Nguyen Van Hai walked around watching hundreds of converts from other faiths making different styles of creches with colourful lights, pretty stars, evergreen trees, Santa Claus figures and other decorations in the compound of Rach Vop church in Soc Trang province on Dec. 18.
Those people, who have been attending courses in catechism for years to join the church, annually erect nativity scenes to decorate the church and celebrate Christ-mas.
“I am too old to put up creches but I am here to encourage people to make beautiful nativity scenes to mark Jesus’ birthday,” Hai, an 85-year-old convert, said.
Fourteen creches erected by groups of converts and children will be displayed around the church to attract people to visit the church and watch Christmas vigil performances. Groups that create the most beautiful creches will be given awards as a way to foster the tradition of making nativity scenes.
“I will invite my neighbours to visit the church on Christmas Eve so that they can see our creches and feel Christmas joy and peace,” the old man, who attends a course for catechumens at the church, said.

Children at the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta have rehearsed well for a traditional Christmas play they were forced to abandon by a terror attack five years ago.
The mayhem caused by two suicide bombers at the church in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province in 2017 is still fresh in the minds of the survivors.
“My eldest daughter was acting as Mary and the son was playing an angel. The terrorists jumped over the church gate, killing nine people and wounding 57. The costumes of some of their friends were stained with blood,” recalls Pastor Simon Bashir.
The nativity play was never held thereafter due to the looming fear of terrorism and then the coronavirus pandemic.
This year, Pastor Bashir encouraged his three children to participate along with their friends, some of whom belong to families of the victims.
The kids performed the nativity play at the jam-packed church on Dec. 11.
“Their spirits were high thanks to the Sunday school training. Even those injured sang jingles. We are not afraid of terrorists,” Bashir to UCA News.
The Methodist Church has dedicated the fourth Sunday of Advent to the martyrs.

In ancient times, the phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” — the voice of the people is the voice of God — was almost a sacred incanta-tion of every monarch.
When a king’s legitimacy was being questioned, all he needed to do was to resort to divine teaching that his rule was ordained by God because he was chosen by the people to be their ruler.
To seal the cap, the pope himself or a Catholic bishop crowns the king to symbolize the Catholic Church’s imprimatur of his king-ship.
In the recent Philippine elections, however, the “vox populi” statement was put to the test. Many Catholic clergymen and the country’s most influential prelates openly supported the candidacy of former vice-president Leonor Robredo.
For them, it was a moral crusade — a battle between good and evil — where no Catholic could stand on the middle ground.
Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas said there was no room for neutrality in the face of evil, where one is faced with a moral choice to side with the good.
“Supposing there is a troll farm [that spreads lies] and here is a truth farm, can you remain neutral there? You cannot be neutral. When we are neutral and there is oppression, we end up empowering oppressors,” the archbishop said in a homily.
Catholic prelates called these efforts a “pandemic of lies” that led to historical revisionism.
“Dear Brothers and Sisters, let us stand up for truth. Remember: goodness without truth is pretense. Service without truth is manipulation. There can be no justice without truth. Even charity, without truth, is only sentimentalism,” the bishops said in a pastoral statement.

Terrified residents expre-ssed grave shock as North Korean authorities publicly executed three teenagers by firing including two who alle-gedly watched and distributed South Korean movies, says a report.
A third teenager was accused of murdering his stepmother, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Dec. 2 quoting witnesses.
The officials in the ultra-communist pariah state have claimed that the crimes committed by teens aged around 16 or 17 were “equally evil” and forced the shocked residents of Hyesen city near the border with China to watch the firing.
“They said, ‘Those who watch or distribute South Korean movies and dramas, and those who disrupt social order by murdering other people, will not be forgiven and will be sentenced to the maximum penalty–death,’” said a local resident. The execution took place in October at an airfield in the city, the resident said.
“Hyesan residents gathered in groups at the runway,” she said. “The authorities put the teen-aged students in front of the public, sentenced them to death, and immediately shot them.”
Brutal public executions are not uncommon in North Korea, which the authorities typically use to terrorize people to deter them from any behaviour not permitted.
The executions came about a week after the authorities declared the state will hand down tough punishments for crimes that involve foreign media, especially those from South Korea.

Suman Haldar, a Catholic who runs a small grocery store in a Bangladesh village, is feeling the pinch thanks to skyrocketing prices and falling income which has led to the rationing of food in his six-member household. “I could afford chicken once a week even during the Covid pandemic, but now it’s become difficult to have it even once a month,” the 37-year-old father of two told. Haldar lives with his wife, kids and elderly parents in Baniarchar, a village in Gopalgonj district, in the southern part of the country. Worse is the situation of some 33 million people, who are estimated to be living below the poverty line in Bangladesh.
“Six months ago I used to earn more than 15,000 taka (US$145) per month, but now I struggle to make 8,000 taka,” he said, adding how his family was surviving on rice and vegetables grown on a tiny plot of family land covering about one-tenth of a hectare.

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 within my own Catholic community,” laments Masih, who says he rarely goes to church be-cause Catholics in his St. Paul’s Church in Lahore diocese ”do not consider me part of their” Cast out for doing the dirty work in Pakistan.
Shafiq Masih is one among the thousands of Catholic sani-tation workers who face discri-mination and social exclusion within the Church and society 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 within my own Catholic community,” laments Masih, who says he rarely goes to church be-cause Catholics in his St. Paul’s Church in Lahore diocese ”do not consider me part of their” commu-nity.
Masih is just one of the thousands of Catholic sanitation workers who face discrimination and social exclusion within the Church and society in Pakistan.

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 and Future” from Dec. 5-6 in the capital Seoul, the Ca-tholic Times reported on Dec. 7.
In his opening address, Kim Dong-eok, president of the Korean Muslim Association, emphasized that Islam is a “religion of peace.”
“There are people who mis-understand the true meaning of Islam in Korean society. I hope that many people will understand and cooperate with Korean Islam through this seminar,” said Kim.
“The image of Islam has become increasingly fixed as one of violence, dictatorship, and oppression”
The KCRP was established in 1965 by leaders of six religious groups — Protestantism, Buddh-ism, Confucianism, Won-Buddh-ism, Cheondo-gyo, and Catholi-cism — with an aim to promote dialogue and harmony among followers of various religions.

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 nuclear-powered Russia, Japan has been courting big-time defence spend-ers while adopting an unprece-dented level of economic sanct-ions against its maritime neigh-bour, which are also aimed at its communist neighbour China and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s re-calcitrant leader.
With the ruling Liberal Demo-cratic Party (LDP) enjoying consi-derable clout in society and a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Diet, it may institute changes to Japan’s pacifist constitution and turn the country’s Self-Defence Forces into a full-fledged military. It’s just a matter of time.
The makeover will suit Ja-pan’s new level of aggression, the only country to ever be attacked with atomic weapons, and its in-creased role in Asia’s security.
“The government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also imposed an unprecedented level of economic sanctions against Russia.”

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 the Middle East were the bridge between warring factions of Shia and Sunni Muslims. Schools and social services run by them contributed to society at large by serving the entire community, regardless of faith. Christians in the Middle East stood for tolerance, democracy, human rights and freedom of religion.
A century ago, Christians comprised 20% of the population in the Middle East, but currently, the region is home to less than 4% or roughly 15 million Christians.
“Iraq, which housed the Church for hundreds of years, will soon be without the Christian faith.”
An enduring — and eventually flourishing — Christian presence in Iraq was the chief aim of Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, when he invited Pope Francis to Iraq in March this year.
More than 500,000 Christians left Iraq due to the sectarian conflict that started with the self-styled caliphate of ISIS in 2013. Earlier, the 2003 US-led invasion had wreaked havoc on the oil-rich country.

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 the Department of Health stating the health hazards entailed in keeping corpses in closed facilities.
The Health Department’s Nov. 22 order “strongly recommended” the disposal of the bodies due to pending infection caused by decaying corpses.
“We need to dispatch the bodies according to the advisory of the Department of Health for the safety of our prison facilities. As much as we would like to wait for their loved ones to claim their bodies… but we cannot wait because we need to dispose of them for public health reasons,” Bureau of Correction officer Donald Worones told.
The 60 bodies were the first batch to be disposed of among the 200 unclaimed bodies, he said.
“We have been waiting for their families to reclaim the remains because some were already in their advanced state of decompo-sition and some were already mummified,” Worones added.
The Health Department has given a deadline to claim the corpses but required the Bureau of Corrections to send out a notice to their families one last time.
“When a prisoner dies, we reach out to their relatives, or if from the provinces, they inform the superintendents of each camp to inform the relatives. If we have not heard from them, then we mark each body and we ready them for burial,” prison health officer Clarence Salgado told.