Asian

Cast out for doing the dirty work in Pakistan

Shafiq Masih, a 45-year-old Catholic in Pakistan, stood inside a manhole, half his body submerg-ed in the dark slush of sewage. Someone asked him to look up, and the camera clicked. That photograph, published in several international publications, made him the face of sanitation workers in the Muslim-majority country. “But it only deepened my seclusion […]

Korean religious groups seek to dispel Islam fears

An interfaith group in South Korea organized a seminar to help people clear misconceptions about Islam, including the wearing the hijab, to forge better ties with the minority faith in the country. The Korean Religious Peace Conference (KCRP) held a public seminar on the dialogue between Korean religions and Islam titled “Islam: Approaching Peaceful Co-existence […]

A farewell to pacifism in Japan

Detaching itself from the horrendous memories of a nuclear explosion 77 years ago and mull-ing to bury its pacifist constitution behind it, Japan is getting ready to be armed from top to bottom to take head on three neighbour-ing nuclear-power nations at the same time. Since the Ukraine war started in February this year by […]

Churches in Middle East hapless as Christians migrate en masse

Pervasive persecution, at times amounting to genocide, has seen millions of Christians in the Middle East killed, kidnapped, uprooted, imprisoned and discriminated against. It has taken a toll on the survival of the oldest Christian communities in the world, located in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, where the Abrahamic faith was born. Earlier, Christians in […]

Church calls for dignified burial for Filipino prisoners

Catholic bishops in the Philippines have called for the dignified burial of dead prisoners as the authorities in the country’s biggest penitentiary started burying 200 unclaimed, decomposing bodies. The authorities at the New Bilibid Prisons Cemetery in Muntinlupa City started the process of disposal of the unclaimed bodies on November 25 following an order from […]

Philippine Church slams violent land grabs from tribal people

Two Catholic dioceses in the Philippines have condemned atta-cks against ethnic tribal people who attempted to save their ancestral land from grabbing by a private corporation in the Min-danao region. The reactions from Malayba-lay diocese and Cagayan de Oro archdiocese came after guards posted by a private company alle-gedly fired shots at members of the tribal […]

Saudi Arabia to pay Filipino workers owed wages

Saudi Arabia will compen-sate 10,000 Filipino workers who lost their jobs in the Gulf country years ago and are still waiting for their salaries, Philippine offi-cials said. The announcement came after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Philippine Presi-dent Ferdinand Marcos met Fri-day on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in Bangkok. Philippine Migrant […]

Ancient Stone Marks China’s First Encounter with Christianity

Earlier this year, scientists anno-unced that the Black Death had ori-ginated in the Tian Shan mountain ranges that pass through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang (China), and Uzbekistan. Evidence for this reve-lation came after studying DNA from human remains in two 14th-century cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan. These are well-known archaeological sites, and on one of the tombstones is an inscri-ption in […]

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

Goans oppose tourism project near 16th century basilica