A second church has been demolished by authorities in China’s Jinan province — and a third church is expected to suffer the same fate soon.

After Liangwang Catholic Church was demolished on July 17, local Catholics prayed at the site and protested the unreasonable behaviour of authorities.

Shilihe Catholic Church was demolished earlier this year and sources expect Wangcun Catholic Church to soon be reduced to rubble.

All three churches were in normal use and legal churches officially registered with the religious administration, according to a source in Jinan.

Liangwang Church was built in 1920. During the Cultural Revolution, it was classified as a private house. After lengthy legal procedures, the church was rebuilt in 2006.

At noon on July 17, three female church members were on duty at the church when more than 40 people forced their way in, searched the members, took their mobile phones and made them leave the church.

Another 30 people later arrived to help with the demolition, which went ahead despite the church still containing many items.

The church was built on land that was distributed by Liangwang village and had been granted a permit for legal activities. It was demolished because its area in Pian district is to be developed with new buildings and infrastructure. After the demolition, the parish priest and president complained to authorities but have not received any reply.

“The stools, altars and dedication boxes were all pressed into the ruins. The ruins later became a fire and all the items were burned out,” said a church member.

The now retired Archbishop Oswald Gomis of Colombo faced huge challenges during the takeover of Sri Lanka’s Catholic-run schools by the state in the 1960s. The government policy was “certainly not a good thing” and was intended to hit Catholics, said the 85-year-old archbishop, who was honoured by President Maithripala Sirisena for his outstanding religious and social service at a celebration in Colombo on July 22.

Celebrating 50 years of his episcopate, Archbishop Gomis believes the government should not have taken over church-run schools at that time.

“The government thought they [the schools] were avenues for conversion. But because of that, today all other religions have got whacked,” he said. “I have always believed the Catholic Church has a very important mission in Sri Lanka, and that is education.”

Catholic schools were meant to instil Catholic values in their communities and to encourage their practice through teachings of the religion daily.

Archbishop Gomis founded 15 affiliated schools as branches of established schools during his tenure as archbishop.

After nearly a decade resisting eviction from ancestral land, ethnic Khasia Christians in Bangladesh are still uncertain whether the land they have lived on for generations will become their own.

About 700 ethnic Khasia from 86 families in two villages have been battling to resist eviction by Nahar Tea Estate in Moulvi-bazar district since 2010.

Most of those affected are Catholics belonging to St Joseph’s Catholic Church, under the predominantly indigenous Sylhet Catholic Diocese in north-east Bangladesh. “The Khasia are peaceful people and they have the right to live in their ancestral land like every citizen of Bangladesh,” Quazi Rosy, a ruling Awami League lawmaker, told ucanews.com.

Rosy was part of a delegation from the Parliamentary Caucus on Indigenous Peoples that visited Nahar 1 and Nahar 2 punjis (forested villages with clustered houses) on July 22. Research and Development Collective (RDC) activists were also part of the delegation to lend their support to the Khasia.

Over 3,500 people, mostly Catholics, joined a charity run organized by Indonesia’s Jakarta Archdiocese to raise money to build churches in various parts of the country.
Jakarta has declared 2018 the “Year of Unity.”

The “Run4U” campaign on July 29, one of a number of Church-led fund-raising runs in recent years, offered people the chance to test themselves with a 2.5-kilometre walk or a more gruelling 5k run in Tangerang, a city in Banten province some 25km from Jakarta.

Participants included priests, nuns, seminarians, elderly and young and people from other religions. “Our main purpose is to raise money to help out with the construction of several churches [that are in need of financial support],” Paskah Widarani, one of the organizers, told ucanews.com.

“Those parishes were chosen as they really need our help right now,” said Widarani.

The Chinese authorities have been eliminating visible Christian signs, crosses and engravings for several months due to a campaign of “synicization.” This adds to the ban on meetings even in summer, with young people under the age of 18, who are also forbidden to attend mass. At the same time, the scandal of ineffective vaccines for new-borns has spread throughout the country. This scandal is caused by widespread corruption, by the little control exercised by the authorities; by protectionism for Chinese firms. The priest-blogger Shan Ren Shen Fu (“the hermit priest”), shares his reflection on these events with our readers. In particular, he points out that if more faith and values were spread in Chinese society, there would be less corruption and more effective vaccines. Furthermore, his regret is that in China there is a concern to vaccinate children in the body, but it is forbidden to vaccinate them in the spirit, excluding them from the cate-chism. In this way the lack of honesty and healthy conscience in society is perpetuated.

On August 6, a brother priest of mine told me on WeChat: “Brother, our bishop called me saying to remove the cross and the inscription ‘Catholic Church’.” In the last two years this confrere has worked with great difficulty. There was no church in the area, and the diocese bought a two-storey shop and turned it into a place of prayer for the local faithful, since then the priest immediately organized the people to clean up and decorate the place.