Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Archbishop Gian Carlo Perego of Ferrara-Comacchio, the president of the Italian bishops’ Migrantes Foundation, called for attentiveness to the needs of “the people fleeing countries where fundamental rights are not protected and where they have lost everything due to environmental disasters and wars.”

“Once again, we do not want to create humanitarian and legal channels of entry, but rather we prefer to build walls, forgetting that migrants, as Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have recalled, are a blessing,” he said.

Archbishop Perego added:

We must not abandon asylum seekers to human traffickers, but we must make the Mediterranean a route along which we can accompany them on ships arriving from all over Europe. The key word is accompaniment, and there should be a European plan of accompaniment.

In addition to electing a new president, new vice president, and six new committee chairmen, the bishops will discuss migrants and refugees, decide whether to consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart in view of the American Semiquincentennial, and decided whether to hold a National Eucharistic Congress in 2029.

Citing Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti, the conference stated that “working for the common good and social justice is the highest form of charity, when politics is at the service of love for persons in all their dimensions, and not just economic or technological interests.”

The prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education announced at a press conference that a papal document on Catholic education will be published on October 28, the 60th anniversary of Gravissimum Educationis, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education.

The CCEE represents European Catholic bishops’ conferences; the CEC is a fellowship of over 100 Orthodox and Protestant communities. The original Charta Oecumenica was signed in 2001; the revised version, according to the CCEE, will be “in line with current ecumenical needs.”

The first such conference took place in 1927 in Lausanne, Switzerland; the most recent, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1993.

The conference is the centerpiece of the World Council of Churches’ commemoration of the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. 350 Protestant and Orthodox communities are members of the WCC; Pope Leo XIV will commemorate the anniversary during his apostolic journey to Turkey next month.

Pope Leo XIV accepted the resignation of Bishop George Bugeja, OFM, from the leadership of the apostolic vicariate of Tripoli, Libya. The prelate, a native of Malta and only 63, had led the vicariate since 2017.

As he expressed condolences and prayed for the late prelate’s soul, Pope Leo described Cardinal Menichelli as a “generous priest” and “dear brother who served the Church and the Holy See with devotion.”