Religious minorities must be protected during conflicts, said Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States, Head of the Delegation of the Holy See to the Seventy-second Session of the United Nations General Assembly. His remarks came September 22, 2017 at the Side Event entitled “The Protection of Religious Minorities in Conflict,” sponsored by the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the UN, the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN, and the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy.

In his address, Archbishop Gallagher noted that war and conflict regularly provide the backdrop for religious minorities to be targeted for persecution, violence, enslavement, exile, murder, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity. Because of how widespread attacks against religious minorities are, their protection, he said, must be one of the most urgent responsibilities of the international community and must extend to examining and eradicating the root causes of that persecution. He listed several essential elements needed to protect religious minorities: a need for action and not just words; equality before the law, regardless of religion, race or ethnicity, based on the principle of citizenship; mutual autonomy and positive collaboration between religious communities and the State; the condemnation of the abuse of religious belief to justify terrorism against believers of other religions; effective interreligious dialogue as an antidote to fundamentalism; education in general and solid religious education in particular; and blocking the flow of money and weapons to those intending to use them against religious minorities.

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Pope: Church must offer “maternal love” to migrants

Pope Francis said September 22, 2017 that the Church must offer “maternal love” to migrants and refugees and that helping them was a “privileged occasion to proclaim Jesus Christ.”

His comments came in an address to the participants in the meeting promoted by the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CCEE) underway in Rome at the Bonus Pastor, from September 21-23, 2017. The event was held in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace.

The Holy Father said the Church will remain true to its mission, as stated in his message for the 2015 World Day of Migrants and Refugees: “of loving Jesus Christ, adoring and loving Him, particularly in the poorest and most abandoned; included among them, certainly, are migrants and refugees” (Insegnamenti II, 2 [2014], 200).

“The Church’s maternal love for these brothers and sisters of ours calls for manifesting itself concretely in all the phases of the migratory experience, from the start of the trip, from the arrival to the return, so that all the ecclesial realities situated along the trajectory are protagonists of the one mission, each according to its possibilities,” Francis continued.

The Pope called the modern flow of migrants a new missionary “frontier.” He concluded that this offers the Church a “to witness concretely the Christian faith in charity and in profound respect for other religious expressions. “