities.

Lai’s trial in Hong Kong began this week. He was originally arrested in August 2020 under that year’s controversial national security law, which was passed by China’s communist-controlled government and sharply curtailed free speech in the region.

Lai has been imprisoned for over 1,000 days under the law. He has been accused of colluding with foreign adversaries and conspiracy to defraud and is facing a possible life sentence.

Jonathan Price, a human rights lawyer with the U.K.-based Doughty Street Chambers, told “EWTN News Nightly” that Hong Kong — long a separate administrative region from the mainland Chinese government — is “now more or less indistinguishable from China.”

“The judges in Jimmy Lai’s national security law trial … are handpicked judges, licensed, in effect, to try national security law cases because of their political fealty to Beijing,” Price told Sabol.

“So in those circumstances, it is not how you or I would recognize fair judicial proceedings,” he said.

Crosses at the entrances of Bavaria’s administrative buildings can stay up, a German court has ruled.

In 2018, Bavarian state premier Markus Söder ordered that all public buildings prominently hang a cross “as an expression of Bavaria’s historical and cultural character.”

A Bavarian lobby group advocating “the meaningful separation of church and state as well as the eradication of church privileges,”, challenged the decree in court.

It argued the move infringed on people’s freedom of religion and violated the state’s obligation to be neutral on such matters.

The court, however, found that the regulation was a “mere administrative regulation with no external legal effect and therefore did not violate any rights of the plaintiffs.”

The court said that while “the crosses brought in do display a central symbol of the Christian faith to an objective observer,” they nevertheless had no legal impact on visitors’ religious freedom.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-bavaria-can-hang-crosses-in-state-buildings/a-67769430

China had witnessed big growth in Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s when past communist restrictions on the practice of religion were relaxed.

This week’s survey, however, found that growth come to a virtual standstill in recent years. Between 2010 and 2018 the number of adults identifying as Christian held steady at about 2% and in 2021 fell to 1%.

Nina Shea, senior fellow and director of the Centre for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, told CNA that the declining numbers of China’s Christians are “no surprise.”

“They correlate with Xi’s [Jinping’s] crackdown on Christianity, his so-called ‘Sinicization’ campaign,” she said. For the past five years, “the state has strictly banned all children from any exposure to religion, churches have been blanketed with facial recognition surveillance and linked to social credit scores.”

Approximately 55.8% of Chileans voted against it while 44.2% supported it. In 2021, 62pc of Chileans had voted against a proposed Constitution that would have been far more ideologically on the left.

The proposed constitution spanned nearly 200 pages and contained more than 200 articles.

Article 1 of the proposed constitution declares in part that “the family is the fundamental nucleus of society” and “it is the duty of the State and society to protect families and promote their strengthening.”

The proposal featured a lengthy list of fundamental rights and freedoms, beginning with “the right to life.” In addition to asserting that “the law protects the life of the unborn,” Article 16 of the proposed document also prohibited the death penalty.

Chile first began taking steps to repeal the nationwide ban on abortion in 2016. If approved, the proposal would have had the effect of overturning the repeal by establishing protections for unborn life.

The list of rights and freedoms also declared that “the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” is “guaranteed.”