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Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Aug 11, 2017 / 04:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A deadly cholera outbreak in Yemen could continue indefinitely without an end to the civil war, says a bishop in the region who has pleaded for the faithful to pray and for an end to arms sales to the parties.

“As I believe in the power of prayer, I can only ask the faithful around the world, to keep in mind the suffering people in Yemen – Muslims as well as the few remaining Christians, including the Missionaries of Charity of Mother Teresa.” Bishop Paul Hinder told CNA Aug. 8.

Bishop Hinder heads the Abu Dhabi-based Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia, which serves Catholics in the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen.

The Church in Yemen is “a tiny group without any structure” that can do little in the face of the situation, he said.

A cholera outbreak provoked by the war has infected a suspected 350,000 people, with over 1,800 people dying from the disease. Over 600,000 could be infected by the end of the year, the International Committee of the Red Cross has said.

The latest outbreak began in April. Within a few hours of infection, the disease causes vomiting and diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration that can be deadly without rapid intervention. At the same time, most cases can be treated with simple rehydration treatments.

Even simple treatments are hard to come by.

 

#Yemen #Cholera update: 474K suspected cases & 1'953 deaths. For the 1st time in 2 months, weekly cases dipped below the 40K mark. Good news

— Robert Mardini (@RMardiniICRC) August 9, 2017  

More than 3 million people have been displaced since the conflict began in March 2015. Over 20 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.

Revenue shortfalls mean 1 million civil servants, including 30,000 medical staffers, have gone unpaid since September. About 45 percent of the country’s hospitals are operating, and only 30 percent of the needed medical supplies can reach the country.

Bishop Hinder stressed the difficulties the war is causing.

“We all should know that the blockade of the country hinders the reconstruction of the destroyed sanitary system in the country,” he said. “As long as the minimal infrastructure in many parts of the country is not functioning, we cannot expect that the cholera can be stopped, other sick people get the proper treatment, and the starving people be fed properly.”

“Whatever help is possible through the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, and other reliable channels remains limited as long as sufficient security is not guaranteed,” he added.

The Yemeni civil war involves the internationally recognized government, and its Saudi-led coalition allies, fighting Shiite Houthi rebels.

“We have to keep in mind that in the Yemen conflict there are no pure angels on one side and pure devils on the other,” Bishop Hinder continued. “Without bringing people again around the table and getting to a cease-fire, there will be only killing and destruction with disastrous consequences for the civilian population and the country as a whole.”

“I think that the people in the so-called West should be aware that their powers are not innocent in what is going on in Yemen,” he said. “The deal of the present U.S. administration with Saudi Arabia regarding weapons will not help to make peace.”

Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, similarly stressed that countering the outbreak depends on peace.

“The great tragedy is that this cholera outbreak is a preventable, man-made humanitarian catastrophe. It is a direct consequence of a conflict that has devastated civilian infrastructure and brought the whole health system to its knees,” Maurer said July 23. "Further deaths can be prevented, but warring parties must ease restrictions and allow the import of medicines, food and essential supplies and they must show restraint in the way they conduct warfare.”

U.N. agencies were caught by surprise at how fast the disease spread, George Khoury, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yemen, told the Associated Press. After an initial mild outbreak in October appeared to have ended, funds had been cut and health monitors put their attention elsewhere.

“It’s a cholera paradise,” Khoury said. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

In March 2016 an attack on a Missionaries of Charity house in Aden left four sisters dead. The attackers kidnapped Indian-born Salesian priest Father Tom Uzhunnalil. The priest’s whereabouts are not known, and no groups have claimed responsibility for his capture. An unauthenticated video posted to YouTube in May of this year showed him with a sign dated April 15, 2017. He appeared thin, with overgrown hair and a beard.

The priest appealed for his release and claimed his health was rapidly deteriorating.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Michael Reynolds, EPA

By Rhina Guidos

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The stories come in dribs and drabs on the evening news or in timelines via Twitter, but they're steady.

On Aug. 2, two young popular soccer players, brothers living in Bethesda, Maryland, were deported to their native El Salvador. In mid-July, Jesus Lara Lopez, a 37-year-old father of four in Cleveland, was deported to Mexico. On Aug. 1, Lourdes Salazar Bautista, a Michigan mom with three U.S. citizen children also was deported to Mexico.

At some point, they all had contact with immigration authorities, but none had criminal records or a violent past, and regularly checked in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, to inform the agency of their whereabouts.

During President Barack Obama's administration, migrants like them, in the country without documentation, were not priorities for deportation, said John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE. They had been granted stays or were under supervision by immigration officials likely for humanitarian reasons -- they were taking care of family or had extenuating circumstances.

"Individuals in this group had mostly been checking in with us ' very rarely are these individuals convicted criminals," said Sandweg during a July panel titled "Immigration Policy and Practice Under the Trump Administration: Understanding What's New, What's Not and Why It Matters," sponsored by the Washington-based immigration reform group America's Voice.

Under President Donald Trump, however, the fate of these migrants has changed, said Sandweg.

"What we've seen is lots of those individuals getting picked up, and the reason those individuals get picked up is they are the lowest hanging fruit," said Sandweg. "They are the individuals who ICE can arrest most quickly and deport within a matter of two, three weeks. They're also the most sensitive cases and the cases least likely to pose a public safety threat."

But it's part of a strategy, Sandweg believes, by the Trump administration to increase the total number of deportations to record levels -- a task that will be difficult to match since Obama was given the moniker "deporter-in-chief" because of the record-breaking 2.5 million deportations that took place under his administration.

"It's very clear to me that their mission is to transcend the number of deportations. How do you do that? You don't focus on criminals," said Sandweg. "Criminals are slow to remove. Criminals who are at-large are very difficult to find and it's very time-consuming. It's time-consuming, difficult work."

Some migrants and their supporters already are sensing the shift in focus.

In early August, when Maria De Loera was called to a deportation hearing in Texas, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso attended the meeting in her place so she could stay at the bedside of her cancer-stricken 8-year-old daughter at the hospital. De Loera left Mexico in 2014 after her husband was assassinated and fled to the U.S. looking for asylum, which was later denied. 

Some supporters had feared De Loera would immediately be deported if she showed up to the meeting with immigration officials, meaning her daughter would be left to attend cancer treatments alone at the hospital.

After Bishop Seitz met with immigration officials, De Loera was granted a six-month stay so she could continue to care for her daughter. These days, it seems as if "the most obvious humanitarian reasons for allowing a person to stay are no longer sufficient," said the bishop, while also expressing worry about the people who seem to be the new focus of deportations.

"The church certainly is going to be very concerned about action leading to prioritization of people who are really not any threat and who have not committed any crime, and who are productive members of our community," Bishop Seitz said in an Aug. 7 phone interview with Catholic News Service.

The emphasis, he said, should be on criminals "who are really a threat to our citizens," not spending time and energy going after people who are law-abiding.

David Leopold, partner and chair of the Immigration Practice Group and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the Trump administration would like others to believe "we're focusing on criminals. That's our priority."

But the focus is on "non-criminals, folks who have worked hard, have done everything they were supposed to do, played by the rules, have been here for a long time," said Leopold, who also was part of the America's Voice panel. "They're the easiest to arrest because they comply. They're going after those cases."

And while there may not be much talk about raids taking place, they're happening but in the lobbies of immigration offices, he said.

"I call them silent raids because where they're occurring is at these check-ins," said Leopold.

While fathers and mothers and children wait for their ICE removal officers, meetings that never yielded unusual developments now turn into meetings in which many have ankle bracelets placed on them, and given a date to leave, he said.

In a July 31 essay for America, a national Catholic magazine run by the Jesuits, Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, said that under the Trump administration, Catholics must shift their focus toward opposing mass deportations because it's clear that under this presidency, steps have been taken "to implement a major deportation campaign targeted at all undocumented immigrants, including the population the U.S. bishops have sought for years to make citizens."

For fiscal year 2018, the administration has asked for 1,000 more ICE agents, 500 more Border Patrol agents, plus more than 10,000 more detention beds, not to mention $1.6 billion for a border wall, wrote Appleby.

"It is clear where this administration is headed on immigration," he wrote. "The goal is not to legalize 11 million undocumented persons but to get rid of them."

While some bishops have been on the front lines during critical moments involving the deportation of noncriminal migrants who have been long-term residents and contributing members of certain communities, Appleby urged the participation of all bishops, so as to have a plan for what to do when deportations take place in their respective dioceses and to lead other Catholics to support vulnerable immigrant families.

"We are entering a dangerous time in the history of our immigrant nation," Appleby wrote. "The stakes for our immigrant brothers and sisters, and their children, are high. History will judge whether Catholics stood up and protected their neighbors during this dark period."

Parishes are a great place to talk about those issues, to listen to "unheard narratives," said Bishop Seitz, while acknowledging that sometimes it feels as if people are listening to two different Gospels in church pews: one that says we have limited resources and we have to protect ourselves from outsiders, and one that says we're called to love others. But a person cannot call him or herself Catholic without expressing the compassion of Jesus, he said.

When a person loves others and gives of oneself for others "God will care for us even though there may be sacrifices involved," said Bishop Seitz, adding that if we give what's good and charitable, God will care for us.

"I don't think those elements are to be found in the dumbed-down Gospel that's out and about today," he said.

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Follow Guidos on Twitter: @CNS_Rhina.

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Mexico City, Mexico, Aug 11, 2017 / 11:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For the ninth year in a row, Mexico is the most violent country in Latin America for priests, said a report from the Catholic Multimedia Center.

The report covers 2012 to 2017, which aligns with the presidency of current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. During this time, 19 priests and two lay persons were murdered, and two priests reported as missing.  

“This year, 2017 specifically, has been disastrous for the priesthood in Mexico,” the Catholic Multimedia Center reported. “Four murders, two thwarted kidnappings, two iconic attacks, one at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City and the other at the Offices of the Mexican Bishops’ Conference, as well as hundreds of threats and extortions of priests and bishops.”

“This is a sad scenario which makes us assert that things are far from getting better,” they said.

So far this year, Fr. Felipe Altamirano Carrillo of the Nayar Prelature; Fr. Joaquín Hernández Sienfuentes of the Diocese of Saltillo; Fr. Luis López Villa of the Diocese of Nezahualcóyotl; and Fr.  José Miguel Machorro of the Archdiocese of Mexico City have been murdered.

While “the members of the Church are not in conflict with the groups that are committing crimes in the country,” the Catholic Multimedia Center said, “there are sectors of society that are taking advantage of the surge of violence and demonstrate insolence toward the religious in places such as Chiapas, Tabasco, Mexico City, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, Mexico State, Jalisco, Nayarit, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Colima, Culiacán, Tabasco, Michoacán, Guerrero and Tamaulipas.”

The report denounced that “these groups that attack priests and religious seek to limit the activities of the pastoral work of the Church in Mexico which are carried out in the fields of healthcare and education as well as aid work – aid, shelter, relief – in support of the human rights of migrants who are passing through Mexican territory.”

It also found that while priests, religious and lay persons have all been victims of hate crimes, pastoral workers – and specifically priests – are particularly vulnerable to various attacks.

With a lack of security, indifferent authorities, and growth in organized crime, the Catholic Multimedia Center said, “we can no longer keep quiet, as the blood of thousands of Mexicans continues to be shed.”

The organization called on all levels of government in Mexico to “provide guarantees for the exercise of the priestly ministry in many areas of Mexico where violence has rebounded.”

Crime in Mexico was also denounced recently by the Catholic Mexican newspaper Desde la Fe.

Corruption, poverty and unemployment only contribute to rising crime levels, the publication said, and Cuernavaca in Morelos State, popularly known as “the city of eternal springtime,” has become the “city of eternal shooting.”

The newspaper lamented that “violent robberies, sexual assaults and homicides are committed, and the citizenry does not report them because of mistrust and frustration.”

 

 

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