Joshua Wong is a young Chinese human rights activist, recently sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on the Orwellian charge of “incitement to knowingly take part in an unauthorized assembly”—meaning, in Chinese Newspeak, urging others to protest peacefully the tyranny now throttling Hong Kong. In his first letter from prison, the uncowed Mr Wong wrote, “Cages cannot lock up souls.” Indeed, they cannot. But the failure to defend the caged by standing in solidarity with them can do the gravest damage to evangelization.
Jimmy Lai, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent Catholic defenders of religious freedom and other basic human rights, was back in jail in early December; his bail in a civil lease dispute was revoked on the grounds that he might flee and is a national security risk to boot. The real reason for his incarceration, of course, is that keeping Mr Lai in prison stifles his ongoing challenge to repression. In numerous interviews, Jimmy Lai has em-phasized that his Catholic faith undergirds and sustains his commitment to human rights for all, even as the Xi Jinping regime tries to ruin his business and threatens his life. Has Jimmy Lai been encouraged by a public word of protest from the Vatican against his persecution since he became a prime target of China’s overlords? No.
Martin Lee is another devout Catholic—a distinguished barrister and pro-democracy activist—who has seen his work undone as Beijing tightens its stranglehold on Hong Kong in brazen disregard of the commitments it made in 1997, when Great Britain reverted sovereignty over the territory to China. Profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Mr Lee rebuffed any suggestion that he would ever leave Hong Kong.

High-ranking government officials have praised Vietnamese Catholics for their great contributions to the Covid-19 fight and returned some former church properties as Christmas gifts during their festive visits.
On Dec. 22, National Assembly chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, accompanied by central and local officials, offered Christmas and New Year flowers and greetings to Archbishop Joseph Nguyen Chi Linh at the Arch-bishop’s House in Hue, the capital of Thua Thien Hue province.

Pope Francis will travel to Iraq next year. The Holy See Press Office director Matteo Bruni made the announcement on Dec. 7.
Following the invitation of the Republic of Iraq and of the local Catholic Church, Pope Francis will make an Apostolic Journey to Iraq on 5-8 March 2021. The pontiff will visit Baghdad, the plain of Ur, linked to the memory of Abraham, the city of Erbil, as well as Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain of Nineveh.
For the Church in Iraq, for Iraqi Christians and for the whole country, including Muslims, this “represents a source of great and immense joy, which we have been waiting for many years, since the time of St Pope John Paul II, in 2000, with the first reports of a journey that was not possible then,” said Mgr Basel Yaldo, Auxiliary Bishop Baghdad, a close aide to the Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako. Francis will undertake the journey that St John Paul II was unable to make in 1999. Ur of the Chaldees was supposed to be the first of three stages – the other two were the Sinai and Jerusalem – in a journey along the path of history before the 2000 Jubilee, said in 2014 Card Giovanni Battista Re, who at the time was sostituto (substitute) for general affairs of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
St Pope John Paul II was able to visit the Sinai and Jerusalem (pictured) in February and March 2000, but not Ur of the Chaldees. The site, located in southern Iraq, is the place where, according to the Bible story, Abraham heard the voice of God and left. Today, ancient Ur is now nothing more than a collection of archaeological remains.
This first stage, which St Pope John Paul II “dreamed and desired,” was however very difficult to do at that time, coming as it did a few years after the First Gulf War, which ended with the liberation of Kuwait. In those years, Iraq was under a UN embargo for the refusal of Saddam Hussein’s government to allow inspectors to see his alleged nuclear and chemical weapons programmes. No plane could travel to the country.

A Catholic diocese in Vietnam has suspended an elderly priest after he joined a banned group of exorcists, disobeying his bishop.
Da Lat Diocese annou-nced on Dec. 6 that 72-year-old Father Dominic Nguyen Chu Truyen had been sus-pended from administering sacraments and pastoral care. The diocese’s vicar general, Father John Bosco Hoang Van Chinh, announced the suspension of Father Truyen, who claims to be an exorcist.
Father Turyen lived in a house owned by Teresa Nguyen Thi Thuong, who leads a group of exorcists based in Bao Loc parish in Lam Dong province.
Thuong and her group members regularly perform exorcism inside the house, attracting several people. The diocese banned Catholics from attending such practice, in June after some priests and nuns also attended the rituals.
The vicar general said Father Truyen sent two letters in October to Bishop Dominic Nguyen Van Manh and the diocesan advisory board stating that he “has to absolutely obey the will of God” even if it means disobeying the bishop.
Father Truyen, a former pastor of Thanh Mau parish, said that Thuong received “a mandate from God for him.”
He claimed that he could “put hands on patients and heal them and perform an exorcism without seeking the bishop’s permission.”
The priest said he considers this service as “a special grace from God, more than his priesthood.”

Sonia, a 24-year-old Christian girl was killed by a young Muslim Shahzad because she refused to marry him. The killing took place last November 30 and the killer is still at large.
Sonia was the daughter of Allah Rakha Masih, who moved 13 years earlier with her family from Faisalabad to Rawalpindi to work as a janitor in a government school.
Sonia’s mother, Teresa, says her two daughters, Sonia and Nazish, 18, work as housekeepers and are a great financial help for the family. Usually they always left together to go to work. On the morning of November 30, Sonia left her sister at the entrance of the Air Force Colony, the neighborhood where they live in a rented house, and headed to Behria Town, where she worked. As she was crossing the G.T. highway, Shahzad shot her in the head and killed her.
The family, warned of the accident, took Sonia to the hospital, where the doctors could only declare her death. Allah Rakha tells that the family of Shahzad, a Muslim, had met their poor Christian family and asked that Sonia marry Shahzad. But they refused, saying that being Christians, their faith does not allow them to marry people of other faiths. In addition, Allah Rakha explains, Sonia was a “true Christian” and would never agree to change her religion.

The owner of Hong Kong anti-communist news-paper Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai, is facing a minimum of a decade in prison after being charged on December 11 with violating the city’s new, and illegal, law against “national security” trespasses.
Prosecutors charged Lai, 73, under the law’s “foreign intervention” provision for allegedly having conversations with foreigners about the steep decline of respect for human rights in Hong Kong in the past year.
The “national security” law mandates no less than ten years in prison for those convicted of four times of national security crimes: foreign interference, “secession,” “terrorism,” and “subversion of state power.” The law was implemented through Beijing’s National People’s Assembly, which violates Hong Kong’s longstanding policy of “One Country, Two Systems.” Under the policy, Hong Kong cannot exercise sovereignty and the Chinese Communist Party cannot impose its laws on the city. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, a Beijing loyalist, has nonetheless ordered Hong Kong police to enforce the illegal legislation.
Apple Daily has developed a reputation for being one of Hong Kong’s most vocal publications criticizing the current government’s friendliness towards Beijing. The newspaper regularly covers Hong Kong police’s use of violence against peaceful dissidents and Lai himself became a regular during the anti-communist protests that erupted in the city in 2019.

Church leaders have thanked Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan for ordering an investigation into forced conversions of females from religious minorities.
“The PM has ordered an investigation on a case-by-case basis of incidents of forced con-versions of minor girls belonging to minority communities, particularly Christian and Hindu, to find reasons for this issue. Law and rights are equal for all. Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and daughters of minorities are our daughters as well,” said Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the PM’s special representative on religious harmony.
“Forced marriages, forced conversion of religion and abdu-ction of underage girls of other religions in the name of marriages will not be tolerated. The human rights ministry, in consultation with other stakeholders, is working out a mechanism to eliminate the fear of forced marriage among non-Muslims.”
Ashrafi was speaking at a joint press conference on November 30 with Catholic and Protestant bishops on Nov. 30 at St Peter’s School of Lahore.
Church of Pakistan Bishop Azad Marshall, president of the National Council of Church-es, welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision.
“We urge Islamic scholars and government officials to sit with us and develop a mechanism for judging instances of religious conversion of children. Many cases go unreported due to societal pressure and fear of reprisal from the accused” he said.

A female professor at Loyola College (Autonomous) is listed in the world’s top 2 percent scien-tists. J. Judith Vijaya of the De-partment of Chemistry has been named in the world’s top scientist, in the field of “materials.”
The analysis was conducted by a team of scientists from Stanford University, USA, led by John P. A Ioannidis and published in PLOS Biology on October 2, Jesuit Father A Thomas, principal said in a statement.
The management of Loyola congratulates Vijaya for placing Loyola College on the global map of scientific research and bringing laurels to the institute, he added.
“Our youngest cousin Vijaya who is a professor at Loyola Chennai is listed in the world’s top 2% scientists. Proud of this brilliant sister of ours,” said Sister Cicily, a Handmaid of Mary nun, who is working in Odisha. Vijaya has been teaching at Loyola College since 2001.
Jesuit-run Loyola College was established in 1925. It offers several undergraduate and graduate degrees in Commerce, Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences and liberal arts.
She did her undergraduate course in Chemistry at Stella Maris College, University of Madras, Masters in Chemistry and Ph.D. at Loyola College.

China criticized Pope Francis on November 24 over a passage in his new book in which he mentions suffering by China’s Uighur Muslim minority group.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Francis’ remarks had “no factual basis at all.”
“People of all ethnic groups enjoy the full rights of survival, development, and freedom of religious belief,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
Zhao made no mention of the camps in which more than 1 million Uighurs and members of other Chinese Muslim minority groups have been held. The U.S. and other governments, along with human rights groups, say the prison-like facilities are intended to divide Muslims from their religious and cultural heritage, forcing them to declare loyalty to China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.
China, which initially denied the existence of the facilities, now says they are centers intended to provide job training and prevent terrorism and religious extremism on a voluntary basis.
In his new book Let Us Dream, due Dec. 1, Francis listed the “poor Uighurs” among examples of groups persecuted for their faith.
Francis wrote about the need to see the world from the peripheries and the margins of society, “to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”
In such places of suffering, “I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi — what ISIS did to them was truly cruel — or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church,” Francis wrote.

“A hidden Church,” “not noisy;” as small as “a Fiat 500,” but alive, which envisions its apostolate above all through schools and help for migrants. This is the image of the Church of Brunei, depicted by the new cardinal- designate Cornelius Sim speaking with AsiaNews via Zoom. Despite being among the smallest churches in Southeast Asia – indeed, perhaps precisely for this reason – Pope Francis wanted to reserve a Cardinal’s hat for Archbishop Sim during the next consistory on 28 November. Unfortunately, the new cardinal will not be able to be present at the ceremony in Rome, due to the Covid-19 lockdown.
“We are a minority Church and this makes us prudent. Not so much because we are discriminated against… Like in any family gathering, small children should be quiet to let the elders talk. So we are quiet. And we, being small, accept our role: if the dishes have to be washed, we do it; if the floor has to be swept, we do it; we do what is required of us.
As a Church we have three small parishes and a mission station. We also have some schools, linked to the parish. Most of our social apostolate takes place through the school, which was opened in the 1930s. School is where our presence started. And where the Church has been established. The Church was actually present here in the first half of the 1800s, thanks to a PIME father [Fr Antonio Riva, in the Barambang mission; Fr Ignazio Borgazzi in Labuan – ed] but after three or four years, those priests were called to Hong Kong and their attempt did not bear much fruit, until 1920, when the Mill Hill missionaries arrived from Sabah (in present-day Malaysia.) The missionaries started a small school. My grandfather was one of the first to be baptized and he was one of the first Catholics in the nation.
And so the Church has always been involved in school, in education, which is not a partisan education, but an open one: 70 percent and more of the students are non-Catholics. There are Muslims, Buddhists, people of different faiths, or people without any faith. Our schools are renowned for the quality of the education they offer. Our teachers are academically bright and prepared. The teachers are local, but also international: they come from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, …
We are the smallest Church in ASEAN. Perhaps only Laos has a very small Church like ours.
We have about 16 thousand faithful. There were more, but due to the economic crisis, many people left the country. On Sundays, 3-4 thousand people arrive at every mass.”
–AsiaNews