Chunchon Diocese realized a long-term dream when it opened a pastoral centre to offer faith education and cultural events to Catholics living in this isolated area of South Korea.
The diocese held the blessing ceremony for its Yeongdong Catholic Pastoral Centre in the coastal city of Gangneung’s Juminjin harbour on March 31. Bishop Lucas Kim Un-hoe of Chunchon presided over the ceremony.

The seeds of Catholic faith were sown in Yeongdong some 100 years ago. However, as most of the pastoral events were held in Chuncheon, the city where the  diocese is based, Catholics from other areas could not join because the diocese is divided by two mountain ridges. Bishop Kim said, “This area lacks venues for education and it was hard to offer programs here. The new centre will appease the thirst of the faithful.” From April, the centre will offer classes on the Bible, Catechism and a reading forum. It will also offer monthly lecture programs.

Jailed Christian attorney Nguyen Van Dai received an award by the German Association of Judges on April 5 for his efforts to defend human rights in Vietnam.

Dai, who has been held incommunicado at a prison in Hanoi, was the first Vietnamese lawyer to win the Human Rights Prize for fighting for a democratic and liberal future in the communist country, said Deutscher Richter-bund (German Association of Judges) the largest professional organization of judges and public prosecutors in Germany.

“The path to democracy in Vietnam is still long and needs people like Dai,” the organization said.

On April 4, Dai’s wife, Vu Minh Khanh, was stopped at Noi Bai Airport so she couldn’t fly to Germany to receive the award. She was told that she was not able to leave the country until 2019.

Vu Quoc Dung, the chairman of the human rights organization “Veto! Human Rights Defenders’ Network” based in German, received the award on Dai’s behalf.

Dai, 47, and his assistant Le Thu Ha were arrested in December 2015 for being accused of conducting “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” after he had held a workshop on basic human rights at the house of a former political prisoner in Nghe An Province.

Authorities in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning have formally arrested two South Korean Protestant pastors accused of trying to help North Koreans flee across the border into China.

Neither pastor has been named. One was arrested along with his wife in February as they tried to board a plane for South Korea from Qingdao in the eastern province of Shandong, while the second was detained at a hotel in the northeastern city of Qinhua-ngdao, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.

While both wives have since been released, the two pastors remain in police detention.

Peter Chung, spokesman for the human rights group Justice for North Korea, said their families have hired lawyers to represent the pastors, now that the cases look set to proceed to trial.

“The cases are now with the state prosecutor’s office; all the files are with the prosecutor now,” Chung told RFA on April 5. “This was approved on March 29.”

Scores of Christians facing trial over the lynching of two suspected terrorists after two church bombings in 2015 are being forced to convert to Islam in return for their acquittal, activists said. Nearly 60 Christians are on trial for the mob killing of two men mistaken for militants shortly after two Taliban bombers attacked worshipers at the Roman Catholic Church and Christ Church in Youhanabad in Lahore on March 15, 2015.

The bombings resulted in death of 15 people while 72 others were wounded. Angry protesters managed to grab two suspects from police, beat and lynch them to death. They were later identi-fied as passers-by.

More than 100 Christians were rounded up in the wake of the incident and put on trial. Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS), an inter-denominational organisation working for persecuted Christians in the country, said that Prose-cutor Syed Anees Shah offered Christians acquittal if they agreed to convert to Islam.

“How can we expect justice when people sitting in courts are inwardly biased? We demand that the government takes action against the public prosecutor,” Sohail Habel, a member of CLAAS told ucanews.com.

“In my 13 years of human rights activism, I have seen many such offers made to non-Muslim prisoners,” he said, adding that a CLAAS legal team was support-ing the victims and trying to dissuade them from capitulating.

Pakistan prosecutor removed from Christian case

A Pakistani prosecutor who tried to push Christians into converting to Islam in exchange for an acquittal in a lynching trial has been removed from the case, activists said. Pakistani media reported that Deputy District Public Prosecutor Syed Anees Shah told 42 Christian prisoners before an anti-terrorism court in Lahore that he could “guarantee their acquittal” if they converted to Islam.

Indonesian Catholic, Muslim, and Protestant groups have pledged unity to fight against slavery and human trafficking in Indonesia’s maritime and fishing sector.

They signed a joint declaration recently to end slavery at the vice president’s office. The joint commitment is “our effort to show that we want to work together with the government to end the problem,” said Father Paulus Christian Siswantoko, executive secretary of the Indonesian bishops’ Commission for Justice, Peace and Pastoral for Migrant People.

Activists in the Philippines called attention to what they described as the “Calvary of the poor” during a protest march to mark the start of the observance of the Holy Week.

Protesters carried crosses symbolizing issues that burden the poor — lack of housing, killings, and human rights abuses — in a dramatization of the passion Jesus Christ on April 10, the Monday in Holy Week.

Hundreds from slum communities joined the procession to the presidential palace in Manila to condemn the government’s “anti-poor policies.” “Promises made by the government should not remain as promises,” said Gloria Arellano, spokeswoman of the urban poor group Kadamay.

President Rodrigo Duterte announced that he would provide free housing for the poor and distribute land to landless peasants as part of the government’s peace initiatives with communist rebels.
The Philippines concluded another round of peace negotiations in The Netherlands aimed at ending almost five decades of communist insurgency.

Arellano, however, said a lot of Duterte’s campaign promises, including wage hikes for workers and an end to labor contracting, remain unfulfilled.

During the march, protesters noted similarities between Jesus’ suffering and the Filipino people’s “continuing Calvary.”

“Poor Filipinos must continue to pressure the government to address the concerns of the homeless,” said Arellano.

“Instead of crucifying or shaming the poor, we call for solidarity with them in our prayers and our actions,” she added.

Aside from their call for free mass housing, urban poor groups said, “there is still so much to do” to address the plight of poor Filipinos.

The issues raised by the protesters during the “Calvary of the Poor” included the spate of killings of suspected drug users and peddlers, the proposal to revive capital punishment in the country, the lowering of the age of criminal liability for minors, the proliferation of fake news, and climate change, among others.

He could have been a researcher or an entrepreneur but he chose to get involved in civil society. And at the age of 54, Herman Kumara believes that he made the right choice.
“I am really happy,” he says. “My former faculty comrades are earning money, sometimes a lot of money, but they are not happy with what they are doing. Personally, I have what I need to eat and to survive and that’s enough.” As a student, Herman Kumara studied biology at the University of Kandy in the centre of Sri Lanka, one of the nation’s most reputable universities.
There he was president of the Newman Society which organized the Catholic students.
“We Christians are a minority in the country but an influential minority,” he says. “We are like the salt that gives taste to the curry.” He had planned to do a master’s degree when the civil war broke out. “In 1989, some inhabitants of my village suspected me of being a member of the Marxist party, the JVP. They wanted to kill me.,” he recalls.
“So I realized what oppression of a minority really meant. As Catholics, we could also feel threatened.”
As a result, he ended his studies. “I did not want to be a white collar worker and I understood that my generation was suffering.  That it was necessary to find alternatives.”
A priest friend suggested that he join the Catholic development agency, Caritas. The movement then supported the struggles of farmers, fisherfolk, and workers in tea plantations as well as women war victims.
“I did not have confidence in the hierarchy,” he comments with reference to the religious authorities who removed him from Caritas.

According to a The World Happiness Report 2017, Norway is the happiest country on Earth. Americans are a bit ‘more sad, the Chinese as happy as 25 years ago. The report shows that money is not everything for the people of the 155 countries studied. The rankings are based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy with four factors from global surveys. In those surveys, people give scores from 1 to 10 on how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are.
In Asia, Singapore occupies the 26th place in the rankings; Thailand 32; Taiwan 33; Malaysia 42; Japan is in 51 st place; South Korea ranked 56th; the Philippines 72nd. Cambodia is the saddest Asian country, ranking in 129th position.
Overall, Hong Kong was ranked 71st in the world and China to 79th. The report finds that people in China are no happier than 25 years ago. This contrasts sharply with the growth of income per capita in the last 25 years. The evaluations on quality of life declined steadily from 1990 until 2005 and today approximately amounted to the levels of the ’90s. “China’s soaring GDP growth over the past quarter century is viewed by many analysts as the hallmark of a successful transition from socialism to capitalism,” the report said. “But if the welfare of the ‘common man’ is taken as a criterion of success, the picture is much less favourable and more like that of European transition countries. The other Asian giant, India, is positioned only at 122th place, lower than Pakistan (80), Nepal (99th), Bangladesh (110) and even Iraq, which ranks 117th place.

China’s two government appointed Catholic bodies have released their revised constitu-tions with “Sinicization” as a central concept, seen as part of a broader strategy by Beijing to make all religion in the country more “Chinese.” Other changes in the appointment of senior officials finds the government -run bodies at even greater odds with standard Vatican practice, under-scoring the difficult road ahead as the Holy See continues its talks with Beijing over — in the first instance — the appointment of bishops. Specifically, “Sinicization” is now included in both constitutions.

One way in which the freedom of religion or belief in a country can be measured is whether minorities are permitted to carry out their own rituals during key ‘rites of passage’ such as birth, marriage and death. One of the world’s fastest-growing Christian communities is that in Nepal. Between the censuses of 2001 and 2011 its Christian population more than doubled from 180,000 to 375,699.
Nepal’s new Constitution, introduced in 2015, recognizes the freedom of religion or belief but, as this video report by Vishal Arora shows, death in a Christian family in Nepal brings not only sorrow but also a gruelling struggle to find land for burial. As local residents object to any burial in their vicinity, churches in Kathmandu and surrounding areas have bought 130,000 square feet of land on a secluded mountain to build a cemetery.
“The biggest challenge is the road that leads to this cemetery,” says Joshua Magrati, Joint Secretary of the recently built Rest Cemetery in Makwanpur district, about 30 miles from Kathmandu, the national capital. “It’s about two miles from the main road. We have spent about 2.5 million Nepali rupees and yet it’s far from being complete. However, we have already buried two bodies here.”
Only a 4×4 vehicle can reach the cemetery, but few can afford it. Many will have to trek for one and a half hours on the steep, makeshift road, carrying the body.
“We chose this place because of two reasons. One, we wanted a place that was really far from any human habitation, as opposition comes mainly from local communities near a Christian graveyard,” explains Parshuram Sunchuri, a board member of the cemetery. “Two, the nearer the land to the city, the more expensive it is.”
“There is no other Christian cemetery near Kathmandu,” says Ang Dawa Sherpa, the cemetery’s General Secretary. “There is one in Pokhara, and one in Chitawan. They are far from here.”