Leading Catholics in terrorism-plagued Indonesia have criticized prosecutors who demanded the death sentence for the alleged mastermind behind a deadly spate of suicide bombings and attacks against police that have left many dead.

From a moral perspective and the view of the church, the death penalty is wrong no matter what the crime is, said Father Antonius Benny Susetyo, an adviser to a presidential unit that promotes communal tolerance and understanding. “The death penalty does not provide an effective deterrent against perpetrators of these sort of crimes,” he said.

He was responding to calls on May 18 from prosecutors demanding that judges impose the death sentence on Aman Abdurahman, alleged leader of an Islamic State-linked terror group, Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), who is standing trial on terrorism charges in a Jakarta court. Abdurahman, 46, is standing trial for allegedly masterminding a series of attacks that included a February 2016 bombing in Jakarta that killed eight people and an attack in November 2017 against the Batak Society Christian Church of Oikumene in Samarinda, East Kalimantan that killed four people.

Despite tight security and fears of further deadly attacks, defiant Christians in Surabaya flocked to services and Masses on May 20 – Pentecost Sunday – according to church officials.

Christians at the Santa Maria Catholic Church and Diponegoro Indonesian Christian Church held services in their church buildings which were attacked by suicide bombers on May 13. Meanwhile, members of the Surabaya Pentecostal Church, which suffered the most damage, held services in a large tent. Twelve Christians were killed during the attacks, committed by members of the same Muslim family.

Church officials told on May 20 that Christians prayed as usual, while fully-armed police and military personnel stood guard outside.

Those entering the churches were thoroughly searched and had to pass through a metal detector.

Father Alexius Kurdo Irianto, parish priest at the Santa Maria Church, said he did not see any decline in church attendance during Mass.

Two Christians have survived after they were fired upon by armed men who wanted to prevent them from regaining possession of their land.

The incident occurred on May 17 in the village of Sankhatra (Punjab province), where the Christian community blocked the streets to protest against the ille-gal occupation of their properties. For months they have been unable to go back into their homes because of a land dispute with a politician from the ruling party. The wounded are Shahbaz Masih Gill, 36, and Samina Tasneem, 28. Both suffered gunshot wounds to the legs and are currently in hospital.

The police took their statement and filed a case under the Pakistan Penal Code, sections 324 (Attempt to commit qatl-i-amd, i.e. murder), 148 (Rioting, armed with deadly weapon), and 149 (Every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object).

“I was coming home after fixing an electric motor when armed men on a motorcycle stopped and attacked me with wooden sticks and punches,” Gill told.

“With my forehead bleeding, I joined the protest against the attack. We had gathered at 6:50 pm when they returned and shot five fires.” Despite this, “We did not panic and retaliated by throwing bricks at the attackers causing them to flee. That’s when I realised blood was dripping from my right leg.”

“Planning and implementing a suicide attack by taking their children with them is a new” form “of violence. It is a family tragedy,” decries Msgr. Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, Arch-bishop of Jakarta and President of the Indonesian Bishops’ Con-ference (Kwi).

He was commenting on the dynamics of the attacks that have hit three churches in Surabaya, capital of the province of East Java two days ago. Meanwhile, following the death of Nathanael, an eight-year-old Catholic child, the number of victims of the co-ordinated attack has risen to 12.

The terrorists belonged to a single terrorist family. The father, Dita Oeprianto, is the Pentecostal Church bomber (Gpps), while the two teenage sons carried out the attack on the Catholic Church of Saint Mary Immaculate (Smtb), aboard a motorcycle. The mother and her two small daughters, aged nine and 12, carried out the suicide attack at the Christian Church of Indonesia (Gki).

“I am convinced – says Msgr. Suharyo – that the two young daughters had no idea what would happen. This is incomprehensible and I think this kind of thing should never happen again, clouding our humanity.”

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tau-ran, President of the Ponti-fical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, visited Saudi Arabia (April 14-20), where he was received by King Salman. During his stay, the media described the visit as a “desire for rapprochement,” as a “stage in the opening of the Saudi kingdom to other religions,” as a “ripples of openness.” However, Tauran’s own words were the most emblematic. For him, “What is threatening all of us is not the clash of civilisations, but rather the clash of forms of ignorance and radicalism,” words that describe in a nutshell all the religious tensions that afflict the world.

The visit itself was the first by a high envoy of the Catholic Church to Saudi Arabia, cradle of Wahhabism, one of the most radical currents in Islam. During his stay, the prelate spoke about issues such as freedom of religion and equal rights for believers of all faiths. Even if he did not explicitly address the issue of allowing churches in the country or even letting Christians worship, the visit had.

Nearly 9,000 Nepali immigrants living in the U.S. will lose their temporary protected status (TPS) after the Trump administration determined that the country has sufficiently recovered from a 2015 earthquake to accept their return. Aside from the deaths and injuries caused by the earthquake, said Lisa Parisio, an advocacy attorney for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), Nepal has not yet recovered from “massive damage to public and private infrastructure across the country,” including homes, health care faci-lities, schools, roads, sanitation and water purification infrastructure.

“All of this has resulted in a situation that remains in Nepal today where the country is absolutely in no shape to safely return the 9,000 TPS holders,” Parisio said.

In a statement April 26 announcing the decision, which came a day after the deadline for the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether or not it would extend the status, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen contradicted this assessment.

Nepal’s government is still up in arms over claims by the European Union that Christians are not being fairly represented in parliament, while sensitive issues such as the eating of beef or the rights of Hindus and mino-rity groups get much greater consideration.

On March 21, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) drew attention to the conclusions and recommendations in the final report on the House of Representatives and provincial assembly elections by the European Union’s Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) to Nepal, which was released in February.

The EUEOM raised the point that Christians were not represented in the election, which operates on a proportional representation system, despite comprising 1.4% of the population.

This would seem to indicate that Nepal’s electoral system is not fully inclusive, as has been claimed. In fact, the charter sets out no provision for religious inclusion apart from guaranteeing this for Muslims. Instead, inclusion is worked out on the basis of people’s caste or ethnicity.

Four decades is enough for an independent nation to determine its true identity.

However, recent political manoeuvrings, gradually influenced by a small but strong group of Islamist hardliners and lethal rise of radicalism in recent years, show the struggle for a true national identity for Bangladesh is intensifying.

Major political parties vie for power by appeasing hardliners and their supporters, while an increasingly authoritarian government tries to solidify power with unfair policies and laws disregarding democracy and greater public interests.

Militancy has weakened amid a crackdown by the government, but it has not withered as a recent event proves. A knife attack on Dr Zafar Iqbal, a prominent liberal intellectual, on March 3 was just a warning sign. Iqbal is one of Bangladesh’s best-known physicists, as well as a popular writer of science fiction and children’s books.

St Paul de Chartres Sisters in Vietnam were attacked by gang-sters while they were protesting construction of a house on their former land.

On May 8, a dozen nuns tried to prevent workers from building a house on the land next to their convent in Hanoi. Workers had taken trucks and tools to the site on the previous night.

Witnesses said gangsters employed to guard the site “insulted and attacked the nuns with batons and one nun was beaten to unconsciousness.”

They said many policemen were present but did nothing to stop the brutal attack.

In a petition to Hanoi authori-ties in 2016, the nuns said their congregation had taken legal ownership of the 200-square-meter land plot in 1949.

After 1954, when communists controlled northern Vietnam, the government rented a novitiate building on the site for an institute of microbiology. Authorities later divided the site and sold it to other people. The nuns have asked the government to return the land many times over the years.