There’s an estimated 200 Catholics in Afghanistan – a tiny minority within the minority of around 7,000 Christians – and days after the Taliban took control of the country following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, a papal charity is sounding the alarm over their situation.
Aid to the Church in Need said it sees “a black future for religious freedom” in Afghanistan. Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman of the Taliban, declared on Twitter that it’s now officially the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
Thomas Heine-Geldern, executive president of the pontifical foundation, expressed profound concerns about the seizure of power in the Central Asian nation.
“During the rule of the previous Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban imposed a strict version of sharia law nationwide,” he said. “We can expect that Sunni Islam will be the official religion, Sharia law will be re-imposed, and hard-won freedoms for human rights, including a relative measure of religious freedom, over the last 20 years will be revoked.”
The Taliban ruled Afghanistan between 1996 to 2001.
This concern is shared by the Vatican, that ran a cover story in its newspaper asking about the future of the women in Afghanistan.

Korea’s Catholic community on Saturday marked 200 years since the birth of Saint Andrew Kim Tae-gon, the first Korean-born priest who was killed in hatred of the faith in 1846 at the age of 25.
Eucharistic liturgies were held in South Korea’s 1,750 churches to commemorate the anniversary, along with the first solemn Mass celebrated in Korean in Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica.
Last Saturday afternoon, Archbishop Lazzaro You Heung-sik led the service in the presence of representatives of Rome’s Korean community. A few weeks ago, the former head of the Diocese of Daejeon was appointed the new prefect of the Congregation for the clergy in the Vatican.
On the occasion of Saint Andrew Kim’s birth, Pope Francis released his own message to Korean Catholics, which Archbishop You read during Mass.
in addition to praising the heroic testimony of the martyr Andrea Kim, the pontiff publicly thanked Korean Catholics for donating anti-COVID-19 vaccine doses to the poorest countries through the Vatican. “This is a strong invitation for a greater commitment to the cause of the least of the world,” Francis said.

Sri Lanka’s Christian community hoisted black flags at churches and homes on August 21 to express anger over the government’s investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bomb attacks, which killed 269 people.
Twenty-five people were charged last week in connection with the bombings. But the country’s Catholic Church says these could be “smaller fish,” and accuses the government of still not taking steps to identify the true conspirators. The head of the archdiocese of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, has raised questions over allegations that state intelligence personnel knew and met with the attackers. Two local Muslim groups that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group were blamed for the six near-simultaneous suicide bomb attacks, which hit three churches and three luxury hotels on April 21, 2019. It is not known if the groups had actual links to the Islamic State.
Under cloudy skies, a row of large black flags billowed in the wind Saturday in front of St Anthony’s Church, which was targeted in the 2019 attacks. Behind a concrete barrier, religious statues overlooked armed police and signs that read: “Hiding the truth is a grand political conspiracy.”
In some areas, Muslim residents hoisted black flags in a show of solidarity. Church bells tolled at 8:45 a.m., the time the first blast occurred. Prayer services were held inside St. Anthony’s, but with empty pews because of a 10-day coronavirus lockdown that began late Friday.

A Catholic church serving more than 300 Christian families in Pakistan’s commercial capital of Karachi was demolished Aug. 24 despite resistance from a civil society group and warnings from U.N. human rights experts.
The Save Karachi Movement, a group of lawyers, human rights defenders, journalists and minority activists, confirmed the demolition of St. Joseph Church on its Twitter account. It was part of a larger demolition plan to prevent flooding, government officials said.
It is reported that Save Karachi Movement said the anti-encroachment squad of the Sindh provincial government tore down the building, despite protests from the Christian community.

Another Christian girl has been kidnapped and converted to Islam in Pakistan.
Speaking to AsiaNews, Chashman’s father, Gulzar Masih, said that on 28 July, he had gone to her school to pick her up; not finding her, he had immediately gone to the police to report the disappearance of the 14-year-old. A few days later, the kidnappers sent the family a video and documents in which the girl claims to have converted of her own free will.
Gulzar, a rickshaw driver by profession, went back to the police station to get some answers, to no avail.
The story came to light only after Lala Robin Daniel, a Faisalabad-based human rights activist, got involved. “Punjab authorities should do their job to free girls who are kidnapped,” he said.
Daniel called for legal action against the kidnappers. “As long as kidnappings continue undisturbed, girls and their families will feel unsafe.”
Muhammad Ijaz Qadri, district president of the Sunni Tehreek organisation, released a letter certifying Chashman’s conversion to Islam, whose “Islamic name from now on will be Aisha Bibi.”

Sri Lanka has filed 23,270 charges against 25 people in connection with the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks on churches and hotels that killed 269 people, the president’s office said Wednesday.
The charges filed Tuesday under the country’s anti-terror law include conspiring to murder, aiding and abetting, collecting arms and ammunition, and attempted murder, it said.
The attorney general also asked the chief justice to appoint a special three-member high court bench to hear the cases speedily, it said in a statement.
Two local Muslim groups that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group were blamed for the six near-simultaneous suicide bomb attacks on April 21, 2019. The blasts targeted three churches and three hotels.
Another suicide bomber who had entered a fourth hotel left without setting off his bomb, but later committed suicide by detonating his explosives at a different location.
Friction and a communication breakdown between then-President Maithripala Sirisena and then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe were blamed for the government’s failure to act on near-specific foreign intelligence warnings ahead of the attacks. That led to the election of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa later in 2019 on a platform of national security.

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.
The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest. On Saturday, 20 people were arrested in connection with the temple attack.
The boy is accused of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the library of a madrassa, where religious books were kept, last month. Blasphemy charges can carry the death penalty.
The Guardian knows the name of the boy and family members, but has chosen to protect their identities for their safety.

A Canadian man is set to join hundreds of shackled inmates on China’s degrading death row as they await agonising lethal injections or firing squads. Robert Schellenberg, believed to be 38, from Abbotsford, British Columbia, was detained by the Chinese authorities for drug smuggling and after a retrial he had been condemned to die. Robert Schellenberg is now on death row in China where doom-ed inmates are caged in humiliating conditions.
Hundreds of Chinese citizens are handed the death penalty each year – more than the rest of the world combinedCredit: AFP A ‘cell trustee’ removes shoes of a prisoner before she is taken away to be killedCredit: chinasmack.com
Schellenberg, who maintains his innocence, has been locked up in China since 2014, when he was accused of attempting to smuggle 225kg of methamphetamine to Australia. In December 2018 he was sentenced to 15 years but after he appealed a retrial was ordered and the Dalian intermediate people’s court instead ordered his execution.
It comes as human rights organisation Amnesty Inter-national has branded China the world’s top executioner.
Schellenberg and others facing death are sent to detention centres where they await their fate on death row in tiny overcrowded cells or in solitary confinement. According to the blog Dui Hua, those on death row wait just two months before being put to death compared to an average of 15 years in the United States.
It says the doomed prisoners are degraded by being shackled at all times by their hands and feet.
Cell trustees help them to eat and go to the toilet and strip them ready for execution after which the chains are removed and cleaned.
Firing squads and lethal injections are two favourite methods of the death penalty used by China.

Authorities in China have arrested leaders and members of a prominent evangelical church that was destroyed with dynamite about three years ago, sparking a global outcry.
Nine leaders and members of the Golden Lampstand Church, a house church in Linfen in Shanxi province, northern China, were arrested on August 7 in a “well-prepared and coordinated” public security operation, reported Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights.
Among the detainees were Pastor Wang Xiaoguang and Evangelist Yang Rongli. Both had previously been arrested in 2009. Before it was demolished with explosives by local authorities in January 2018, the Golden Lampstand Church was a mega-church and one of the largest churches in China.
Its congregation was part of a network of 50,000 members and the church was constructed at an estimated cost of US$2.6 million, according to Bitter Winter. It was the second destruction of a church in China in one month after a Catholic church was destroyed in the neighbouring province of Shaanxi, about 20 years after it was opened, The Guardian reported.

A priest and a catechist from Hakha Diocese in Myanmar’s Chin state who were arrested by a local militia have been released following mediation by Catholic leaders.
Father Noel Hrang Tin Thang and a catechist were arrested by the Chinland Defense Force (CDF) while they were traveling from Surkhua to Hakah on July 26. They are from the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Surkhua. They were released on Aug. 4 evening following the intervention of church leaders, according to local sources. “The pair were in good health as they were treated well during nine days of detention. They returned to their parish yesterday evening,” a church social worker from Hakha told. He said the release followed agreeing to the demands of the CDF, which included transferring the priest from Surkhua to Hakha to avoid contact with the military and an agreement not to undertake government projects.