"Declericalization" is a challenge facing Church leaders in much of the world, including the Catholic Church in Timor Leste. The issue mainly refers to laypeople willingly assuming roles traditionally performed, if at all, by priests, whom Timorese Catholics regard as God's representatives. More generally, it concerns laypeople confessing their faith by ...

The World Youth Day events in Sydney, Australia, had people running from one venue to the next, but one delegate remembered the reason for it all when he found himself, accidentally, left out. Nothing seemed to go right for Daniel Tay, the 28-year-old Singapore bureau chief for UCA News, on July ...

The recent Seventh Plenary Assembly of the Catholic Biblical Federation (CBF) decided to support biblical pastoral ministry in Asia with a special focus on China for the next six years. Other priorities the CBF affirmed at the June 24-July 3 meeting in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, included animation of Basic Ecclesial ...

Bishop Leopoldo Jaucian of Bangued hopes the apostolate he was recently assigned to lead can help local ethnic Chinese better fit into Philippine society. In an interview with UCA News at Manila's Shrine of Saint Jude on Aug. 7, the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) bishop also expressed hope that ...

I was disappointed to hear about our missing five. Of the 33 young Catholics who went from Myanmar to the World Youth Day (WYD) in Sydney, those five have failed to come back. I feel sorry for Father Robert Bya Reh, Myanmar's Catholic youth director. After the July 15-20 event, he spent ...