Malta: welcome just as St. Paul was welcomedThe Pope is to make an apostolic visit to Malta in April next year. It will be the third papal visit to the archipelago after those of John Paul II in 1990 and 2001. Benedict XVI has therefore accepted the invitation made to him by the Bishops of Malta and the President of the Maltese Republic in recent months. The visit will take place on the 1950th anniversary of St. Paul’s shipwreck in the waters off Malta, which according to tradition took place during his journey to Rome in the year 60. The Apostle of the Gentiles – says the Acts of the Apostles – was given a warm welcome by the local population: “The inhabitants treated us with unusual kindness” (28:2). Here he remained for three months before setting sail for Sicily. On 16 June 2005 Benedict XVI, on receiving the new Maltese ambassador to the Holy See, recalled the deep Christian roots of Malta, a “patrimony of cultural and religious values” on which “a future of solidarity and peace” can be built. “Europe – the Pope had underlined – must learn how to combine the legitimate needs of each nation with the needs of the common good of the Continent as a whole”. The Archbishop of Malta, Paul Cremona, recalled that by giving hospitality to the apostle Paul, the Maltese had showed “a strong sense of opening their arms to the ‘alien’, the foreigner”. This is a sentiment – he added – that “needs to be preserved and practiced also in our time, characterized as it is by mass migration: a phenomenon that is expressed at Malta in a particular way, since it is a common point of landfall of irregular immigrants coming by boat from Africa”. Malta, which won independence from the United Kingdom in 1964, has a population of over 410,000, 98% of whom are Catholics. Malta has been a member state of the EU since 1st May 2004. It adopted the euro as its currency on 1st January 2008.Ukraine: a Catholic church returnedAfter a legal dispute that had lasted for roughly a decade, the church of St. Joseph at Dnepropetrowsk, a city in eastern Ukraine, the third largest in the country with a population of roughly one million, has been finally restored to the ownership of the Catholic Church of Latin rite. It was solemnly re-consecrated in recent days. News of the return of the church was given to the “Kirche in Not” association by Father Jerzy Zielinski of the Capuchin Franciscans, who are celebrating the third centenary of their mission in Ukraine this year, and to whom the parish of St. Joseph has now been re-assigned. The church, confiscated and closed by the Communist regime in 1949, was then illegally sold to a private company by the state authorities in 1998, after the political changes; since then it had changed ownership more than once. In July 2007 the Catholics, who had congregated to pray in the church, were attacked by the security guards of the new “owner”: since then, reports Fr. Zielinski, in spite of repeated threats, “the faithful of the parish met together each day in front of the locked church, praying for it to be returned”. The ceremony of dedication, which began with a solemn procession of the Most Holy Sacrament through the streets of Dnepropetrowsk – streets which also bear the names of Marx and Lenin – was attended by bishops, priests and faithful from all over the country. After the procession, the church was re-consecrated during a Mass celebrated by the Bishop of Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhya, Mgr. Marian Buczek. Since the threats have since continued, the parish priest has asked the authorities for police protection, but “many parishioners too – concludes Fr. Zielinski – continue to maintain surveillance over their church”. INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE The centenary of the synagogue in SofiaThe synagogue of Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, is now a hundred years old. It is the largest synagogue of the Sephardic rite in Europe, after those of Amsterdam and Budapest. The Sephardim are one of the two main groups of the Jews of the diaspora, of common geographic origin and cultural tradition. The term designates the Jewish medieval communities of Spain (Sephardim derives from Sefarad, ‘Spain’ in Hebrew) and North Africa, in distinction to the Ashkenazi – the second main Jewish group – who trace their origins to the communities in northern, central and eastern Europe. Symbol of the Bulgarian Jewish community, the synagogue of Sofia was built between 1905 and 1909. “It’s a jewel – says Robert Jerasi, head of the Central Council of Jewish Communities in Bulgaria, in a briefing to the Bulgarian press agency “Novinite.com” – anyone who enters it cannot but be struck”. Designed by the Austrian architect Friedrich Grunanger, the synagogue has a capacity for some 1,300 worshippers. The building was intended to respond to “a desire to make visible the development and future of the Jewish community in Bulgaria”, continues Robert Jerasi. The six days of celebrations to mark the centenary (6-11 September) culminated on Wednesday 9 September with a celebration in the synagogue in which representatives of Jewish communities and organizations from all over the world took part. On the programme was also a round table on the Second World War and the role of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, proposed as “a model of active religious tolerance and civil solidarity”, in helping to save the Bulgarian Jewish community.
