Vatican & World News 05.09.2026

0:00Laudatoa Jesus Christos, Vatican and World News. Today, Saturday, September 5th is the feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa. And these are today's headlines. The Holy O praises nuns for weaving communion with threads of prayer, work and eucristic adoration. Two people were rescued in Nepal ten days after devastating floods and landslides struck the country. And the apostolic vicar of northern Arabia tells Vatican radio how the war with Iran is affecting him and his people. In the Vatican, I'm Christopher Wells. Following a on Saturday with contemplative nuns from Mexico, Pope Leo XIV upheld their role in the church as they adored the Blessed Sacrament.

1:04He called them women who weave communion with the threads of prayer, work and eucristic adoration. Devin Watkins tells us more. Pope Leo XIV met on Saturday with several members of the perpetual ador of the most blessed sacrament also known as the sacramentai nuns. In 1807 by Blessed Maria Mother Lena of the Incarnation, the contemplative nuns devote their lives to the adoration of the Blessed Sacramentai and Nide. They follow the rule of Saint Augustine. In his address Pope Leo called the sacramentai nuns his presence a radiant testimony of the gratuitousness of God who soes within the human heart, the desire to seek and contemplate his face. Their devotion to eucristic adoration he said offers a response to the profound longing for God written deep in the human heart. Is Abusqueda constante de Vrozcho de Dios? This constant search for the face of God which particularly characterizes monastic life he said takes on a special dimension in the vocation you have received.

2:05This vocation he added is expressed in a life devoted entirely to the continuous and silent adoration of God who has made himself bread and who invites us to unite ourselves with him in the sacrifice of the altar so as to form one body. Pope Leo pointed to Saint Augustine's explanation that the bread and wine upon the altar are the sacrament of the unity of the faithful in Christ. For this reason he said we need a eucristic spirituality that is a spirituality of ecclesial unity in love. In their daily lives devoted to adoration the contemplative nuns radiate throughout the world the beauty of the face of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. He recalled to be weavers of communion he said with the threads of prayer and work, eucristic adoration and fraternal sharing within the monastery. In conclusion Pope Leo XIV invited the sacramentine nuns to live their consecration to God with renewed hope and a desire for holiness.

3:05Remember he urged that fidelity to the gospel is the best path for those who guided by the holy spirit dedicate themselves to loving God and their neighbor. I'm Devin Watkins. Turning to world news a power plant worker and a woman were rescued in an appal and separate operations on Saturday, ten days after devastating floods hit the country. Meanwhile international search and rescue teams continue searching for thousands of people still missing. And Abortoni has this report. According to authorities the man was rescued from a hydropower tunnel bringing the total to three workers pulled alive from the Trishuli hydropower plant in Nepal which was struck by flash floods that washed away valleys and buried entire villages on the 26th of August. The rescued woman was found alive inside a damaged house in Nua Kott town and airlifted

4:07to Kathmandu for treatment. At least 1375 people have been killed in the floods with more than 5,000 missing according to Nepal's disaster management agency. Shortly after the disaster a joint rescue team of Nepalese military personnel and South Korean disaster experts swung into action and are trying to reach surviving workers in the 12 hydropower stations across Nepal where 900 people are missing with roughly 500 believed to be trapped in various tunnels. Meanwhile geophysicists say that satellite images from just days before the collapse of rock and ice that triggered the catastrophe suggest that a section of the glacier and the rocks it's sat on top of were accelerating in the weeks before the actual collapse. However, the precise sequence of events remains unclear and experts say such events are difficult to predict using existing monitoring techniques.

5:10What they do agree upon is that with the high altitude regions of the Himalayas warming 50% faster than the global average they face greater environmental risks. I'm Linda Boudoni. Now, swearing world news, the 128 states party to a framework that regulates or bans weapons considered as indiscriminate or causing it to many injuries agreed on a document on Saturday that would pave the way to international rules on autonomous weapons. Agreements to the non-binding text marks a significant step after more than a decade of talks on how to regulate weapon systems that can identify and engage targets with varying degrees of autonomy, sometimes called killer robots. The agreement comes as alarm grows over the use of lethal autonomous weapon systems in conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East.

6:13The document reached by consensus is non-binding but could open the door to formal treating negotiations. And in the latest escalation of the U.S. Iran War, Tauron on Saturday accused the United States of attacking an Iranian tanker near Kharga Island, an extremely important hub for Iran shipments of crude oil. The U.S. did not immediately comment but a new strike raises the risk of sparking a new round of Iranian attacks on U.S. allies and interests in the region. Amongst them are the Persian Gulf states dragged into the war because Iran sees them as U.S. allies in the area with American military bases on their territories. Bishop Aldo Barardi, the Absog Vicar of Northern Arabia, which comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, was in Rome this past week for meaning with the group that comprises all the Latin bishops of the Arab regions.

7:13They were received in audience by Pope Leo IV on Thursday. Vatican Radio spoke with Bishop Aldo Barardi asking him to share the Pope's message as well as his own experience of the ongoing conflict. So it was very important for us to meet the Holy Father because of course we are in link with him through the Nunesia of the Decasteery but to meet him directly was very very important to express all our suffering, all our questions, all our worries and our concern regarding the Gulf and regarding all the region because we can make some differences between the Christian native from the countries and the Christian who are expatriate while living in the Gulf. And the Holy Father received all our concern and also our presentation about the reality and the reality of the situation. So it was important for him to listen to us but also to listen to him

8:15and of course encouraging and supporting us about his administration and we can contact them for any moment, any difficulties but his message was about peace of course how we can help for peace by our prayer, by our dialogue, by maintaining the contact with the different fraction and also maybe the most important for us is to be witnesses, witnesses of Christ, the reason Lord and witnesses of the gospel in that region with Islamic countries where a conflict between also the different interpretation of Islam but it's important to be united as a Catholic church because in the Gulf we have different rights, different traditions, different languages so we are all one Catholic church and the unity of the Catholic church is also an example for the region.

9:18So our testimony is maybe silent but very effective. Staying in the Middle East, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, on Saturday met with Palestinian Americans including relatives of US citizens killed by Israeli settlers in a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank that has been the target of settler attacks. The visit comes as settler violence and what is widely perceived as being due to Israeli's government in action has increasingly drawn international condemnation including from US allies. The Israeli government has condemned settler violence, the perpetrators are rarely arrested and even less frequently prosecuted. Palestinians in the West Bank have faced a surge in settler while their freedoms have been increasingly curtailed under military occupation since Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition came into power in late 2022. Meanwhile as a new school year

10:24begins classrooms are reopening and children are returning to their studies but that is not the case for many young Palestinians. For many in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon schools run by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRA, have provided a pathway to opportunity for generations with some 2.5 million students graduating. However financial constraints and conflict have disrupted or shattered their progress, threatening to further derail their prospects for the future. In this interview with UNNU's Reema Abadza, UNRA director of education, Julei Daikon, discusses the challenges facing their education programs. I think it's very clear to many people because we've been in the media quite a bit in the last few years for our financial crisis and the political crisis surrounding the agency. That is the greatest risk.

11:25Every year we have to work very hard to see how we can open the schools and keep them running. The children of course have a right to education regardless of their status of refugees. It is a big, big, big effort for us to ensure that we can fund our teachers' salaries and benefits and school principals and maintain the buildings. We're very grateful in most of our fields, our host countries provide the textbooks for free. We are able to run the schools. Unfortunately, we are not able in this year to run the schools five days a week. Our teachers and many of our staff, most of our staff actually, are being paid only for 30 hours instead of 37 hours a week of work. This impacts the amount of education that we're able to give

12:29the students as well as the teacher's ability to prepare their lessons and to deal with parents, deal with issues facing the children. That is certainly one of our biggest challenges this financial. The quality of the education program partly because of our financial crisis, but also because of the political crisis in the region is very much also suffering, particularly in Gaza. Most of our schools in Gaza, the actual buildings have been closed and turned into shelters back in October 2023. While we've managed to open a good number of them or parts of spaces within these shelters for temporary learning spaces for the youngest children, the majority of education since 2024 in Gaza has been taken place online through a distance education program, which of course is not an ideal learning environment. As I think the whole world learned that during COVID,

13:30but it is all that we can offer the majority of the Palestine refugee children in Gaza at the moment. And that's all the time we have for this edition of Vatican and World News. From on these other stories, we invite you to visit our website, www.vaticnews.va. Many thanks to Stephen Goethe or our send engineer in studio in the Vatican. I'm Christopher Wells.