WORLD & NATION

Bishop: Suffering from war, hunger ‘beyond human imagination’ in Ethiopia’s Tigray region

MEKELLE, Ethiopia — Stopping food aid in Ethiopia from the United States and United Nations caused severe hunger that has killed hundreds of people in the northern Tigray region in recent weeks, and one local bishop said the situation is “beyond human imagination.” Bishop Tesfasellassie Medhin of Adigrat stressed that the two-year war forced many to depend solely on humanitarian assistance. According to the bishop, thousands of people have been displaced into tented camps and schools and constantly cry for peace. Most of them lost everything in the course of the war, surviving two years of daily aerial bombardment, sieges and blockades. “We are dying to live in peace,” Bishop Medhin told OSV News in an interview June 26. “For the last three years, the situation in Tigray has been something difficult to explain. Words cannot express the situation. It is beyond human imagination.” Tigray, a semi-autonomous state in northern Ethiopia slid into war in November 2020, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali accused Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the rulers of the region, of over-running a national army based in Tigray’s capital, Mekelle. A peace treaty ended the fighting in November 2022. The bishop estimates the war killed at least 1 million people and forced 5 million to 6 million people to depend on relief aid, which has been suspended by the U.N.’s World Food Program and the U.S. Agency for International Development over allegations of widespread theft of aid. In an email to AP, USAID called the decision to halt food aid “wrenching.”

Compiled from Our Sunday Visitor

People who fled their homes due to fighting between the Afar Special Forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in Berhale, Ethiopia, wait for food near a makeshift compound in Afdera district, Feb. 23, 2022.

OSV News photo/Tiksa Negeri, Reuters)

Catholic university in Ukraine sends off

AKITA, Japan (— On July 6, 1973, light surrounded a wooden statue of Our Lady of All Nations at a convent in Akita, Japan, and the statue spoke to a novice, asking her to pray for the reparation of the sins of humanity and to be obedient to her superior. When the statue ceased speaking, it had a bleeding wound in its hand. The novice, Sister Agnes Sasagawa, would hear the statue of Mary talk two other times that year. In the meantime, Sister Agnes would encounter visions of her guardian angel and experience the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ, as a wound in her left hand. She, the sisters of the Institute of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and hundreds of visitors would also witness the three-foot-tall statue perspiring as well as shedding tears, a phenomenon that continued sporadically, 101 times total, until 1981. With the 50th anniversary of the miraculous events from Mary now known as “Our Lady of Akita,” her messages to Sister Agnes continue to resonate, said Mark Miravalle, a theology professor who holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Mariology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. Like Mary’s messages with other apparitions, they compel Catholics to an examination

A wooden statue of Our Lady of Akita is seen in this undated photo. On July 6, 1973, Sister Agnes Sasagawa of the Handmaids of the Eucharist in Akita, Japan, reported receiving messages from a wooden statue of Mary and witnessed the statue weeping many times.

OSV News photo/SICDAMNOME, via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 of conscience to “see if we can be more generous” in prayer, especially the rosary, offering sacrifices for the reparation of sins and returning to the Eucharist, he said. “That’s the message, and that is as timely now as ever.”

Sessions at upcoming Tekakwitha Conference to feature healing, renewal

lic university in Ukraine celebrated its commencement against all odds, sent forth with “blessings” into a “difficult world,” said its president, Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak. More than 500 students in humanities, applied sciences and business received their degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, having completed their studies amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country. Only half of the graduating class was present, with the remainder attending a July 2 liturgy and graduation ceremony to ensure the chapel’s bomb shelter could accommodate those present in case of an air raid alert. Nonetheless, “we did it. In spite of the coronavirus, in spite of the war, we came here,” said Archbishop Gudziak in his homily during a July 1 baccalaureate liturgy at which he presided in the school’s Holy Wisdom of God chapel. Joining him at the July 1 liturgy were Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, papal nuncio to Ukraine, and Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, who was in Ukraine to tour various humanitarian aid sites. “When I came here, I was told I would see the tears of the past, but also the future,” said Cardinal Cupich. “And so I have seen many tears of the sufferings of the past. But today as I look out at the graduates, I also see the future.”

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Honor ing Indigenous Catholics’ spirituality and traditions, the Tekakwitha Conference July 19-23 is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from North America and beyond. “Gathering for Heal ing Through Living Waters” is the theme of the 84th an nual conference being held in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington. In Dakota and Ojibwe spirituality, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers in Min nesota is considered a place of creation and healing. St. Kateri Tekakwitha — a 17th-century Mohawk-Algonquin woman who was canonized in 2012 and is the conference’s namesake — also lived in a village established along a confluence of rivers in what is present-day New York. Presentations at this year’s conference will feature healing and renewal, said Shawn Phillips, director and pastoral minister of Gichitwaa Kateri in Minneapolis and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Office of Indian Ministry. Originally from Idaho, Phillips grew up on the Nez Perce Reservation be- fore he and his wife moved to Minnesota. He’s been a member of Gichitwaa Kateri for 35 years, and a director of the parish for six. Phillips, who is co-chair of the upcoming conference, said, “About three years ago, American Indians had a listening session with the bishops and the primary issue that American Indians in the United States wanted dealt with was boarding schools” affiliated with various religious orders, including the Catholic Church. “And so, this became the topic as healing from the boarding school trauma,” he told The Catholic Spirit, the archdiocesan newspaper. Conference details can be found at https://www.archspm.org/tekakwitha2023.

A statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha is seen at Our Lady of the Island Shrine in Manorville, N.Y. Honoring Indigenous Catholics’ spirituality and traditions, the 2023 Tekakwitha Conference July 19-23 is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from North America and beyond to Bloomington, Minn.

OSV News Photo/Gregory A. Shemitz