Pastoral Aid

Almost 90 percent of the 170 million people in Bangladesh are Muslim. Christians account for just a tiny minority of well under one percent and generally belong to disadvantaged ethnic minorities.   Such is the case in the Diocese of Rajshahi, in northern Bangladesh. There are over 20.4 million people here, 71,000 of whom are Catholic. Most of them are poor, with very few educational opportunities, and forced to toil as day laborers or small traders, or scrape a living from ...

Violence is on the rise in Latin America. In Ecuador, the number of killings increased by more than 80 percent between 2021 and 2022.   And in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil, which has close to three million inhabitants, the rate of violent crime is particularly high, mostly affecting young men between the ages of 15 and 27. They are recruited by criminal gangs, often when they are already in prison. If they can see no alternative life, they ...

2023 marks the 30th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Albania. On that occasion, he recalled the many priests who suffered under communism and were killed for administering the Sacraments, as well as the unknown number of Catholics who had likewise been imprisoned and murdered because of their faith. At that time, the dictator Enver Hodscha had banned all religion, and in 1967, had even made Albania the world‘s first “atheist state,” something no other state had done, ...

Strengthening families, grounding the young in their faith, providing a Christian education: these are the great priorities of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Najib Michael Moussa of Mosul and Akre, Iraq, in the cradle of Christianity in the Middle East. Accordingly, he has increased family care and catechetical instruction. One of these projects is the Jesus the King Catechetical Center in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where many Christian families are now living, including those who fled Mosul when ISIS invaded in ...

The Diocese of Shimoga in southwest India is highly active, despite having just 18,000 Catholics in a total population of over 5.6 million. It has set up various committees to deal with a range of particularly important issues, including the ongoing formation of priests, religious, and laity, so they are equipped to help the people and promote the Gospel. “The Church in Shimoga needs leaders who can help advance the mission of our Redeemer Jesus Christ and extend our networks,” ...

Life is hard in the Apostolic Prelature of Corocoro, located high up in the Andes of Bolivia. People live in widely scattered, often small settlements. Only a handful of the villages or small towns have a population of over 10,000. Close to 80% of the 290,000 people in the prelature live in extreme poverty, and rural exodus is a real problem, as many people move away into the urban centers of the country. Those who depart often only end up ...

The population of Africa is largely young. In Togo, nearly 40 percent of people are under 15 years old. But sadly, many factors lead these young people to crime, substance abuse, pregnancy, and transmissible diseases. Families are impoverished and broken, and they have few economic prospects. Bishop Isaac Gaglo of the Diocese of Aného in Togo is concerned for the young people in his diocese. He would like to provide them with some form of training, so they can make ...