Every Sunday, Paul Rmah Bral and a partner, along with other friendly men in pairs, travel around on motorbikes in Vietnam’s Central Highlands region introducing villagers to Catholic values.

Bral is a 60-year-old ethnic Jarai, part of a wider group known as Montagnards, who speak a Malayo-Polynesian language related to other tongues in the Asia-Pacific region spoken from Indonesia to far-away Fiji.

A French Catholic missionary made contact in the mid-1800s with the traditionally animist Jarai.

During the Vietnam War, many Jarai joined with clandes- tine American forces and later resettled in the United States.

Bral and other lay missionaries, known as giao phu, have for the past two decades been bringing more villagers into their fold in Kontum Diocese.

“It is the happiest thing in life to know that God creates and loves us, and to bring His love to our brothers and sisters,” said

Bral, a former Vietnamese language teacher who embraced Catholicism in 1995 and was baptized in 2000.

He and dozens of other villagers, including his wife and son, attended weekend catechism classes held at the Redemptoristrun Evangelization Centre.

Local communist authorities in the Central Highlands, which borders with Cambodia, pressured locals into withdrawing from their study sessions.

In recent months there has been a crackdown on religious practices by an ethnic militia force in a remote region on Myanmar’s mountainous border with China.

Churches in northern Shan State have been closed, crosses torn down and pastors and other Christian leaders detained by the United Wa State Army (UWSA).

On October 9 about 100 Christians were released, but as many as 92 remained in custody, Christian leaders said.

The UWSA, the military wing of the United Wa State Party (UWSP), dominates the population of about 500,000 in the self- proclaimed Wa Self-Administered Division of Myanmar.

According to various researchers, the UWSA is the largest standing militia in the country with a force of up to 30,000 troops. The enclave has long been widely seen to be backed by China as it is the implementation of the now intensified crackdown on religious practice.

The militia and its political arm are remnants of the Burmese Communist Party and retain very close links with authorities in China. China is conducting a fresh campaign of internal repression of religion, but its motives in northern Myanmar are essentially economic.

A hard-line Islamic group known for supporting Pakistan’s tough blasphemy law has warned against any release on bail of jailed Catholic woman Asia Bibi.

The nation’s Supreme Court earlier announced that it would consider the issue of bail pending hearing of an appeal by the Catholic mother of five against a death sentenced imposed by a trial court in 2010.

She was found guilty of making derogatory remarks about Prophet Mohammed during an argument with a Muslim woman while working in a field.

In 2014, the High Court in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, upheld the death penalty.

Two high-profile politicians, then Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer and minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, were assassinated in 2011 after calling for reforms to the blasphemy law.

According to a media release issued by the Supreme Court of Pakistan on October 5, a three-member bench headed by Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar and comprising Justice Asif Saeed Khosa and Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhe, would begin hearing Asia Bibi’s appeal this week.

If her appeal is rejected by the Supreme Court, she is expected to ask the nation’s president for clemency.

A court in Pakistan has reached a decision on whether a Catholic woman will become the first person to hang to death under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.

A special bench of the Supreme Court, sitting in Islamabad, reached a verdict on October 8 on the fate of Asia Bibi, but publication has been deferred until a later, unspecified date, according to the British Pakistani Christian Association. In an Oct. 8 news release sent by email to Catholic News Service, Mehwish Bhatti, an officer of the BPCA who was in the courthouse during the proceedings, said the three judges “have come to a decision, but it has been reserved.”

Christians in Pakistan are conscious of the threat of an outbreak of rioting by Muslim mobs if Bibi is acquitted by the court, the BPCA said in an Oct. 7 press release, even though they are praying ardently for her release. Bibi has been held in solitary confinement since November 2010, when she was sentenced to hang for insulting Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Ashiq Masih, her husband, told Catholic News Service in an Oct. 5 interview that if Bibi is released she and her family will immediately seek sanctuary in one of several countries that have offered them exile, because it was too dangerous for them to remain in Pakistan.

They said when they visited Bibi in Multan Prison on Oct. 1 that she was in good health, contrary to speculation that she was developing dementia. During the interview at St Columba’s Church, Ashiq said Bibi was praying constantly and that she deeply believed she would win her freedom.

“She is psychologically, physically and spiritually strong,” Ashiq told CNS. “Having a very strong faith, she is ready and willing to die for Christ. She will never convert to Islam.

“She also wanted to deliver a message to the international community that they must remember her in their prayers. These prayers will open the door of the prison, and she will be released very soon,” he said.

Indonesian Christians sought solace on October 7 in churches in the city of Palu, hard hit by an earthquake and a tsunami that roiled central Sulawesi, killing 1,649 people and seriously injuring some 2,500 people.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, but there are Christian communities throughout the archipelago.

During a service in front of the Santa Maria Church in Palu, a priest encouraged locals to have faith in God and stay in Palu to rebuild the city.

“If we all leave, then who will welcome those who come here to help us?” Yohanes Salaki asked his congregation, speaking from outside the church as the inside remains unsafe because of damages caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

Palu resident Etna Rorimpande told VOA’s Indonesian service that “we have to give ourselves to God, have faith on Him, and believe that God will always take care of us.”

Another Palu resident I Nyoman Sarna said that though he is sad and worried about his fate, he think he and his family will stay in the city.

“We have to rebuild our town. Who else will do that?” he said. The United Nations said in a statement that 113 people remain missing after the twin disasters. About 70,000 people have been displaced.

More than 300 Christian children in two high schools in Zhejiang province, which has been referred to as the “Jerusa-lem of the East” for its strong Christian presence, have been asked to fill out a form stating that they did not follow a religion, World Watch Monitor has been told by a trusted local source.

While “it is normal for a school to ask parents to fill out a form which includes questions of faith when a child is first enrolled in school, for many years this hasn’t been an issue,” our source, who wished to remain anonymous, explained.

Schools in China are government-controlled and financed and therefore communist in ideology, and Christian children have sometimes faced “shaming” incidents, “but the extent of such shaming was to prevent them from joining the Communist Youth League, thereby denying them any of the perks that come with a progression to Communist Party Member later in life,” World Watch Monitor was told.

“In this case, however, the children were handed a question-naire in class about faith, which is not normal. It seems this is part of the new push to identify Christians and give them pressure of one sort or another.

“Children in this part of China would write ‘Christian’ because of their innocence and they come from families of fervent believers who do not compromise their faith.”

In the first school, which has around 200 Christian students, the teacher demanded they rewrite the questionnaire, stating that they had “No religion.” But when filling out the next questionnaire, half of the children maintained that they were Christians. According to our source, following further warnings, in the end all but one child complied.

In the other school, which has around 100 children, it was the class prefect who forced the Christians to resubmit their papers, stating that they had “no religion.”

In 2002 Pope St John Paul made the appointment that would underpin the Catholic Church’s efforts to begin repairing relations with Asia’s two main communist states, China and Vietnam, when he named Msgr. Pietro Parolin as undersecretary of state for relations with states in the Secretariat of State.

Improving relations with officially atheist communist states had been a key focus for the Polish Pope who continued the Vatican’s long-held policy of Ostpolitik towards these countries.

That policy was basically keeping dialogue open between the Vatican and communist-ruled countries despite their general repression of all religions. The idea was to win small gains and work towards eventually normalizing relations. Vietnam and especially China posed new problems for the Vatican, which was keen to normalize its relations with former French colonies Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as well as China, which ended just nine years of diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1951, two years after the communists won power. The Vatican, had, of course, been keen to recognize bishops of the newly independent countries of Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam.

The China-backed United Wa State Army (UWSA) has destroyed unauthorized churches, detained pastors and closed religious schools in the area under its control in Myanmar’s Shan State near the Chinese border. Myanmar’s largest armed ethnic organization has clamped down on Christian churches since on September 13, according to church sources. A Catholic priest said the UWSA also checked Catholic Churches and schools and detained four teachers for questioning, but they were released two days later. “It appears that they are concerned about several churches [mostly Baptist] that had sprung up unofficially. They are also checking whether schools might try to persuade people to convert to Christianity,” the priest told ucanews.com.

“They know the Catholic Church’s activities as we never try to convert people to Christianity.”
Undated videos appearing to show UWSA officers destroying crosses, demolishing a new church and sealing off a church went viral on Facebook and Twitter on Sept. 19.

The UWSA instructed all its military officers and administrators to find out what missionaries were doing and what were their intentions, according to an Asia Times report.

All churches built after 1992 would be destroyed as they had been built illegally. Only churches built between 1989 and 1992 are legal, the army said in a statement.

It pledged to punish any local administration cadres who support missionary activities, it banned the construction of new churches and requires that priests and workers in churches must be local, not foreign.

It also bans religious teaching in schools in the Wa Hills area, while UWSP functionaries are no longer allowed to be members of any religious organizations.

Nyi Ran, a UWSA communications official at the army’s office in Lashio, Shan State, told Radio Free Asia that Wa leaders believe there are religious extremists in Wa territory, including missionaries who have not obtained official permission and clergy members who are operating outside the law.

One of Australia’s iconic Labour leaders and former Governor General Bill Hayden has been baptized as a Catholic at the age of 85, and after a lifetime as a declared atheist.

“There’s been a gnawing pain in my heart and soul about what is the meaning of life. What’s my role in it?” Hayden said.

Now in declining health, the former federal opposition leader and foreign minister said he hoped his new-found faith might encourage others as the Church passes through difficult times.

“This took too long, and now I am going to be devoted.

“From this day forward I’m going to vouch for God,” Hayden told The Catholic Leader as he prepared to be welcomed into the Church at St Mary’s Church, Ipswich, west of Brisbane, on September 9.

He suffered a stroke in 2014, and as he prepared for the baptism celebrated by Fr Peter Dillon, Hayden was feeling “great pain” from a recent fall in which he broke his shoulder. However he was determined to go ahead. Fr Dillon said he felt a “real closeness” with the former Australian leader as he baptized him.

“It was a big thing for him … an act of submission to the fact that there was no denying for him that God is real and he had come to discover that,” he said.

“I have always felt embraced and loved by her Christian example,” Hayden said, of the 93-year-old, who has been a lifelong inspiration of service to him, and who was among the congregation at the baptism.

“Sister Angela Mary Doyle was for twenty-two years administrator of Mater hospitals in Brisbane – a citadel of health care for the poor of South Brisbane where I grew up towards the end of the Great Depression,” he wrote in a letter to friends before the baptism.

“Dallas (my wife), our daughter Ingrid and I recently visited Sister Angela Mary in the Mater Hospital where she was a patient.

“The next morning I woke with the strong sense that I had been in the presence of a holy woman.

“So after dwelling on these things I found my way back to the core of those beliefs – the Church.”
“These characteristics are founded on the teachings of Christ and driven by faith in an external power – the Christian God whose limitations are beyond what humans could attain.

“I can no longer accept that human existence is self-sufficient and isolated.”

Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge also congratulated Hayden.

“I’m delighted for Bill and think it is a gift for not only him and his family but for the entire Church in some sense,” he said.