Asian

At ‘Church City,’ a taste of Catholic life in Qatar

Hymns echo through the spacious, blue-walled church. The congregants listen to the Gospel and the homily. They kneel, eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer or palms turned skyward. They line up to receive Communion as a choir belts out: “Lord, for my sake, teach me to take one day at a time.” In many […]

Lefebvre priests’ push spreads Malaysian Church confusion

In a busy commercial hub outside Kuala Lumpur, above a row of shops, sits the chapel where Elizabeth attends Sunday Mass. But the 27-year-old Catholic, who would identify only as Elizabeth, is discreet about her newfound love for the traditional Latin language Mass. She is not alone. Some 120 Catholics gather regularly for Sunday Mass […]

Christians flee fresh violence in Myanmar’s Kachin state

More than a thousand people, most of them Catholics and Baptists, have fled their village in Myanmar’s northern Kachin state after fresh fighting erupted between the military forces and ethnic Kachin rebels.Those who fled belong to some 160 families from Nan San Yang village, located barely 20 km from Laiza town, which is the headquarters of […]

Christian widow raped and killed in Lahore for refusing to convert

Shazia Imran, a Christian woman, was kidnapped, raped and killed by four Muslim men because she refused to convert to Islam and marry a man who had set his eyes on her. Mani Gujjar is the main suspect in the death of the 40-year-old Christian widow. After failing to get her to do what he […]

Cambodian Catholics honour martyrs killed by Khmer Rouge

More than 3,000 Catholics including bishops, priests, and laypeople in Cambodia participated in a Mass to commemorate clergy, religious, and laypeople who were martyred by the Pol Pot regime in the seventies. The event was held in Tang Kork District, Kampong Thom Province, about 100 kilometres from the capital Phnom Penh on June 17, Catholic […]

Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, a school for Nepal’s marginalized

On mission in a very poor area of western Nepal. With a big dream that is taking its first steps: that of opening a school in Dhangadhi to give a future to the children of those living in this extreme periphery at the foot of the Himalayas. This is the missionary frontier of Fr. Ajo […]

Vicar of Anatolia warns that the Christian community is at ‘great risk’ after the earthquake

The Christian community “is at great risk” and still reeling from the quake of 6 February. Amid “great desperation”, only a handful of Christians are left in places like Antakya (Antioch), the core of the devastation, this according to Bishop Paolo Bizzeti, vicar of Anatolia. In Turkey’s quake-ravaged regions, everything has to be rebuilt from […]

Report accuses former President Rajapaksa of obstructing mass grave investigations

Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused of tampering with police records to obstruct investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989. The charges are contained in a report entitled ‘Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations’ publish-ed by a number of activist […]

Eviction-facing Indian Catholics to fight Muslim charity’s claims

Goans oppose tourism project near 16th century basilica