We know Pakistan punishes blasphemy with the death penalty, but how many blasphemers are there in Pakistan? From July 13, we have an answer, thanks to a report by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony.
It claims that 400,000 social media accounts spread “extremely blasphemous material against the most revered figures, including Allah Almighty (God), the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the Ahl al-Bayt (Prophet’s family), the Mothers of the Believers, the Companions of the Prophet, the Holy Quran, and the national flag [of Pakistan, which includes Islamic symbols].”
Even considering that the same individual may have multiple accounts, the number of those risking the death penalty is enormous. Through which method the Ministry arrived at the figure of 400,000 and the claim that an “epidemic” of blasphemy is hitting Pakistan is not explained.
Doubts arise when we read in the report that, among the owners of these 400,000 accounts spreading blasphemy, “the FIA [Federal Investigation Agency] Cyber Crime Wing has already apprehended 140 individuals involved in these crimes, with 11 of them having received the death penalty from trial courts and two having their death sentences confirmed by the High Court.”

In early July, Javeria, a seven-year-old girl, was raped in Chichawatni, a rural subdistrict (Tehsil), in Sahiwal district, in what is the latest and most chilling example of violence against women.
This problem is widespread in Pakistan, with tens of thousands of cases each year, affecting mainly girls and women from ethnic and religious minorities, this according to local human rights activists.
Javeria is from a Christian family. On the day of the attack, she had gone to a store to buy certain things. When she did not return, her father, Javed Masih, started looking for her, eventually finding her in an abandoned building while a man was raping her.
The man fled the scene but was later apprehended by police, while the girl was admitted to Sahiwal District Hospital for a few days.
Voice for Justice, a Pakistani organisation that provides legal aid to those who cannot afford it, offered to represent Javeria, whose family is destitute.
Like Javeria, “girls from to religious minorities are specifically targeted because they are less likely to receive help from police and other officials in the search for justice,” Voice of Justice chairman Joseph Jansen explained.
“Often in these cases the culprits are not prosecuted and police agents tend to side with the people from the majority religion, i.e. Muslims,” he lamented.

The highest authority of the Chaldean Church in Iraq, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, has been forced to leave the patriarchal see in Baghdad and move to a monastery in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, via Istanbul.
This is a direct consequence of the “deliberate and humiliating campaign” against the Chaldean patriarch by the Babylon Brigades, a pro-Iranian Christian militia.
Such persecution is compounded by the decision of Iraq’s president to withdraw “the Republican Decree (147), an unprecedented [act] in Iraqi history”, Card Sako says in a statement in Arabic and English posted on the patriarchate’s website.
A few  days ago, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid withdrew what could be called the “institutional recognition” of the office of the patriarch.
According to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Arab, al-Kildani wants to include the Christian question in its political agenda and use it “in the service of the militias that control Iraq behind whom is Iran”, unlike the patriarch who has always tried to “preserve the independence of the Chaldean Christian community.”
According to the governor of Wasit, Muhammad Jamil al-Mayahi, Cardinal Sako “is a symbol of unity and brotherhood, and his departure from Baghdad is a loss for all of us.”
Meanwhile, in the cities of Karamlesh and Erbil Iraqi Christians have rallied in support of the Chaldean patriarch.
“The entire Christian community of Iraq is threatened, and Chaldean and Syriac Assyrians have united to affirm their support for the patriarch of the Chaldean Church,” said several associations, such as the Assyrian Democratic Movement, the Popular Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Council, the House of Mesopotamia (Bet-Nahrain) Patriotic Union, the Sons of Mesopotamia (Bnay Nahrain) Party, and the Assyrian Patriotic Party.

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 ways, the service at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary feels like a standard Sunday Mass. But at this church in Qatar, the small Gulf emirate hosting the World Cup, there are some tweaks.
The church sits in a “religious complex” housing other Christian denominations. Its building looks non-descript from the outside, with no crosses on its exterior. Sunday Mass is celebrated also on Fridays and Saturdays, the weekend days in the conservative Muslim country.
From Masses to baptisms, weddings and confessions, the church provides a window into the religious life of Catholic expatriates in Qatar. Mass is offered in multiple languages, including English, Arabic, Konkani, Tagalog and Sinhala, to cater to Catholics from India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and other countries. While Qatar is unusually full of visitors now for the World Cup, migrant workers already make up the majority of the country’s population of about 3 million.

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 in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus celebrated by a priest of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
They follow the 1962 edition of the Tridentine Mass and liturgical forms used prior to the Second Vatican Council, spreading confusion among the laity about the validity of the SSPX’s ministry.
“We are attracted to it because it nourishes our faith. Many young Catholics struggle with the watering down of the faith in many parishes,” Elizabeth said.
The Mass she attends is in Latin, which probably not many in her congregation understand. But they follow a book where the English translation is given to help them understand.
Elizabeth and others who prefer to attend the Tridentine Mass, which was abrogated in 2021, know that they are part of a schism started by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
But Elizabeth has her own reasons to reject her parish under Kuala Lumpur archdiocese.

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 the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) close to the China border. The fighting began on July 3 and those who fled have taken refuge in the Catholic Church compound at Wai Mai town. Gam Aung, who led the villagers from Nan San Yang, said more villagers were likely to flee as reports of violence continued to pour in on July 6.
“We escaped with only a few clothes, leaving behind our homes and livestock. Hope we might be able to return to our village in a week or two,” Aung told UCA News on July 7.
Amid the uncertainty, those who fled the village were worried about how long the church groups and local authorities will continue to feed them.
“We will certainly need food, medicines and arrangements for school children for a longer term,” Aung said.
Father Vincent Shan Lum, the parish priest of Nam San Yang village, said he fled with the villagers on July 3 and they may need to stay in the church compound for weeks amid the tense situation.

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 wanted, he and others gang-raped her and, after killing her, tried to destroy her body with acid.
Shazia worked at a day-care centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where she first met the man who now stands accused of her death.
On 6 June, when she did not return from work, her family searched for the mother of three – two boys, Salman (16) and Abrar (6), and one daughter, Aliza (7) – without success.
The next day, they went to the police to file a report, concerned because Shazia and her family were convinced that her husband was beaten to death 18 months earlier, not by “thugs”, as the police asserted, but by the same people who killed Shazia.
Physical attacks and rape have been used countless times as coercive methods of conversion, above all, against women from religious minorities in Pakistan.
Shazia’s case, her rape and murder for refusing to convert, have sparked a new wave of fear but also anger and protests among the country’s Catholic minority.
Her relatives say that she had told her sister-in-law about Mani Gujjar’s harassment and attempts to get her to convert and marry him.
So far police have arrested only one of the four suspects, Mani Gujjar himself; his brother and two cousins, who allegedly participated in the crime, are still at large.
Joseph Jansen, president of Voice of Justice, said he was concerned about the incident, and urged the authorities to take strong action against the perpetrators.
For Jansen, whose NGO provides legal counsel through Pakistan’s first digital legal portal, the persecution of religious minorities needs to be curbed as soon as possible.

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 Cambodia reported.
During the program, church officials called the martyrs the “fathers” of today’s Catholic community in Cambodia.
“The testimony of the martyrs guides us along the way” Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, the Apostolic Vicar of Phnom Penh and an MEP missionary, said during the program.
Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzález, the apostolic prefect of Battambang, Pierre Suon Hangly the apostolic prefect of Kompong-Cham, priests, nuns, and laity attended the Mass in remembrance of the “Cambodian Martyrs.”

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 Thelappilly, an Indian Catholic priest of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate (CMI), coordinator of the social works of Nepal Carmel Mata Samaj, an NGO that has been active in Nepal as part of the mission that this religious institute opened in the country for a decade.
“We arrived on March 22, 2011,” Fr. Thelappilly recounts, “at the request of Msgr. Anthony Sharma, a Jesuit who was Nepal’s first local bishop and later died in 2015. We belong to the St. John’s province of our institute, which has missions outside our home country as well as in northern India. Currently here in Nepal we are six missionaries active in four different missions: Punarbas and Parasan in Kan-chanpur district and in Dhangadhi and Phulwari in Kailali district, all in the westernmost part of the country.”
Compared to the capital Kathmandu these are much more underdeveloped areas of Nepal.
“The inhabitants belong mainly to the Magar, Chhetri, and Tharu groups known for their ancient traditions and culture ,” Fr. Ajo continues. ”Agriculture provides them with a basic livelihood, but in local markets for their products they earn very little. Occasionally, then, the region receives heavy rains and subsequent flooding, which makes life even more difficult. There are also landless people who are completely dependent on daily work in neighboring India or in Dhangadhi, the most important city in the area. Most of their children work in hotels and markets as child laborers.”

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 scratch – homes, schools, jobs – because, “other-wise, people will leave.” To avoid this, the vicariate met on 13-15 June in Iskenderun (Alexandretta) to discuss the situation and decide what to do in the coming weeks to deal.
“Christians are no different from other minorities,” Bishop Bizzeti said. “They are affected by the same problems like every-one else: housing, jobs, education, daily life, ordinary things. All this will take years to fix. Even today it is hard to say what can be done from the outside to help; the key point is to keep in mind that Christianity’s roots are in these places.’
For the prelate, “Western Churches should pressure on their governments and raise awareness so that they can help and contribute to the Christian presence in the Middle East. I’m talking about serious policies, to put on the agenda.”
The 7.7 earthquake remains an open wound in Turkey. The situation is still one of active emergency in 11 large areas in southern and south-eastern Turkey and in northern Syria.