With the increasing rate of COVID-19 cases in Nigeria, the Catholic community is responding and supporting the government’s efforts to combat the virus.
In May, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria donated 425 church-run hospitals, clinics, and health facilities to the government. The hospitals, which will be used as isolation centers for coronavirus patients, were handed over to the presidential task force that coordinates the pandemic response across the country.
On June 2, former pastor Ella Jones was elected mayor of Ferguson, Missouri, with 54 percent of the votes cast. Jones currently serves as the council member for Ferguson Ward 1. She will be the first black mayor of Ferguson, as well as the first female mayor.
This was the second time Jones ran for mayor in Ferguson. In 2017, she lost to incumbent James Knowles III, who—due to term limits—was unable to run for reelection this year.
Since the beginning of 2019, Southern Baptist Convention president J. D. Greear has been among the highest-profile advocates for preventing sexual abuse and protecting victims of abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Now advocates for abuse survivors are criticizing Greear after his church decided to hire a teaching pastor who has been accused of mishandling an abuse claim in the past.
A day after Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University in Virginia, tweeted an image of a face mask depicting figures in blackface and dressed as Klansmen, Christopher House, an online instructor for the university, announced his resignation on Facebook.
In the early evening on June 1, President Donald Trump stood before the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington and held aloft a Bible for cameras.
The photo opportunity had an eerie quality: Trump said relatively little, positioned stoically in front of the boarded-up church, which had been damaged the day before in a fire during protests sparked by the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis.
The church appeared to be completely abandoned.