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.

Before a gathering of religious leaders in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, a Catholic bishop from Nigeria gave an account of how his country had become a “cauldron of violence” at the hands of Islamist extremists.
Addressing the G20 Religion Forum in Bali on Nov. 3 in advance of the Group of 20’s meeting later this month, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah testified to the violence committed against both Christians and Muslims caught in intra-sectarian warfare.
“Every day, news of abductions, armed robberies, kidnappings for ransom, murders, and assassinations of our innocent citizens persists. Our sacred spaces have become killing grounds,” the bishop said. “Hundreds of worshippers have been murdered in mosques and churches across the country.
According to a report by the nongovernmental organization Open Doors, 4,650 Christians were killed in Nigeria in 2021— that’s more than the number killed in all of the other countries in the world combined.
The G20 Religion Forum was hosted by Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama political party, which, according to its press release, represents 120 million “moderate” Muslims, or about 40% of the country’s 231 million Muslims.
The conference was convened to “prevent the weaponization of identity” and “curtail the spread of communal hatred,” according to its stated goals.
Kukah, the bishop of the Diocese of Sokoto in the northwest region of Nigeria, where Muslims are in the majority, commended the group for “taking the historic step to address these issues directly,” he said.
In his address, he shared details of some of the recent acts of violence committed by Muslim extremists in his diocese, including the kidnappings of fellow priests and the case of Deborah Samuel, a Christian student who on May 13 was accused of blasphemy and brutally murdered by a mob of Muslim students.
Kukah explained that Muslim elites see secular laws as a threat to Islam and, therefore, disregard them. Nigeria’s constitution includes protections of the freedom of religion and prohibits federal or state governments from adopting any religion as a state religion.

Oct. 23 marks the 80th anniversary of diplomatic re-lations between the Holy See and the Republic of China, which exists today in Taiwan.
As surprising as it may seem to many, in Via della Conciliazione 4 in Rome there is the embassy of the Republic of China. Its red flag with a white sun amid a blue rectangle flutters from the balcony.
There is, therefore, a Chinese ambassador to the Holy See, Matthew S. M. Lee, and he comes from Taiwan.
The Embassy of the Re-public of China represents the island of Taiwan. Yet the Va-tican’s diplomatic recognition of China, which began in 1942, does not concern either the People’s Republic of China (which came into existence in 1949) nor, strictly speaking, is it an agreement with Taiwan. Taiwan as such does not exist as an independent legal entity. What we are commenting on here is precisely the relationship between the Holy See and the Republic of China, based in Taiwan.

Myanmar was added on October 21 to a global financial blacklist while Russia was sidelined by the international money-laundering watchdog FATF. The move by the Financial Action Task Force puts Myanmar alongside North Korea and Iran as outcasts of the global financial system.
Citing a “continued lack of progress” and the fact the majority of the actions Myanmar had promised to take had not been completed more than a year after a deadline, the FATF put the country on the so-called blacklist.
Other nations are required to apply enhanced measures to screen transactions with countries on the blacklist to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.
Those measures can act as an impediment to trade and investment.
The Paris-based FATF also further cut back Russia’s role in the organization due to its invasion of Ukraine.

Born in Longview, Wash., on Oct. 31, 1939, he was abandoned by his father, a house painter and farmer, whom his mother repeatedly took to court in fruitless attempts to gain child support.
“He wasn’t abusive; he just left us, and it hurts so badly,” he said. “That’s the essence of it all: I wanted to become a priest to help other kids so they wouldn’t suffer and hurt like I did.”
While still a boy, he left home to join Roman Catholic Redemptorist seminaries in Oakland, Calif., and in Oconomowoc, Wis.
After ordination, he recalled the thrill of preaching his first sermon in a tiny wooden church in South Dakota that had been built by his Irish relatives and seated just 40 people.
“That’s a very important moment for a priest,” he said, pointing to a small framed black-and-white photograph of the church hanging on a wall above his dining table.
When he arrived in Thailand in 1967, on his assigned mission by the Redemptorists, he was first dispatched to the far northeastern part of the country and to Laos. Returning to Bangkok in 1971, after war came to Laos, he was reassigned to Klong Toey, almost as far out of sight as if he had been in the distant highlands.
“The priest there was drunk,” he said, “and I replaced him there, as a drunk and a priest.”
In Klong Toey, he met a Catholic nun, Sister Maria Chantavarodom, now 92, who led him through the narrow lanes and joined him in founding the tiny school in a former pigsty.

Catholic bishops in Asia are working on a pastoral plan for the Church in Asia, taking into consideration the emerging so-cial, economic, religious and po-litical realities on a continent whe-re Christians are a minority.
“What exactly is the reality? How should the Church respond? What priority should we have in the next few years? What should the churches in Asia do? We are in the process of identifying and trying to open ourselves to under-stand these priorities and to see what is the way forward. We want to commit ourselves, the bishops of Asia, to work for a better Asia,” said Cardinal Os-wald Gracias.
“We will present a message to the peoples of Asia and also begin the elements of a final docu-ment which will be like a guide document, a pastoral plan for the Church of Asia,” said the Indian cardinal.
He was among three Asian cardinals, including the president of the Federation of Asian Bi-shops’ Conference (FABC) gene-ral conference, who addressed the press on Oct 24 to help sum up the last 12 days of their meet-ing. Some 20 Cardinals, 120 Bi-shops, 37 priests, eight nuns, and 41 laypeople from 29 coun-tries are taking part in that confe-rence.