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.

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.