A group of “pink shoes” women in Aotearoa New Zealand campaigning for gender equality in the Catholic Church took their message with a display of well-worn shoes to St Patrick’s Cathedral plaza in Auckland today on International Women’s Day.

It was part of a national and global “Pink Shoes into the Vatican” campaign.

“Women from all over the country have sent their worn out shoes with their stories of service to the Catholic Church, only to find that the doors to full equality in all areas of the ministry and leadership remain firmly closed,” said an explanatory flyer handed out by supporters.

“A vibrant church requires a synodal structure in which all members share full equality by right of their baptism.”

The organisers, Be The Change, say: “We are interested in your story. You are invited to email or write to us telling of your experience with the church. You do not have to be a practising Catholic to participate.”

‘Pink Shoes into the Vatican’ campaign stories.  Video: Be The Change

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Independence leader and Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta has declared victory in Timor-Leste’s presidential election, saying he had secured “overwhelming” support and would now work to foster dialogue and unity.

Data from the country’s election administration body (STAE) with all votes counted showed Ramos-Horta secured a decisive 62 percent win in Tuesday’s ballot, well ahead of his opponent, incumbent President Francisco “Lu Olo” Guterres with 37 percent.

“I have received this mandate from our people, from the nation in an overwhelming demonstration of our people’s commitment to democracy,” Ramos-Horta told reporters in Dili.

The 72-year-old statesman is one of Timor-Leste’s best known political figures and was previously president from 2007-12, and prime minister and foreign minister before that.

Addressing concerns over political instability in the country, Ramos-Horta said he would work to heal divisions in Timor-Leste.

“I will do what I have always done throughout my life… I will always pursue dialogue, patiently, relentlessly, to find common ground to find solutions to the challenges this country faces,” he said.

Ramos-Horta said he had not spoken to his election rival Lu Olo, but had received an invitation from the President’s Office to discuss a handover of power.

Political instability, oil dependency
Home to 1.3 million people, the half-island and predominately Roman Catholic nation of Timor-Leste has for years grappled with bouts of political instability and the challenge of diversifying its economy, which is largely dependent on oil and gas.

Ramos-Horta said he expected Timor-Leste to become the 11th member of the regional bloc the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “within this year or next year at the latest”.

Timor-Leste currently holds observer status in ASEAN.

The president-elect, who will be inaugurated on May 20, the 20th anniversary of the country’s restoration of independence, said he would work with the government to respond to global economic pressures, including the impact on supply chains from the war in Ukraine and covid-19 lockdowns in China.

“Of course, we start feeling it here in Timor Leste. Oil prices went up, rice went up, that is a reality of what has happened in the world. It requires wise leadership.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Thousands of Catholics “Walk for Life” in Manila to protest against the drug-related killings under President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Video: Papua New Guinea’s EMTV

Thousands of Catholic faithful gathered in the Philippine capital in a “show of force” today to protest against the extrajudicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug war.

The rally, called the “Walk for Life”, gathered 20,000 people, according to the organisers.

Manila police estimated the crowd at 10,000, reports Al Jazeera.

READ MORE: Children and Duterte’s drug war – Lessons from the past

But in what was the the biggest rally yet against the killings, members of one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions prayed and sang hymns as they marched before dawn to condemn a “spreading culture of violence”.

More than 7000 people have died since Duterte took office almost eight months ago and ordered an unprecedented crime war that has drawn global criticism for alleged human rights abuses.

The move, however, has been popular with many in the mainly Catholic nation.

“We have to stand up. Somehow this is already a show of force by the faithful that they don’t like these extrajudicial killings,” said Manila bishop Broderick Pabillo before addressing the crowd, reports AFP.

“I am alarmed and angry at what’s happening because this is something that is regressive. It does not show our humanity.”

The demonstrators also condemned legislation restoring the death penalty for drug-related crimes and other offences.

Duterte, 71, has attacked the Church as being “full of sh*t” and “the most hypocritical institution” for speaking out against a campaign that he says would save generations of Filipinos from the drug menace.

About 80 percent of the 100 million Filipinos are Catholic.

The Church helped lead the revolution that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and a 2001 uprising against then-president Joseph Estrada saw him ousted over corruption charges.

The Church had initially declined to voice opposition publicly to Duterte’s drug war but, as the death toll of mostly-poor mounted, it started late last year to call for the killings to end.

Two weeks ago the Church branded Duterte’s “reign of terror” as creating a war against the poor.

“It is obvious that there is a spreading culture of violence. It is saddening to see, sometimes it drives me to tears how violent words seem so natural and ordinary,” said Manila Cardinal Luis Tagle, the country’s highest-ranking Church official.

“If the response to violence is also violence, then we are only doubling down on violence.”

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines had called on the faithful to gather before dawn at the Quirino Grandstand, in the same venue where Duterte held a huge pre-election rally in 2016.

“Why dawn? It’s because it is during these hours that we find bodies on the streets or near trash cans. Dawn, which is supposed to be the hour of a new start, is becoming an hour of tears and fears,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the bishops’ conference, told the crowd.

Among those who attended the event was Senator Leila de Lima, a former human rights commissioner who is one of Duterte’s most vocal opponents.

The government on Friday filed charges against her for allegedly running a drug trafficking ring inside the country’s largest prison when she was justice secretary in the previous administration.

De Lima, who has strongly denied the charges, said she attended the event as a show of solidarity.

By Gwyn McClelland in Melbourne

Today, Martin Scorsese’s Silence will have its premiere at the Vatican, where it will be screened to hundreds of Roman Catholic priests.

The famed director’s first foray into East Asia links to familiar themes of Catholic guilt and redemption, as he portrays the brutal 17th century persecution of Jesuit missionaries and their converts in Japan.

Scorsese’s film, which will open here in January, is an adaptation of Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence. It tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) who travel to Japan at a time when Christianity was banned to find their mentor (Liam Neeson) and support the local converts.

The pair are imprisoned and tortured.

The characters of the priests Cristóvão Ferreira and Sebastian Rodrigues were based on Portuguese and Italian Jesuits found in the historical record.

Endo’s novel (沈黙）describes the hostile environment that leads to the missionary priests’ relinquishment of faith. They were forced to place their feet on fumi-e （踏み絵) – religious images – to demonstrate that they had given up all faith.

Rodrigues (played by Garfield in the film), believes he hears Jesus’ voice telling him to apostatise by stepping on the fumi-e.

‘Hidden Christianity’
The remaining Christians went underground. The persecution continued until the ban against Christians was removed in 1873. But the indigenous Japanese who returned to Catholicism in the 1870s after 250 years of “hidden Christianity” remembered their long period of “betrayal”.

Most descendants of the native Christians lived in Nagasaki during World War II. On the 9 August 1945, when the United States dropped the A-bomb on Urakami, a northern suburb of Nagasaki, 8500 of the 12000-strong Catholic Christian community were among the dead.

The bomb was meant to target Nagasaki city, but because the Americans were low on fuel and clouds opened above the northern suburbs, the eventual Ground Zero happened in Urakami.

Its cathedral – the biggest Catholic church in Asia at the time – was only 500m from Ground Zero.

Nagasaki Catholics remember the A-bomb in particular ways, as I show in my research on memory in Nagasaki. My work has involved interviewing nine Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing, as well as three other non-Catholic survivors, and members of the Urakami community.

The Catholic interviewees explained that their grandparents had been exiled to other regions of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s due to their return to Catholicism after 250 years of “hidden Christianity”.

One interviewee, Matsuo Sachiko, explained that her grandmother was a double survivor, having first survived the Christian exile (referred to as the 4th exile) imposed by the government in 1867-73 and then later, the 1945 atomic bombing. She says:

Bombing survivors
“Yes… my grandmother was one of the Urakami Fourth Exile survivors and at that time there were still some of those survivors who were alive… these people still believed, everyone was able to stick at it and get through… Within their testimony, they didn’t talk about their pain.”

Orphaned Ozaki Tōmei adopted a new name after the bombing, as a novice at a Polish monastery in Nagasaki. Normally Japanese monks would adopt the name of a Western saint, but he selected a Japanese saint, Ozaki Tōmei, who is a child martyr of 1597 from Nagasaki.

Ozaki remembered his mother telling him that the 26 martyrs of 1597 were marched directly past his childhood home in the middle of winter on the way to their execution.

The child martyr Ozaki had been separated from his mother and was marched to Nagasaki from Kyoto. Along the way, he was able to write a letter to his mother, in which he reflected on the “transience of the world”.

My informant Ozaki linked his own experience to this boy of 1597, writing:

“The experience of the atomic bombing was exactly like that. Everything in the world is breakable and vanishes. As far as the atom bomb went, there was nothing to be known of reality which was not destroyed.

“Koware-iku sonzai ni tayotte wa naranai. We cannot depend on a life so fragile. Nonetheless, after that, staring at reality, what I saw was the indestructible God’s existence.

“The Lord God who holds all created things, the source of love and life is the God I know. This is also the source of faith.”

Tragic loss
Despite the destruction around him and the tragic loss of his mother, Ozaki, orphaned monk and survivor of the atomic bombing, held on to the faith of his ancestors.

His resilience might be considered one fruit of the missionaries whose ambivalent lives are depicted by Scorsese in Silence. Ozaki turned 88 this year and continues to write prolifically on his blog.

Silence was originally controversial among Christians in Japan for the perceived faithlessness of its priest protagonists. Nevertheless, Scorsese’s film version – which has taken 27 years to make – is eagerly awaited in Nagasaki, where the descendants of the hidden Christians still continue to be a practising community of faith.

The 26 Martyrs’ Museum, just down the road from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, frequently posts updates on the progress and making of the movie on its blog.

Meanwhile, another interviewee, Matsuzono (a pseudonym) told me:

“Soon Martin Scorsese will release the movie, so the things we locals talk about will spread around the world…”

Gwyn McLelland is an oral historian and associate, Japanese history, Monash University. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation at Monash University on the basis of oral history interviews conducted amongst Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing. He was the beneficiary of a Japan Study Grant from the National Library of Australia in 2015. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.