RELIGION HEADLINES

(SRN NEWS) – Memorials to hundreds of Jews murdered by German forces during World War Two have been unveiled in a forest in Poland. The ceremony this week took place at the site of a Nazi labor camp where Jews were forced to work in the fields before they were murdered in 1943. Auschwitz and other death camps are well known, but the Polish site of Adampol had received little attention until now. Prayers accompanied the event, which was attended by local school children and watched by the descendants of Holocaust survivors far beyond Poland on a livestream.

Greek leaders have revived a long-standing demand for war reparations stemming from Nazi Germany’s World War Two occupation of the country.  During a visit to Greece this week, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier rejected the demand, saying the issue had been long settled. Steinmeier stopped at sites of Nazi atrocities in Greece during his visit.  Most of the Greek Jewish population was deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps during the occupation, while tens of thousands of other Greek civilians died of starvation.

A second high court has ruled that the Japanese government’s policy against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. The ruling is the latest in a series of decisions upholding plaintiffs’ demands for gay marriage and states the unconstitutionality more clearly than a 2022 lower court decision. Asia is generally a socially conservative region, but LGBT activists have been targeting it for at least a decade and the United Nations is pressuring countries as well.  Japan’s conservative party has been trying to hold the line, but will probably have to capitulate now.

Pope Francis’ child protection board has issued its first-ever global assessment of the Catholic Church’s efforts to address the clergy sex abuse crisis. The board is calling for victims of pedophile priests to have greater access to information about their cases and the right to compensation. In its most critical note, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors called for greater transparency in the Vatican’s sex abuse office. It says the office’s slow processing of cases and its secrecy are re-traumatizing the victims.

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