A second church has been demolished by authorities in China’s Jinan province — and a third church is expected to suffer the same fate soon.

After Liangwang Catholic Church was demolished on July 17, local Catholics prayed at the site and protested the unreasonable behaviour of authorities.

Shilihe Catholic Church was demolished earlier this year and sources expect Wangcun Catholic Church to soon be reduced to rubble.

All three churches were in normal use and legal churches officially registered with the religious administration, according to a source in Jinan.

Liangwang Church was built in 1920. During the Cultural Revolution, it was classified as a private house. After lengthy legal procedures, the church was rebuilt in 2006.

At noon on July 17, three female church members were on duty at the church when more than 40 people forced their way in, searched the members, took their mobile phones and made them leave the church.

Another 30 people later arrived to help with the demolition, which went ahead despite the church still containing many items.

The church was built on land that was distributed by Liangwang village and had been granted a permit for legal activities. It was demolished because its area in Pian district is to be developed with new buildings and infrastructure. After the demolition, the parish priest and president complained to authorities but have not received any reply.

“The stools, altars and dedication boxes were all pressed into the ruins. The ruins later became a fire and all the items were burned out,” said a church member.

The now retired Archbishop Oswald Gomis of Colombo faced huge challenges during the takeover of Sri Lanka’s Catholic-run schools by the state in the 1960s. The government policy was “certainly not a good thing” and was intended to hit Catholics, said the 85-year-old archbishop, who was honoured by President Maithripala Sirisena for his outstanding religious and social service at a celebration in Colombo on July 22.

Celebrating 50 years of his episcopate, Archbishop Gomis believes the government should not have taken over church-run schools at that time.

“The government thought they [the schools] were avenues for conversion. But because of that, today all other religions have got whacked,” he said. “I have always believed the Catholic Church has a very important mission in Sri Lanka, and that is education.”

Catholic schools were meant to instil Catholic values in their communities and to encourage their practice through teachings of the religion daily.

Archbishop Gomis founded 15 affiliated schools as branches of established schools during his tenure as archbishop.

After nearly a decade resisting eviction from ancestral land, ethnic Khasia Christians in Bangladesh are still uncertain whether the land they have lived on for generations will become their own.

About 700 ethnic Khasia from 86 families in two villages have been battling to resist eviction by Nahar Tea Estate in Moulvi-bazar district since 2010.

Most of those affected are Catholics belonging to St Joseph’s Catholic Church, under the predominantly indigenous Sylhet Catholic Diocese in north-east Bangladesh. “The Khasia are peaceful people and they have the right to live in their ancestral land like every citizen of Bangladesh,” Quazi Rosy, a ruling Awami League lawmaker, told ucanews.com.

Rosy was part of a delegation from the Parliamentary Caucus on Indigenous Peoples that visited Nahar 1 and Nahar 2 punjis (forested villages with clustered houses) on July 22. Research and Development Collective (RDC) activists were also part of the delegation to lend their support to the Khasia.

Over 3,500 people, mostly Catholics, joined a charity run organized by Indonesia’s Jakarta Archdiocese to raise money to build churches in various parts of the country.
Jakarta has declared 2018 the “Year of Unity.”

The “Run4U” campaign on July 29, one of a number of Church-led fund-raising runs in recent years, offered people the chance to test themselves with a 2.5-kilometre walk or a more gruelling 5k run in Tangerang, a city in Banten province some 25km from Jakarta.

Participants included priests, nuns, seminarians, elderly and young and people from other religions. “Our main purpose is to raise money to help out with the construction of several churches [that are in need of financial support],” Paskah Widarani, one of the organizers, told ucanews.com.

“Those parishes were chosen as they really need our help right now,” said Widarani.

The Chinese authorities have been eliminating visible Christian signs, crosses and engravings for several months due to a campaign of “synicization.” This adds to the ban on meetings even in summer, with young people under the age of 18, who are also forbidden to attend mass. At the same time, the scandal of ineffective vaccines for new-borns has spread throughout the country. This scandal is caused by widespread corruption, by the little control exercised by the authorities; by protectionism for Chinese firms. The priest-blogger Shan Ren Shen Fu (“the hermit priest”), shares his reflection on these events with our readers. In particular, he points out that if more faith and values were spread in Chinese society, there would be less corruption and more effective vaccines. Furthermore, his regret is that in China there is a concern to vaccinate children in the body, but it is forbidden to vaccinate them in the spirit, excluding them from the cate-chism. In this way the lack of honesty and healthy conscience in society is perpetuated.

On August 6, a brother priest of mine told me on WeChat: “Brother, our bishop called me saying to remove the cross and the inscription ‘Catholic Church’.” In the last two years this confrere has worked with great difficulty. There was no church in the area, and the diocese bought a two-storey shop and turned it into a place of prayer for the local faithful, since then the priest immediately organized the people to clean up and decorate the place.

A court in southern Vietnam has jailed 15 protesters includ-ing Catholics who joined nat-ionwide protests against a new cybersecurity law and a draft law on special economic zones.

On July 30, the People’s Court in Bien Hoa city sentenced Tran Nguyen Duy Quang, 35, and Pham Ngoc Hanh, a 45-year-old Catholic mother of five, to 18 months and 16 months in prison respectively, Dong Nai newspaper reported.

The newspaper said 13 other defendants were jailed for 8-10 months, while five others were given 12-14 months’ probation as they need to take care of their children. Many of the defendants are Catholics from Xuan Loc, the country’s largest diocese in terms of population. The court also confiscated 10 motorbikes belonging to defendants.

All defendants were convicted of causing public disorder, holding up banners, shouting slogans, inciting others to protest and blocking traffic for hours on June 10 at the protest in Bien Hoa, the capital of Dong Nai province.

Within weeks of the collapse of the final remnants of the Khmer Rouge in late 1998, Father Enri-que Figaredo, also known as “Kike” or “The Bishop of the Wheelchair,” went to visit some of the movement’s last-standing cadres after hearing they needed assistance.

During the decades-long civil war, many had lost limbs to land-mines and were struggling after the group’s ultra-Communist leadership had defected, died or been arrested.

While many people would have been apprehensive to say the least about entering an area that until recently had been controlled by one of the most feared revolutionary movements of the 20th century, Father Figaredo saw it as his calling. “I remember going to one of the furthest corners of Cambodia,” he said from within the grounds of Battambang Catholic Church, or Pet Yiey Chee as it is known by locals.

“They asked for my support. I went to see them and gave them chickens so they could have eggs and meat. I also gave them small loans,” most of which are still being put to use today, he said.

A group of Protestant congregations writes a courageous appeal to the government: “You consider us a threat, an error to be corrected. But wrong, we want to contribute to the well-being of the nation like everyone else.” The capital orders a catalog of unregistered places of worship. Among the churches affected, one is Catholic.

Chinese Christians “are not a force in disagreement, an error to be managed or rectified, the chosen objective of veiled or direct attacks. Thinking this way is wrong, it’s a fundamental mistake. The Christian churches, even the domestic ones, are animated by the desire for dialogue to achieve the best possible relations with the government of this new era, to achieve socialism with Chinese characteristics “of which President Xi Jinping speaks. This is the courageous appeal launched by dozens of domestic Protestant churches, struck by yet another round of restrictions on their religious freedom.

The text, signed by 34 unofficial churches, underlines how recent revisions to religious regulations adopted by the government have broken the rights of the faithful: “The normal life of a believer has been violated and hindered, and this has caused enormous emotional damage. The sense of patriotism that animates Christians has also been affected, opening the possibility to social conflicts. The situation seems to worsen day by day.”

To overcome this impasse, Christian leaders write, “the authorities must respect the religious freedom protected by the Constitution of China. That text contains many rights that in reality the single-party state does not respect. The churches have a real desire for dialogue.”

The Chinese State Council approved in 2016 a new package of regulations on religious activity termed as “draconian.” The declared aim is to eliminate the unregistered Christian cult, that of the so-called “domestic churches.” The new rules came into force on 7 October 2016, effectively prohibiting religious preaching or Christian events online or in schools.

A teary-eyed Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila has lamented the deaths of innocent people killed since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s assumed office during the last day of a summit on new evangelization on July 22.

Addressing a crowd of priests, nuns, religious and lay people, the prelate asked if people were happy with all the deaths around them.

“Do you rejoice at the deaths of the innocent?” Cardinal Tagle asked in the wake of a statement released by the country’s Catholic bishops condemning a wave of killings across the country.
In his prayer, the Manila archbishop spoke to God about many innocent people dying.

“We want to believe that you do not rejoice in their death. But there are so many of them,” said the prelate. Police have reported more than 23,000 killings over the past two years, which human rights groups said were likely linked to the government’s war against narcotics.

The cardinal included in his prayer a 36-year-old migrant worker who was killed in Slovakia for defending two women from being attacked.

“Where do we see your face? Where do we hear your word? Some people are asking, where are you?” asked the cardinal.

The cardinal told about 8,000 participants at the Fifth Philippine Conference on New Evangelization to become “bread” for others amid the hunger in the world.