The Social Weeks of Portuguese Catholics Portuguese equivalent of the Semaines Sociales in France will be held in Braga from 9 to 12 March. They will be “an occasion to ask for the commitment of everyone to solve the problem of unemployment”, underlined the organizing Committee, in presenting the event that will enjoy the participation of personalities at the national and international level, including Jacques Delors and Cardinal Raffaele Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. According to Msgr. Antonino Dias, auxiliary bishop of Braga, “the evil of unemployment and poverty is anti-evangelical reports the Catholic Ecclesia press agency .The Church is worried by this situation. There’s so much poverty in families, so many people are going hungry”. Theme of the Social Week, chosen by the Episcopal Commission for the laity and the family, is in fact “a society able to create jobs”. Its aim is to mobilise dioceses and social and ecclesial organizations to find concrete solutions to a problem from which Portuguese society is suffering so severely. Over 300 have enrolled in the event, which resumes after an intermission of several years a tradition of social awareness-raising of Catholics, which had its most flourishing period in Prtugual in the Fifties and Sixties. Again in the social field, the Forum of Catholic organizations for immigration (FORCIM), which, in view of the new bill that the Portuguese government is drawing up, has asked for “far-reaching changes” in the law on immigration because “an excess of bureaucracy favours exploitation by criminal networks”. “The process of regularizing immigrants says Father Valentim Gonçalves, of the Forum must avoid the bureaucratic hassles that make their life difficult and facilitate their exploitation by the mafia”.
