Komal Maria, 23, walks smoothly through the metal detector at the entrance to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Lahore, a northern city regarded as Pakistan’s cultural capital. She routinely presents her purse for inspection, placing her phone in the tray and her keys beside it before nodding as a guard briefly pats her down. For Maria, the armed guard at the church gate, body scanners and heavy iron turnstiles are simply part of the church she grew up attending. Her father, Iqbal Masih, remembers a very different time.
The 52-year-old Masih, walking behind his daughter, appears uneasy. As the guard sweeps a handheld metal detector across his chest, his shoulders tense. He sighs as he looks up at the razor wire coiled above the high concrete wall. “Going to Sunday Mass has changed since the 9/11 terror attacks,” Masih says, noting that over the past 25 years, churches across Pakistan have reinforced their iron gates and checkpoints, and armed security has “become a permanent reality” in churches.
The heightened security has also changed the Church’s pastoral administration, drained its finances and altered the nature of its major churches, which were once seen as cultural landmarks and meeting points for people of different faiths, according to Church leaders.
Almost overnight, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, peaceful places of worship and Church-run schools were forced to tighten security amid fears that militant Islamists could view them as supporters of the US and attack them. After the U.S.-led war in neighboring Afghanistan began in October 2001, Christian communities across Pakistan sought state protection for their communities and institutions as they faced heightened threats from domestic extremist groups that equated Christians with Western countries. “What began as temporary, emergency measures slowly hardened into permanent fixtures,” said Younas John, 62, a long time parishioner in Lahore. “To respect local cultural sensitivities,” churches also introduced more discreet screening arrangements.
