A Pakistani court has acquitted a Christian couple who have spent seven years on death row for alleged blasphemy, their lawyer says, in a case that rights groups have long singled out for fair trial issues.
The Lahore High Court acquitted Shafqat Emmanuel and his wife Shagufta Masih after a hearing in the eastern city of Lahore on June 3, the couple’s lawyer Saif ul Malook told Al Jazeera.
“They have been acquitted on all charges […] and the capital sentence is set aside,” said Malook.
Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, the lawyer for the complainant in the case, confirmed the verdict to Al Jazeera.
“The appeal was allowed after hearing the arguments [from both sides],” said Chaudhry. “The grounds and reasons for the decision have not yet been given.”
Emmanuel and Masih were convicted and sentenced to death in April 2014 for having allegedly sent “blasphemous” text messages that were insulting to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and its holy book, the Quran, to a local Muslim leader in their native Gojra, a town located 165km (102 miles) west of provincial capital Lahore. The couple denied the charges, with their lawyer arguing they were illiterate and unable to compose the text messages they were accused of sending, court documents say.
Blasphemy is a sensitive subject in Pakistan, where certain forms of the “crime” carry a mandatory death sentence.
Violence around blasphemy allegations has become increasingly common, with mob violence or targeted attacks against those accused of the “crime” or people who defend them.

Fr William Nellikal who has been in charge of the Malayalam section of Radio Vatican and Vatican News for the past 12 years will retire on 13, June. He worked 4 years during the reign of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and nearly 8 years with Pope Francis. He will be resuming the pastoral ministry of his alma mater, the Archdiocese of Verapoly soon after a short period of rest.

The Society of Jesus has suffered the largest number of Covid deaths among Catholic priests in India despite all alertness and preparations, says the congregation’s South Asia chief.
“Despite our goodwill and efforts, we lost about 37 Jesuits to Covid-19 this year,” Father Stanislaus D’Souza, president of the Jesuit Conference of South Asia told on June 10.
As on June 11, the coronavirus pandemic claimed three bishops, 125 diocesan and 131 religious priests, nine religious brothers and 248 religious women, according to a list compiled by Capuchin Father Suresh Mathew, editor of the Indian Currents weekly.

An Indian priest on June 11 took over as the chief content editor of Radio Veritas Asia, a pan-Asian radio service of the Catholic bishops of Asia.
Fr Feroz Fernandes, a member of the Society of Missionaries of St. Francis Xavier or better known as Society of Pilar, was the editor-in-chief of a Konkani weekly “Vaura-ddeancho Ixtt” (Worker’s Friends), Goa, western India, from 2008 to 2013.

Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as a new member of the Vatican body that supports the Eastern Catholic Churches throughout the world. The cardinal is the sole addition to the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, which also assists the Latin-rite Catholic dioceses of the Middle East. Cardinal Tagle is the current prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples or Propaganda Fide, which oversees the church’s vast “mission territories.” Formerly known as the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, it began as part of the Propaganda Fide, established by Pope Pius IX in 1862.

In the first five months of 2021, in 151 days of the current year, despite the serious pan-demic situation, 127 episodes of violence against Christians took place in India: says to Agenzia Fides “United Chri-stian Forum” (UCF), reporting the data obtained from the special “Toll-free number”, a telephone line activated to monitor incidents of violence against the faithful in the country.
Among the complaints registered on the toll-free num-ber by Indian Christian citizens, there are attacks by mobs or threats and intimida-tion of various kinds, for reasons of religious affiliation.
“Furthermore, there is a tendency not to file the First Information Report (FIR), the official complaint handed to the police, which was presented only in 15 cases out of 127 episodes of violence”, notes to Fides A.C. Michael, a lay Catholic and leader of the UCF.
According to data sent to Fides, the state of Chhattis-garh, in central India, leads the count of the largest number of accidents (19), while 17 cases occurred in Karnataka and Jharkhand. Religious violence, it highlights, can be exacerbated by the conditions of poverty and destitution caused by the pandemic, across the national territory.
555 women, 120 dalits and 189 tribals were injured in these incidents. The incidents of religious violence, notes the UCF “have become so com-mon that no one feels the need to condemn them anymore, including political, civil society and religious leaders”, says Michael, signaling the danger of indifference.
Thanks to the interventions of lawyers and volunteers who provide free legal and social assistance, in the first six months of the current year 28 places of worship or prayer meetings have been reopened while 66 Christian faithful arrested by the police have been released. UCF, based in New Delhi, is an organization that promotes fundamental and civil rights and is an interfaith Christian body that fights for the rights of the Christian mi-nority. It works with network partners such as Alliance Defending Freedom India, Religious Liberty Commission of Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) and Christian Legal Association.

The diocese of Miao on June 6 launched a campaign to mark the World Environment Day. At small event held at Christ the Light Minor Semi-nary, Bp George Pallippara-mbil of Miao inaugurated the “Mitthi Sona Hai” (Earth is Gold) campaign to make people self-sufficient by encouraging them to cultivate and produce their food.
Celebrating the World En-vironment Day 2021 with the diocesan minor seminarians, the Salesian prelate said, “The Earth is gold and it has every-thing for everyone. We only need to till it and discover it.”
The campaign aims at making every parish in the diocese to produce its vegeta-bles and fruits.
Quoting the creation story of the Bible, the bishop said, “God asks us to subdue the earth and not subjugate it. It calls for free and equal co-existence with the nature. We are to be friends to the mother earth and not its master.”

“While scrolling through my social media feed, my eyes fixed upon the troubled reflection of innocent angel Sunita Masih. She was staring back at me with helpless orbs. Her eyes betrayed the discomfort of humiliation and, without even uttering a single syllable, she proclaimed the tale of injustice through her misery-laced expression” reports Anee Muskan from Pakistan. Sunita, a 14-year-old Christian girl, was raped, molested, beaten and subjected to bullying in which her head was shaved by the culprits.
The crisis we are facing regarding forced conversion is highlighted by this story. The good fruits are the innocent girls born with the fate of being a minority in Pakistan. The poisonous weeds are the extremists living in our society.
A report by the Centre for Social Justice cited 162 allegations of forced conversion between 2013 and 2019. This figure merely covers reported cases; there are so many other cases that barely receive the limelight of sympathy and mercy.
Last year one case that actually received media attention was that of Maria Shahbaz, a 14-year-old Christian girl who was abducted and raped. To eradicate the stains of sexual abuse, the girl was forcefully converted and with the knot of marriage the whole dilemma of sexual abuse and abduction was erased.

The recent arrest of a Vatican-approved bishop, priests and seminarians in north-central China came as a shocking development, if not sur-prising, as religious persecution in the communist country has continued to intensify under the watch of President Xi Jinping.
Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Xinxiang in Henan province was arrested by police on May 21, a day after police detained his seven priests and an unspecified number of seminarians. They are accused of violating new regulations on religious affairs.
The prelate and the priests drew the ire of authorities by using an abandoned factory as a seminary for religious formation of future priests.
They are charged with breaching a new set of rules for religious clergy implemented this month. It requires all clergy to register with the state in order to serve Catholics while asking Catholics to elect their bishops democratically.
The rules also make it illegal to perform religious activities including worship in places not registered or controlled by the state.
The arrests sparked condemnation from Christian and rights groups.

Four Indian women, who joined as Islamic State fighters and now lodged in an Afghanistan prison, seem to face a bleak future.
The women, all from Kerala, had accompanied their husbands to join the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP).