A Catholic bishop in Pakistan has warned of an increase in young Christian and Hindu girls being kidnapped, then forced to convert to Islam and marry their captors.

“There have been many kidnappings recently,” Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore told papal charity Aid to the Church in Need.

“The girls are usually 14, 15. The men often already have one wife. They can be 25 or older. They can also be younger, more like 20,” he added.

The archbishop said he believes the kidnappings sometimes include a religious motivation, since the victims are typically Christian or Hindu. However, he also said that the perpetrators are driven by lust.

According to Aid to the Church in Need, research in Pakistan indicates that up to 700 girls were kidnapped in one year alone.

Shaw said Church leaders had reported the abductions to the police, who were unresponsive. They then contacted government officials, who were more receptive to their concerns.

“Along with the Islamic council, they arranged a meeting with myself and leaders from the Muslim and Hindu communities,” the archbishop said. During that meeting, “[o]ne young Islamic scholar criticized the kidnappings and said forced conversions are not allowed.”

Shaw stressed the importance of enforcing laws against kidnapping in order to end the growing surge of abductions.

“Kidnapping is a crime. It has to be treated as one,” he told Aid to the Church in Need. In August, Catholic and other religious leaders signed a joint resolution asking the Pakistani government to adopt safeguards protecting religious minorities, a move that they said is much needed in the 97% Muslim nation.

A new Pew Research Centre report examines public confidence in groups of people who hold positions of power and responsi-bility in America, including religious leaders.

The other groups included in the survey were members of Congress, military leaders, police officers, principals of K-12 public schools, journalists, leaders of technology companies and local elected officials.

Respondents were asked their views about several aspects of confidence in the performance and outlook of these groups of leaders, such as whether they care about people, handle resources responsibly or provide accurate information to the public. Results were released on 19th September. “In general, U.S. adults express positive opinions about the role of religious leaders play in their communities,” said a Pew report on the survey results. “U.S. adults express the most confidence in religious leaders’ ability to fulfil the spiritual needs of their communities on a consistent basis.

“Three-quarters say religious leaders do a good job providing for the spiritual needs of their communities ‘all or most’ or ‘some of the time,’ while just 23% say religious leaders do this only a little or none of the time. Another seven in 10 U.S. adults say religious leaders care about people like them at least some of the time.”

U.S. adults “are divided over how frequently religious leaders admit their mistakes and take responsibility for them,” it said, with half saying these leaders do this at least some of the time and half saying religious leaders do this “only a little” or “none of the time.”

Pew said the opinions about religious leaders varied by religious affiliation, age and frequency of attendance at religious services.

Adults who have a religious affiliation are more likely than the religiously unaffiliated — those who identify themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” — to say religious leaders “perform key parts of their jobs at least some of the time.”

Among adults who identify with a religious faith, Pew said, evangelical Protestants are among the groups who hold the most positive opinions about religious leaders.

A Syrian war monitor associated with the opposition said on September 9 that over 120 Christian places of worship have been damaged or destroyed by all sides in the country’s eight-year conflict.

Some of the attacks were deliberate, such as the Islamic State group using bulldozers to destroy the ancient Saint Elian Monastery in Homs province in 2015. The majority, however, were caused by front-line combat, shelling or rockets.

Christians made up about 10% of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million, who co-existed with the Muslim majority and enjoyed freedom of worship under President Bashar Assad’s government.

The report by the Qatar-based Syrian Network for Human Rights, which collects statistics on the war, said government forces were responsible for 60% of the 124 documented attacks since fighting erupted in March 2011. The rest were blamed on IS militants, the al-Qaida-linked group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other factions of the armed opposition.

The Hungarian government and researchers have a joint responsibility to warn the global community of the ongoing persecution of Christians, “the largest and least talked-of humanitarian crisis today,” a government official told a conference in Budapest.

Tristan Azbej, state secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office for persecuted Christians, spoke at a conference organised by the state secretariat, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Budapest’s National Public Service University (NKE).

Christianity is said to be the most persecuted religion in the world, with 215 million people suffering discrimination or genocide-like persecution for their religion worldwide, he said. Some 4,150 Christians have been murdered in 2018, he said.

Azbej noted that the government’s Hungary Helps programme, aiming to help persecuted Christians in their homelands, was launched on the basis of data provided by the university.

British-born John Bradburne, who died in Zimbabwe 40 years ago, could be on his way to be-coming the country’s first canonized saint.

Bradburne is a revered figure among the Catholic community in the landlocked southern African country of Zimbabwe. According to reports, Bradburne was shot in the back after he was abducted from his hut in Mutemwa in the north-east of Zimbabwe. Born in 1921 to Anglican parents in Cumbria, England, Bradburne converted to Catholicism in 1947 while living with Benedictine monks, after he had a religious experience during World War II.

He lived after his conversion as a pilgrim, shuttling between England, the Middle East and Italy, living out of one bag. He was a prolific poet. Bradburne joined the Secular Third Order Franciscan in 1956.

He later made contact with Fr John Dove, a Jesuit friend living in Zimbabwe. Bradburne asked whether there was a “cave in Africa” where he could pray. Dove encouraged him to move to Zimbabwe, where he arrived in 1962.

In Zimbabwe, he told a Franciscan priest the three desires of his life: “to serve leprosy patients, to die a martyr, and to be buried in the Franciscan habit.”

In 1969, seven years after his arrival in the country, Bradburne’s desire to care for leprosy-afflicted patients was fulfilled, when he was appointed the lead caretaker at Mutemwa Leprosy Settlement, a center that cared for leprosy patients.

Bradburne spent hours with patients. He rose at 3:00 each morning, and washed patients, bandaged them, ate with them, and talked with them. Some of them he carried to Mass. But he clashed with leaders at the centre over the conditions in which patients lived, and eventually, he was fired.

Seven religious schools in Eritrea, four of them sponsored by the Catholic Church, have been seized by the country’s government this month. Catholic bishops in the country say the move was motivated by “hatred against the faith.”

“If this is not hatred against the faith and against religion what else can it be?” Eritrea’s bishops asked in a Sept. 4 letter addressed to the Minister of Public Education, SemereRe’esom.

The seven schools seized by the government include three run Protestant and Muslim groups, according to Comboni Catholic missionaries serving in the area. The schools have been nationalized, and will reportedly now be run by the country’s education ministry.

“The actions that are being taken against our educational and health institutions are contrary to the rights and to the legitimate freedom of the Church,” the bishops wrote in their September 4th letter.

The bishops also suggested that the government raise to them any objections to the way in which Catholic schools and hospitals are administered in Eritrea.