World in Brief

Evangelicalism is now the majority faith in Central America, a new survey shows. 42% now identify as Protestants (mostly evangelical) while under 40% identify as Roman Catholics.

The research was carried out in Nicaragua, Guatemeala, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Honduras by M&R Consultores. In Nicaragua, for example, the Catholic Church has lost 60% of its adherents since 1950 and currently only one person in three claims to be Catholic. Non-Catholics represented only 4% then, but by 2023 that number has risen to 65%.

(cid:31)e Scripture Distribution Statistics report of the United Bible Societies shows that Bible societies worldwide distributed over 35 million Bibles in 2022 – about 3 million more than in 2021.

The countries with the highest Bible distribution last year were Brazil (4.8 million), the USA (2.6 million) and India (2.5 million). China increased by 50%, from 1.2 to 1.8 million Bibles, and in Buddhist-majority Cambodia Bible distribution doubled to 25,000. Most Bibles were distributed in Spanish (5.8 million), followed by English (5.4 million), Portuguese (4.9 million), and Mandarin Chinese with 1.8 million copies.

Holy Spirit Church, a Free Evangelical church in Cuxhaven, Germany which has a congregation speaking in Korean and German, has burned down.

A neighbour alerted police after smoke poured from inside, but when the fire brigade arrived the entire building, a former commercial premises, was already in flames. Firefighting was only possible using heavy breathing apparatus. Over 100 emergency personnel (including volunteers) tried to extinguish the blaze. The damage is estimated at over €200,000.

(cid:31)e SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis, Russia’s leading freedom of religion and belief (FoRB) monitoring group, is to be disbanded following a court ruling.

The First Appeal Court of General Jurisdiction upheld the claim by the Russian Department of Justice, that SOVA had committed ‘gross and irreparable violations’ of the Public Associations law and its own statutes by holding events outside the city of Moscow. SOVA’s director Aleksandr Verkhovsky, denounced the ‘obvious and extreme selectivity’ of the Department’s claims against human rights groups, while ignoring ‘hundreds of others’.

Ugandan police have detained a 28-year-old man entering a church in the capital Kampala with an explosive device he planned to use to attack it.

The authorities are now seeking three other men also believed to have been sent on similar bombing missions elsewhere in Uganda, police said. Their motives were unclear, but the Islamic State (IS)-linked Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) has previously carried out deadly bomb attacks in Uganda.

The first complete translation of the Bible in the Mohawk language has been published in Canada.

Harvey Satewas Gabriel has studied his native Mohawk language all his life. When he was 17 he heard his United Church minister, John Angus, translate the Scriptures into Mohawk as he preached. Fluent in Mohawk, Harvey was eventually asked to read the Scriptures in Mohawk at church, which required him to translate short passages. In 1980, he took on the task of translating the entire Bible, which is now complete.

Pastor Harendra Singh, his wife Priya and their three-year-old son have been imprisoned in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, for holding a prayer service in their home. They were charged with ‘luring innocent people to Christianity’.

The couple had no choice but to bring their young child with them into prison. This is the latest in a series of arrests of believers in Uttar Pradesh. One Christian leader said: ‘The situation has reached such a stage that even holding a prayer service or reading the Bible at home can land you in jail.’

Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen is now ‘hopeful’ that all the charges against her will be dropped after she stood trial for a second time. The former Minister of the Interior was on trial for ‘hate speech’ for three expressions of her Christian faith on marriage and sexuality.

She was charged with ‘agitation against a minority group’, under Finland’s ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ laws. She was acquitted last year by the Helsinki District Court, but is back on trial after the prosecution appealed.

Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal has ruled that the territory must legally recognise same-sex couples. Although homosexuality has been decriminalised in Hong Kong since 1991, same-sex marriages or civil unions are not permitted.

The judgement rejects petitions to expand the current legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples and to recognise overseas same-sex marriages. However, the court has given the Hong Kong government two years to create a new legal framework that grants them some legal rights.

The Supreme Court in Mexico has voted to decriminalise abortion. The judgement comes two years after it ruled that criminal penalties for abortion were unconstitutional. But Mexico’s states and the federal government had since been slow to repeal penal codes. The new ruling legalises abortion across all 32 of the nation’s states.

The Supreme Court said the denial of the possibility of a termination violated the human rights of women. ‘In cases of rape, no girl can be forced to become a mother – neither by the state nor by her parents nor her guardians,’ it said.