Mainstream Christian groups in South Korea have sought action against a neo-Christian sect accused of spreading the coronavirus that has claimed the lives of 54 people in the country.

When the virus began to spread in mid-February, authorities traced the infection to people who attended crowded prayer programs of a sect called Shincheonji Church of Jesus in the Daegu area.

Two mainstream Church groups — the National Council of Churches in Korea and the United Christian Churches of Korea — have asked the government to investigate leaders of the Shincheonji Church.

“The government should clarify facts about the spread of the infectious disease, arrest Shincheonji leader Lee Manhee and other leaders and investigate their actions,” they said in a joint statement on March 6.

The Protestant groups alleged that the secretive doomsday cult had been intentionally withdrawing information about its 200,000 followers, resulting in the spread of the infection.

According to South Korea’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Shincheonji followers accounted for almost 60 percent of 7,513 cases in the country, most centered in Daegu, the base of the controversial sect.

The death toll had reached 54 on March 10, the government body said.

The Protestant groups said the Shincheonji sect is trying to buy more time to manipulate its list of followers.

“The majority of Shincheonji believers are not only the victims of this incident but also the victims of faith, which is a cult and fundamentally fake,” the groups said.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith says he is ready to launch street protests if Sri Lanka’s government does not bring the culprits behind last year’s Easter bombings to book.

He said the administration has not taken action regarding the Easter Sunday suicide bombings that killed about 300 people, including 40 foreign nationals, and injured at least 500.

“The most senior person in the government should have been brought to the Criminal Investigation Department and question-ed if he had been aware in advance of the Easter bomb blasts,” said Cardinal Ranjith on March 8 at Tewatta Church.

“There are reports that police officers investigating the Easter Sunday suicide bomb blasts are currently being transferred.”

The cardinal said the government should publish all the interim committee reports on the bomb blasts.

When Imran Khan took office as Prime Minister of Pakistan in August 2018, persecuted Christians in the Muslim-majority nation expected a policy change for the better.

However, the 67-year-old former cricket captain did not live up to their expectations. On the contrary, violence against Christians continued uninterrupted, allegedly with the tacit support of the establishment.

The latest victim in the long chain of violence was a 22-year-old Christian youth from Punjab province. Saleem Masih was beaten black and blue for cleaning himself in a well owned by a Muslim. He died of his injuries three days later on Feb. 28.

Rights activists like Sabir Michael say religious minorities in Pakistan have become an easy target for Islamic fundamentalists because of their poverty in all areas – social, economic, cultural and political.

Asia Bibi is a Pakistani Catholic woman who was sentenced to death in 2010 for blasphemy against Islam. After more than eight years in prison, she was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2018.

“I was accused because of the name of Jesus and I knew I would be freed because of Jesus,” Bibi said at a Paris press conference.

Bibi said that during her time on death row, her faith “was always strong because I knew that God was with me, God never leaves you alone, he always accompanies you.”

Together with French journalist Anne-Isabelle Tollet, Bibi has written her autobiography, Enfin Libre (Free at Last). The English edition is due out in September.

“My parents told me that and I knew that something would happen one day,” she said.

During her incarceration, even when she was sentenced to death by hanging, Bibi said she prayed to God for His help to overcome her ordeal.

“If you trust in God, your faith becomes stronger,” she said.

“I knew I was going to be released because I was accused because of the name of Jesus and I would be freed because of Jesus,” Bibi said. A mother of five, Bibi especially thanked all the people who prayed for her during her years in prison, especially Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

A Pakistani Christian man has been tortured to death for washing himself at a well belonging to a Muslim landowner, according to an organisation dedicated to highlighting and opposing persecution of Christians in Pakistan.

Saleem Masih, 22, was a labourer from Baguyana village, Kasur District, near Lahore. On 25 February, after unloading a farm vehicle, Masih washed himself in a nearby well. When the owner of the well, Sher Dogar, discovered he was a Christian, he began to beat Masih with a stick, shouting anti-Christian slurs.

Masih was dragged to a cattle farm and beaten with sticks and iron rods; with his hands tied and feet chained, his captors rolled a thick iron rod over his whole body, causing multiple fractures in his ribs and left arm. After being tortured in this manner for hours, Masih fell unconscious from the pain.

The following morning, the local police gave Masih’s location to his family, who found the unconscious Masih, severely injured, lying where he had been tortured. The police, who had been called to the farm by Dogar, encouraged the family not to take the issue further. Dogar asserted that Masih had committed a crime by dirtying his well water and so he had been justly punished. Masih died from his wounds at Lahore’s General Hospital on 28 February.

Kasur district is known for violent persecution of Christians by Muslims. In 2014 Sajjad Mesih and his wife Shama, a Christian couple in their 30s, were burned alive in a brick kiln by a Muslim mob for allegedly desecrating pages of the Qu’ran. Shama was expecting her fifth child.

There are around four million Christians in Pakistan, 2% of the total population of 200 million.

The threat of spreading the corona virus has forced Catholic officials in Hong Kong to suspend all church programs for the next two weeks and cancel the Ash Wednesday liturgy that marks the beginning of the Lent season.

Cardinal John Tong, the apostolic administrator of Hong Kong, said the “disappointing” decision had been taken “because the next two weeks will be a crucial time to suppress the epidemic.”

The diocese has decided to suspend all public Masses on Sundays and weekdays from Feb. 15-28 and to cancel the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, Cardinal Tong said in a Feb. 13 pastoral letter.

Ash Wednesday, which marks seven weeks of fast, abstentions and prayer leading to the Easter feast of Christ’s resurrection, this year falls on Feb. 26.

Hong Kong’s 500,000 Catholics will miss the liturgy in which ash will be smeared on foreheads, reminding humans that they will turn into dust when they die. It calls for repentance and prayers.

The move comes amid global fears that the epidemic, now called COVID-19, has worsened in the last few days in China against the expectations of experts.

The epidemic, first reported in Wuhan city of Hubei province, has spread across the world and claimed 1,369 lives, with more than 60,000 confirmed cases as of Feb. 13, mostly in China.

Hong Kong, which has open borders with China, has reported 50 confirmed cases and one death. Hundreds are now under self-isolation or observation.

“Some church members may be disappointed” with the diocesan move, the cardinal’s message said. But “this is not an easy decision,” he said.

“At this difficult time,” Catholics must “deepen our trust in God and implement our Christian love for our neighbors and all people,” the message said.

Since Jakarta Archdiocese introduced an anti-plastic waste campaign back in 2006, many parishes and individuals have taken it seriously. The campaign to “collect waste, and make it a blessing” has inspired many Catholics, including Lucia Mona Hartari Windoe from the Holy Family Parish in Rawamangun, East Jakarta.

In February 2016, Mona launched a waste management program called the Bhakti Semesta Waste Bank in her parish, just as the country marked its 10th National Waste Care Day.

Through the initiative, she encouraged Catholics in her parish to collect their plastic waste, instead of throwing it away and creating an environmental problem.

She said a waste bank is not a place where people dump their garbage, but rather an initiative to help parishioners who have waste at their homes but do not know what to do with it.

The goal is to raise people’s awareness to care for the environment, and at the same time make a profit out of waste, she said.

In doing so, with the support of her parish priest, she cooperated with the East Jakarta Environment Agency who provided trucks to pick the waste up.

Catholics in the Philippines have been asked not to kiss or touch the cross when they venerate it on Good Friday because of concerns about the corona-virus.

Instead, they should “genuflect or make a profound bow” before the cross during the veneration of the cross, according to updated liturgical guidelines issued on Feb. 20 by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and posted on Twitter.

Already in January, the bishops’ conference advised priests to distribute the Eucharist in communicants’ hands rather than their mouths, to place protective cloths over the screens of confessionals and to change the holy water in church fonts regularly. The conference also asked the faithful not to hold hands during the “Our Father” and not to shake hands during the sign of peace.

In the new guidelines, which the bishops’ conference said it “strongly recommends” following, priests were asked to distribute ashes on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 26, by “dropping or sprinkling a small portion of blessed ash on the crown of the head of the faithful,” rather than rubbing them on the person’s forehead.

Azeem Gulzar has been left half-paralyzed after being shot in the head in a mob attack on a church under construction in Pakistan. Gulzar, 25, was released from the Civil Hospital Sahiwal on Feb. 24, three weeks after his family tried to resist 15 armed men from pulling down the wall of the church. The Christian tailor had donated his 51-square-meter plot in a village in Punjab’s Sahiwal district for a community church. The Muslim-majority village is home to about 150 Christians.

“He is unable to communicate and is paralyzed from the right shoulder down. One of my cousins is recovering from the wound of a bullet that slightly hit his skull. My uncle was also injured with an axe. We are not rich enough to pursue lengthy court cases. Our property is the only hope we had,” Waseem, his younger brother, told UCA News on Feb. 25.

“There is no church in our village. We gather in the house of a local pastor for weekly prayers. We wanted to facilitate the women and elderly who couldn’t travel each Sunday to the nearby city.”

The attack followed months of heated arguments between Gulzar’s family and Muhammad Liaqat, a Muslim schoolteacher who opposed construction of the church on the empty plot that shares a wall with Liaqat’s house. The District Coordinator Officer had set community consent as a major prerequisite for the registration and issuance of a no-objection certificate (NOC) for the church’s construction. Amid the negotiations, Gulzar’s family erected a front wall and a door at the site on Feb. 2. They were attacked the same night.

“It was Sunday. We spent the whole day building the wall and finished at 7pm. We only wanted to secure our property against any forceful occupation. Three hours later, we heard a crowd chanting on our doorstep. As we tried to explain our stance, someone resorted to aerial firing. My brothers were the next targets,” said Waseem.