A diocesan pro-life panel in southern Vietnam celebrated a special requiem Mass and burial for 700 aborted foetuses on Jan. 29 where participants dedicated themselves to raising awareness of human dignity in the communist nation where students lead the pack in seeking abortions.
Led by Xuan Loc diocese’s pro-life committee, the special Mass at Bac Hai Church in Bien Hoa City, in the southeast region of Vietnam, was attended by hundreds of pro-life volunteers from different faiths. The cemetery is home to over 62,000 unborn babies.
Before the burial, the dead foetuses were cleaned with alcohol, wrapped in white cloth, given names, decorated with flowers, and placed in the church for people to pray for.
“Burying dead foetuses is to apologize to unborn babies for the pain and suffering we make them endure … and to pray for other babies to be safe,” Father Joseph Nguyen Van Tich, one of two priests who concelebrated the Mass said.
The other priest was Father Vincent Nguyen Minh Tien.
Although people took ten days off to celebrate the Tet (Lunar New Year) festival in January, early terminations did not subside and volunteers still collected 700 dead foetuses from local clinics and hospitals, Father Tich said.
The southeast Asian nation with a population of 99.4 million records 300,000 terminations per year, mainly among girls aged 15-19. Of them, 60-70% are students, according to studies.

North Korean defectors residing in South Korea face discrimination due to language barriers and negative perceptions about their country causing many to have psychological breakdowns, says a new survey.
The Korea Hana Foundation (KHF) in its 2022 North Korean Refugees Social Inte-gration Survey found that one in every five North Korean defectors face discrimination due to their “speech, lifestyle, and attitude,” Catholic Peace Broadcasting Corporation (CPBC) reported on Feb. 1.
Park Joo-myung, 43, felt that apart from the support and benefits provided by South Korea to settle in, the defectors’ North Korean accent is also a factor that impacts discri-mination. “I felt a lot of alienation because of [my] North Korean accent. So, I have no choice but to react sensitively to even passing [comments],” Park said.
KHF is a non-profit public organization established by the Ministry of Unification in 2010 to help defectors settle down through its multi-faceted projects.
In the organization’s 2022 annual survey among 2,198 of the estimated 30,000 North Korean defectors in the county, 19.5% of respondents acknowledged facing discrimi-nation of some sort, CPBC reported.
In contrast, 16.1% had experienced dis-crimination while trying to settle down in South Korea in 2021.
Concerning the reasons for discrimination, “negative perception about the existence of North Koreans” among South Koreans ranked second at 44.2% after the speech, lifestyle, and attitude issues.
The assumption that North Koreans “lack the ability compared to South Koreans in terms of professional knowledge and skills” ranked third at 20.4%

Filipino Jesuit Father Catalino Arevalo, whom many consider the “Father of Asian Theology,” died at the age of 97 on Jan. 18.
The Jesuit brought his own method into conversation with other theologians in the Philippines, recalls Vincentian Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, a theology pro-fessor in the Philippines. In the following tribute, Father Pilario provides excerpts from a 2004 article he wrote on the theology of Father Arevalo:
Theologians need to have a concrete grasp of the country’s main political and economic move-ments, so as to act on them in the spirit of the Gospel. This intrinsic connection of theology with time and historical circumstance can be discerned in Filipino Jesuit Father Catalino Arevalo’s theolo-gical method of “reading the signs of the times,” a term introduced by Vatican II.
Somewhere in his writings, Father Arevalo wrote: Ours is “a theology of bits and pieces gathered and scotch-taped together in hours of doing and suffering, in dialogue and confrontation, in reflec-tion and prayer, in emptiness, in confusion and paralysis — in all the times and seasons of Qoheleth, it would seem — in struggle, sometimes in anguish and despair, sometimes with the shedding of real blood and tears.”

The Lunar New Year, which began on Jan. 22, is traditionally a time for families to come together, share meals, visit relatives and take time off work. As people across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and many other parts of Asia and the world celebrate the Year of the Rabbit, many will have traveled long distances to reunite with their families.
But as this festival gets underway, let us remember those who cannot be with their loved ones — in particular, those in prison for their political or religious beliefs. And let us especially think of one prominent Catholic, the 75-year-old Hong Kong entrepreneur, publisher and pro-democracy campaigner, Jimmy Lai, who is spending his third Lunar New Year behind bars.
In December 2020, Lai was jailed, awaiting trial on multiple charges. He was briefly released on bail and was able to spend Christmas that year with his family, albeit under a form of house arrest, but on Dec. 31, 2020, his bail was reversed and he has been in prison ever since.
Late last year, on Dec. 10 — which is Human Rights Day — Lai was sentenced to almost six years’ imprisonment, on totally trumped-up fraud charges. He has already served two other sentences, one of 13 months for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and another of 14 months for participating in a peaceful protest in 2019.
“If convicted, Lai may end up spending the rest of his life in jail”
But even worse is to come. His biggest trial — under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law — begins in September this year, having been postponed from last year due to a wrangle over his choice of defense counsel. His chosen lawyer, British barrister Tim Owen, KC, was rejected by the Hong Kong government and his work permit was temporarily suspended, even though Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal had approved him.
Beijing has now given Hong Kong’s chief executive carte blanche to determine not only who the judge is in a National Security Law trial, but also who the defendant’s legal representative will be.
If convicted, Lai may end up spending the rest of his life in jail.

The Japanese government’s policy of increasing financial subsidies for families to have a baby has a long history. It is of course an attempt to address the country’s extremely low birth rate and aging population.
Japan has really tried everything, from providing couples with subsidies for marriage before the age of 40 to encouraging couples to spend more time at home and offering cheaper day-care. In fact, government funds have been heavily spent in recent years to wage war against the hedonism of single individuals with the aim of bringing about a demographic shift.
This time the subsidies that were going to be handed out were about US$400 to match the average price for giving birth at a clinic. And guess what? All those clinics on hearing the news that an unexpected bonus was coming their way have raised their prices accordingly.
So what the government accomplished was to effectively increase future taxation for its citizens, while at the present claiming it was all done with a pure heart and good intentions.
“Traditional family structure and traditional gender roles are slowly but surely coming under attack”

The parliament of Pakistan moved this week to tighten its already far-reaching blasphemy laws, under which numerous Christians and other minorities have been prosecuted and subjected to mob violence, often for dubious charges of blasphemy against beliefs or figures associated with Islam.
Insulting the Prophet Muhammad is already, at least on paper, a capital offense in Pakistan. Under the newest legal changes, those convicted of insulting the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, companions, or close relatives will now face 10 years in prison, a sentence that can be extended to life, along with a fine of 1 million rupees, or roughly $4,500, reported the New York Times. It also makes the charge of blasphemy an offense for which bail is not possible.
Islam is the state religion of Pakistan, and blasphemy laws have been on the books in the country for more than a century, even before it became an independent nation. A notable escalation of the country’s blasphemy laws occurred in 1987 when the death sentence was made mandatory for some violations.
One of the most famous cases in recent years was that of Asia Bibi, a Catholic woman who spent nearly a decade on death row after being accused of disparaging Islam. Numerous world leaders called for her immediate release, including Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.

In the wake of rising attacks against places of worship, senior religious leaders of Myanmar have appealed for restraint citing international pacts that call for the protection of places of worship, places of learning, and places of healing.
In the latest attack, a church, bell tower and other buildings of Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral at Mandalay in Upper Myanmar were destroyed on January 15.
Government soldiers, an eyewitness revealed, also “desecrated” the place by “looting, drinking alcohol and smoking” inside.
The destroyed church is a historical and cultural heritage for the entire country, including Buddhists since 1894.
Also ,in the January 15 attack, a century-old convent of the Franciscan Sisters was set on fire by the military.
In addition, five out of 16 dioceses in the country — Loikaw, Pekhon, Hakha, Kalay and Mandalay — are affected by the ongoing conflicts between the army and ethnic rebel groups, some of whose members belong to various Christian denominations.
On January 21, in his message to the faithful published on the occasion of Chinese New Year, Archbishop of Yangon Cardinal Charles Maung Bo declared January as the “month of the ceasefire,” asking all parties – including the military – to “silence their weapons” and “believe in a peaceful solution.”
The cardinal, who is also the president of the Federation of Asia Bishops’ Conferences, emphasized the value of ‘dialogue’ in conflict resolution and called for the resumption of the Panlong peace process.
“Why are these sacred places attacked and destroyed?” ask archbishops of Yangon, Mandalay and Taunggyi in the open letter entitled “Peace is a pilgrimage, let us walk it together.”

The persecution of Christians in seven Asian nations including China is predicted to increase in 2023 due to political pressure and radical religious views, says the latest report from UK-based Christian rights group, Release International (RI).
The RI report titled “Persecution Trends 2023” released on Dec. 28, 2022, highlights China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Iran in the list of nations where Christians face persecution, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Jan. 4.
The group’s report highlighted the extensive control placed by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Christians in the nation labeling them as “unpatriotic” citizens through official messages.
“The government under Xi Jinping wants to control everything, and currently Christianity is not fully under its control [as it sees it],” the report said, quoting an unnamed source.
“Christianity is being pictured as unacceptable to an atheistic, communist country, rather than an acceptable but minority belief,” the report read.
The report highlighted the numerous reports of Christian leaders and followers arrested or summoned for questioning related to their activities in China.
The increasing number of Christians facing charges related to cults and illegal financial and religious activity was also pointed out as an indicator of Christian persecution in the Communist-ruled nation.

According to a Kyodo News poll conducted recently, 64.9 percent of Japanese citizens disapprove of a recently revealed plan to raise taxes to pay for a significant rise in the country’s defense spending.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration now has the lowest support level since it assumed power last year, at 33.1 percent.
The reasons are simple.  While the military budget increase has been supported by some members of the government and a minority of citizens who either haven’t well comprehended the math behind such a tax hike (that is, more debt on the shoulders of their offspring’s already burdened by years of quantitative easing of monetary policy) or they just do not seem to care because they are in a position of power or above a certain income bracket that wards off all the financial worries in the world.
One of the main arguments in favour of the military budget increase is the need for Japan to strengthen its defence capabilities in the face of growing regional tensions and potential threats, especially from China and North Korea.
“Focusing on military spending, without considering any other strategies, could lead to a more aggressive foreign policy”
Sure Japan must be prepared to defend itself against the military ambitions of neighboring countries and deter potential adversaries from harming its national interests, but Japan has already one of the strongest militaries in the world.
This military budget hike is unnecessary, especially at a moment when the overall cost of living for the average citizen is increasing.
Also focusing on military spending, without considering any other strategies, could lead to a more aggressive foreign policy, which could potentially cause further tensions in the region and create uncertainty or concern among its neighbors.
As much as those in Europe regard the past as something far behind, just take a look at the leading role that Germany has in the hemisphere. Japan’s military history remains a sensitive issue in many parts of Asia, and we know some countries in the region may view an increase in Japanese military strength with suspicion or even hostility.
Many citizens feel they are already paying too much in taxes and that the government should look for other ways to fund the military budget. Some have suggested cutting unnecessary spending, or increasing taxes on high-income earners, rather than raising taxes on the general population.

Pakistan practices religious segregation which puts minorities at the receiving end. With national polls around the corner in the South Asian nation, minorities are looking forward to some respite from the divide-and-rule strategy of the powerful religious and political elite.
Despite Islamization directly enshrined in the constitution, preventing equal rights for all citizens, political parties time and again have come out with pledges and action plans to end religious discrimination as polls near. However, they are seldom put into practice once a new government is cobbled together.
Former prime minister, Imran Khan, and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) ruled the nation for three and a half years but kept none of the five poll promises listed in their election manifesto to empower minorities and protect their rights.
Khan, who survived an assassination attempt last year, had pledged to set up a legally empowered National Commission for Minorities (NCM), equal access to justice, laws against hate speech, minority quotas and the promotion of interfaith dialogue.