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 Lumad community at Barangay Butong in Bukidnon province on Nov. 22 as they tried to harvest root crops that they planted.
Lumad is a collective term for indigenous people concentrated in the Mindanao region of the Philippines.
Six guards reportedly approa-ched them while pointing fire-arms, forcing them to leave the area at once.
“We cannot go back to our land because their guards won’t allow us.”
“More than three of them opened fire. We were nervous be-cause we could see the soil spla-tter after being hit by bullets,” Angel Pilutiin, an ethnic Lumad, told.

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 Workers Secretary Susan Ople said the compensation package of two billion riyals ($532 million) would “help our displaced workers”.
It was unclear if unpaid work-ers from other countries would also receive some of the money.
“This is very good news. He (Prince Mohammed) told me this is their gift to us,” Marcos said late Friday.
Saudi Arabia plunged into economic crisis in 2015 following a sharp decline on oil prices, leading construction companies to lay off tens of thousands of foreign workers. More than 700,000 Filipinos work in the kingdom, most of whom are domestic and construction workers, according to latest official data.

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 Old Uyghur indicating Nesto-rian Christian beliefs.
Today, this tradition of Christia-nity largely exists in the Middle East and is known as the Assyrian Church of the East. Most of the Christians brutally killed by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in recent years belonged to this church that shares the Nestorian Christology. Despite the narrow geographic region they inhabit today, the church once sent missio-naries out across Asia, eventually entering China in the seventh century.
In A.D. 451, the Council of Chalcedon affirmed the full deity of Christ, the full humanity of Christ, Christ being one person, and that the deity and humanity of Christ were distinct and not blurred together. This theology was adopted by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox churches within the Roman Empire, and later by post-Reformation Protestants. However, five Oriental churches, most of which were outside of the boundary of the Roman Empire, refused to accept the Chalcedon definition of faith: the Armenian Church, the Coptic Church, the Assyrian (Syriac) Church, the Ethiopian Church, and the Indian Church of Malabar.

Twenty-two years ago, Swa-pan Das fell in love with Sabina Das but their Catholic parish in Bangladesh refused to solemnize their marriage.
That was because the bride was only 14, and solemnizing her marriage would have been a vio-lation of Church laws and a cri-minal offense under national law. Both laws allow only women of 18 years and above to marry.
Das, then 23, managed to get a fake birth certificate for her and they married in a civil court in the Panchagarh district in northern Bangladesh. That meant the couple being barred from the Sacraments and Catholics in their Sarker Para village excluding them from social programs.
The life of Das and his wife changed for the better on Nov 7, when their marriage was rectified at the Queen of Fatima Church in Thakurgaon district along with their three children.
“Many still prefer marriage in their own traditional way rather than following a Church-mandated marriage process”
Each year their Dinajpur diocese rectifies dozens of illicit marriages, following the process of a Church law, to bring Catho-lics back to sacramental life and build up Catholic communities, officials said.
The Das couple were among ten others who had their marriage rectified by the Church. All of them are Catholics whose ance-stors converted to Catholicism from lower-caste Hindu groups.

Catholics in the South Korean capital Seoul joined a memorial Mass at the Yongin Park Cemetery to pay tributes to 6,000 donors who donated their bodies for scientific purposes in the last 55 years.
This annual commemoration takes place during the third week of November, a month dedicated to the departed souls in the Catholic Church. The donation of bodies helps the medical community at the Catholic Medical Centre (CMC) and its eight affiliated medical schools to study anatomy, Catholic Peace Broadcasting Corporation (CPBC) reported. The medical school states that as of now 36,000 volunteers have registered to donate their bodies as cadavers for educational and research purposes after death.

Two years ago, Kanika Das was in a relationship with a boy from a rich Catholic family and they planned to get married. However, their dreams were left in tatters when the boy’s family opposed the plan saying Das belonged to a Dalit Catholic family.
“When they [the boy’s family] found out my father is a cobbler and we belonged to the Dalit caste, they called off the marriage. That is not my fault, I think this is my misfortune,” Kanika, 19, told.
Dalits are considered socially lower and economically weak in the Hindu caste system on the Indian subcontinent, which continues to be practiced within Catholic Churches in the region, including Bangladesh.
The two families, both living in Khulna district in southern Bangladesh, did not know each other earlier. They met through a mutual friend and they maintained a close relationship for nearly two years.
The boy was ready to accept her Dalit background but “problems started when his family became aware of it,” she said.

Some 90,000 Myanmarese refugees live in nine camps on the Thai side of the border. At the height of displacement in the early 1990s, the camps held more than 130,000 refugees.
People already in the camps have watched humanitarian groups come and go over the years, though in recent times aid workers have mostly moved on to newer crises, leaving a chronic shortage of assistance for the refugees. What hasn’t declined is the commitment of the Catholic Church to accompany people in the camps. Father Nyareh said when Pope Francis mentioned refugees from Myanmar in his speech for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees Sept. 25, his words echoed among Burmese of all faiths.

The never-ending nightmare of the blasphemy law in Pakistan has a new victim — former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party was shot in the right leg on Nov. 3 in the eastern city of Wazirabad in Punjab province, where he was leading a protest march against the government.
Khan is the fourth high-pro-file figure to have been attacked in Pakistan by vigilantes who swear by the blasphemy law and hold the view that everyone who disgraces Islam’s holy figures must die.
Government officials termed the attack as the work of a lone gunman and “a very clear case of religious extremism.”
“He pretends to be giving a message like the Prophet Muha-mmad”
Naveed Mohammad Basheer, the arrested assailant, has report-edly confessed to the crime and accused Khan of committing “blasphemy” and cited this as a reason for the attempt to kill him.
“He was making noise during Azan [call to prayer] time. He claims to be the prophet of this century. He pretends to be giving a message like the Prophet Mu-hammad.

Before Bahrain established the Gulf’s first church in the 1930s, priests would visit from Iraq to perform services for a small Catholic community.
Now, its ranks swollen by foreign workers, mostly from India and the Philippines, the community is preparing to wel-come the pope, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.
Pope Francis’s visit this week, his second to the Arabian peninsula, will be especially emotional for Najla Uchi, whose father Salman built the Sacred Heart church that opened on Christmas Eve, 1939.
After lighting candles at her home in Manama, capital of the tiny Gulf nation, Uchi pulls out folders of old photos of her father and a medal he was awarded for building the church.
“My father left his hometo-wn, the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a long time ago,” she told AFP. “He came to Bahrain and settled here.”
More than 80 years after its consecration, the Sacred Heart is on the pontiff’s itinerary in the Muslim-majority monarchy who-se Catholics now number about 80,000.

Sri Lankan police blocked more than a thousand protesters who were attempting to march to the capital’s main railroad station on Wednesday to demand the release of two detained protest leaders and an end to a government crackdown on demonstrations against an economic crisis that has engulfed the island nation for months.
The protesters, including opposition lawmakers and trade union and civil rights activists, also urged the government to abolish a harsh anti-terror law under which the two student protest leaders have been held for more than two months.
Father Jeewantha Peiris, a Catholic priest and prominent protest organizer, said Wasantha Mudalige and Galwewa Siridhamma have been detained for 74 days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act without any legal basis.
Mudalige and Siridhamma were involved in anti-government protests earlier this year, and their arrests drew wide condemnation.
The protesters marched Wednesday along a main road in Colombo toward the railroad station where they planned to hold a rally. But hundreds of police blocked the road, forcing them to abandon the demonstration.