The Catholic Weekly 12 April 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 18 12, April, 2020 WITH HOLY Week celebra- tions closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis postponed the traditional Good Friday col- lection for the Holy Land to September. The Vatican announced on 2 April that the pope ap- proved a proposal to hold the collection in churches world- wide on 13 September. “The Christian communi- ties in the Holy Land, while exposed to the risk of conta- GOOGLE SEARCHES for “prayer” have surged world- wide in step with the surge of emerging cases of COVID-19, according to a European re- searcher. The rising interest in seeking information about “prayer” on Google “skyrock- eted during the month of March 2020 when COVID-19 went global,” wrote Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Universi- ty of Copenhagen, Denmark, and executive director of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Cul- ture. Using Google Trends data on internet searches for “prayer” for 75 countries, she said she found that “search in- tensity for ‘prayer’ doubles for every 80,000 new registered cases of COVID-19.” The findings were part of a preliminary draft study titled, In Crisis, We Pray: Religiosity and the COVID-19 Pandemic , released online on 30 March for public comment. The working paper was to be up- dated with new data “regular- ly,” she wrote. Bentzen, who authored a paper in 2019 looking at the impact natural disasters had on “religiosity,” said she want- ed to study whether the COV- ID-19 crisis was impacting “one of the deepest rooted of human behaviours – religion.” Specifically, she said she wanted to know whether the pandemic “has intensified the use of religion” globally, given that the coronavirus has affected more than 200 coun- tries to date. The data-timeline showing “search intensity on ‘prayer’ is flat before a country registers its first case of COVID-19,” and then drastically rises af- ter the first case is registered in a country for all regions of the world, including Muslim majority nations, she wrote. ¾ ¾ Junno Arocho Esteves ¾ ¾ Carol Glatz Google searches for ‘prayer’ skyrocket Collection postponed Google searches for “prayer” have surged worldwide in step with the increasing cases of COVID-19. SCREENSHOT: CNS Women pray at the Stone of Unction, or Stone of Anointing, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. PHOTO: CNS/DEBBIE HILL gion and often living in very trying circumstances, benefit every year from the gener- ous solidarity of the faithful throughout the world, to be able to continue their evan- gelical presence, as well as to maintain schools and welfare structures open to all citizens for education, peaceful coex- istence and care, especially for the smallest and poorest ones,” the Vatican said. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, an administra- tively autonomous province of the Franciscan order, uses the collection to carry out its mission of preserving most of the shrines connected with the life of Jesus as well as for providing pastoral care to the region’s Catholics, running schools, operating charitable institutions and training fu- ture priests and religious. The collection, taken up at the request of the pope, is administered by the Francis- can Custody and the Congre- gation for Eastern Churches, which uses it for the forma- tion of candidates for the priesthood, the support of the clergy, educational activities, cultural formation and subsi- dies. The Vatican press office released some details on 4 March of how the money was used from the 2019 collec- tion, which totaled more than A$13.3 million. The congregation spent more than A$5.2 million on academic, spiritual and hu- man formation of seminari- ans and priests of churches under their jurisdiction as well as men and women reli- gious. - CNS “The increases in prayer in- tensity documented here are the largest the world has ex- perienced since 2004, the ear- liest date for which the Google Trends data is available,” she wrote. Google Trends measures keyword searches as a share of all total searches so any increase in internet activity doesn’t skew the data. Bentzen concludes that “we humans have a tendency to use religion to cope with crisis. The COVID-19 has proven no exception.” “The rise in prayer intensi- ty supersedes what the world has seen for years” and may likely continue to rise as the crisis worsens, she added. In response to Bentzen’s request for comments, some researchers cautioned against her assumption that “an in- creased share of Google searches for religious terms thus reveals an increased de- mand for religion.” One professor of sociology said the data only proved that more people were googling “prayer” and, without know- ing people’s motives or back- ground, it was not necessarily evidence of “an increase in religiosity.” The searches could “very well be the people who would normally have attended reli- gious services but now can’t,” so rather than representing a net increase in a “demand for religion,” it may reflect a grow- ing need to access resources and services online. But whatever the motives or reasons for the surge in searches, the online demand is real and massive with some Catholic outlets already re- sponding to the huge increas- es they have seen on their own platforms. James Rogers, chief com- munications officer at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Catholic News Service that, as of 23 March, “mentions for the USCCB on Twitter increased 2,783 per cent and the number of Face- book followers increased 172 per cent, the second straight week of triple digit increases.” “Practical advice for how best to start or strengthen the prayer space in your own home does seem to me to be driving a lot of the traffic. That’s why our social media has tried to focus on simple ideas that anyone could try to get them started,” he added. - CNS The rise in prayer intensity supersedes what the world has seen for years” and may likely continue to rise as the crisis worsens.” Jeanet Sinding Bentzen In brief Security shuts 6 parishes FR HUANG Jintong, 60, parish priest of Saiqi in China, has disappeared in Chinese police custody. On 3 April Chinese se- curity forces arrested him up Zand took him to an unknown location. A few hours later, Bishop Vin- cenzo Guo Xijin, unoffi- cial (and auxiliary) bish- op of Mindong, received a call from public security advising him to prepare clothes for Fr Huang as he would not be able to return home for a month. Huang is one of about 20 priests who have re- fused to sign member- ship in the “independent Church” controlled by China’s Communist Par- ty. It is likely he will be subjected to political propaganda and brain- washing sessions in an attempt to forcibly extract his membership. After the signing of the provisional agreement between the Vatican and China, the government launched a campaign to eliminate the unof- ficial communities by requiring each priest to sign a document to ad- here to the “independent Church”, refuse relations with foreigners, prohib- it religious education to young people under the age of 18 and limit reli- gious activities to within the narrow confines of churches. Many priests equate signing the document with denying their bond with the Pope and the universal Church, be- coming state officials. Since the end of 2019, at the pasrishes of at least 6 priests who refuse to sign official documents have been closed. Father Huang’s parish of Saiqi, located approxi- mately 60 kilometres east of Beijing, is among the largest and has around 5,000 faithful who wor- ship in it. - AsiaNews.it WORLD