The church bulletin: Catholic headlines for 5/20/21

Catholic priest among those kidnapped in Nigeria (CNA) A Catholic priest serving in Nigeria’s northern Kaduna archdiocese is among 11 people reportedly kidnapped on Monday. ACI Africa, CNA’s African news partner, said that gunmen attacked Kadaje community in Kachia, a Local Government Area in southern Kaduna State, on May 17, killing eight people and kidnapping 11 others…

Lawsuit alleges former Newark archbishop abused girl (AP) An archbishop of Newark groomed a 5-year-old girl by delivering food to her struggling family and regularly babysitting her, then sexually abusing her on multiple occasions in the 1970s, a lawsuit alleges. The suit filed in March is believed to be the first to level sexual abuse charges against the late Peter Gerety, who died in 2016 at 104 as the world’s oldest Catholic bishop. Gerety served as archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark from 1974 until his retirement in 1986, according to the archdiocese’s website…

Activists fear jailed Indian Jesuit faces a COVID death sentence (Crux) Father Stan Swamy, a 84-year-old Jesuit priest with advanced Parkinson’s disease who spent his life serving indigenous peoples in India and who was imprisoned last October after being accused of “terrorism”, reportedly is suffering from COVID-19 symptoms in a country that counts some 4,000-daily death due to the virus…

“The Turning” podcast looks at Mother Teresa’s order from sisters who left (Salon) One of the most striking things about the new podcast “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left” is how some of the former nuns describe their experiences with life behind the walls of Mother Teresa’s world-famous order, the Missionaries of Charity: in language reminiscent of the way we talk about cults. They use terms like “isolation” and “brainwashing.” They were only permitted to write home once a month and visit home once every decade. They describe what it feels like to look at a single human: as having a direct line to holiness…