A Church of Pakistan lay pastor was gunned down and a priest wounded by unknown assailants as the leaders drove home from a worship service on Sunday in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, where Christians had suffered their deadliest attack in the country’s history nearly a decade earlier.
Church of Pakistan Bishop of Peshawar Humphrey Peters said that William Siraj, 75, was shot and died instantly in the ambush in the Gulbahar neighbourhood, while Patrick Naeem, 55, sustained a bullet wound but was in stable condition. A third church leader in the car was unharmed, he said.
The Protestant church leaders were returning from All Saints Church parish when two gunmen riding a motorcycle intercepted their car and opened fire on them, Peters said.
“Siraj received one bullet in the forehead and one on the arm and died instantly, while Rev. Naeem received a bullet wound in the hand,” he said. “It’s a miracle that Rev. Naeem and another priest escaped the volley of bullets.”
The assailants fled the scene unchallenged, according to wit-nesses, Peters said.
Siraj was a senior lay leader and led worship at three different parishes while Naeem was the priest of the All Saints Church parish, Peters said.

Egypt’s president on Wednesday swore in the first-ever Coptic Christian to head the country’s highest court.
Judge Boulos Fahmy is the 19th person to preside over the Supreme Constitutional Court since it was established in 1969. President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi picked the 65-year-old Fahmy from among the court’s five oldest of 15 sitting judges, as is prescribed by law.
Fahmy succeeded Judge Saeed Marei, who retired over health reasons, according to Mohammed Bassal, a respected expert in Egypt’s judicial affairs and editorial manager of the Shorouk daily.
Fahmy has headed the court’s General Secretariat since 2014. His appointment as chief judge has been welcomed by many in the Muslim majority country.
Moushira Khattab, head of the government-appointed National Council for Human Rights, hailed the decision as “historic” and “a giant move” in the field of political and civil rights.
However, Ishak Ibrahim, a prominent expert on Christian affairs in Egypt, said in a Face-book post that the move will have little impact on ending discrimination against Christians as they are vastly under represented in Egypt’s state institutions.

A respected Islamic scholar and Parisian Catholic priest is condemning the recitation of the Koran and Muslim prayer in Paris’ largest church as the “abandonment of evangelization” and the “introduction of the Antichrist.” Fr Guy Pagès’ censure is being echoed by Parisian Muslim converts, who face the death penalty for apostasy from Islam — including a former high-ranking Islamic jurist who confessed to engaging in interfaith events “only to sanitize the true face of Islam in preparation for jihad.”

An international coalition of Christian leaders, including the president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, appealed for the release of Hong Kong’s Catholic pro-democracy supporter Jimmy Lai and other imprisoned activists as part of a Chinese New Year amnesty.
Cardinal Charles Bo of Myanmar, FABC president, joined other Catholic and Protestant leaders from across Europe, North America and Asia to send a letter to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, a practicing Catholic, reported ucanews.com.
“There is the very real prospect that Jimmy Lai may spend the rest of his years in prison. This would be a sad injustice and would raise unfortunate doubts as to China’s continued commitment to the ‘one country, two systems’ model and the tolerance it engenders,” the letter said.
Ucanews.com reported Fr Franco Mella of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions and the Rev. Fung Chi Wood, former Hong Kong legislator and a priest of the Hong Kong Anglican Church, handed the letter to Lam Jan. 31.

Abune Antonios, a confined Eritrean Orthodox Church patriarch and the longest-serving prisoner of conscience in the Horn of Africa, died on February 9 at the age of 94.
He was still serving detention in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, after his arrest in 2006 just two years after his installation as the third patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Church. For 16 years, he was kept in solitary confinement under the orders of the country’s authoritarian leader, President Isaias Afwerki, for his resistance to government interference in the ancient church.
Eritrea has long been on the US State Department’s list of worst religious freedom violators, and ranks No. 6 on Open Doors’ 2022 list of where Christian persecution is worst.
Rashad Hussain, the newly confirmed US religious freedom ambassador, said in a tweet that he was “saddened by the news” and that “Patriarch Abune Antonios was a true leader.”
“It is very unfortunate that the patriarch died while in detention. There was no reason for the government of Eritrea to put him in detention,” Francis Kuria, the secretary general of the African Council of Religious Leaders, told RNS. “The Orthodox Church in Eritrea and elsewhere is always very supportive of the people’s development.”

A law firm’s report on how abuse cases were handled in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising incriminated retired Pope Benedict XVI, with lawyers accusing him of misconduct in four cases during his tenure as Munich archbishop.
Lawyer Martin Pusch of the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl said the retired Pope had denied wrongdoing in all cases, reported the German Catholic news agency KNA.
Pusch expressed doubt about Pope Benedict’s claim of ignorance in some cases, saying this was, at times, “hardly reconcila-ble” with the files.
At the Vatican, Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, said, “The Holy See believes it has an obligation to give serious attention to the document” on cases of abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, but it has not yet had a chance to study it.
“In the coming days, following its publication, the Holy See will review it and will be able to properly examine its details. Reiterating its sense of shame and remorse for the abuse of minors committed by clerics, the Holy See assures its closeness to all victims and confirms the path taken to protect the youngest, ensuring safe environments for them,” Bruni said.
From 2001, when St. John Paul II charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — with the authority to take over cases from local bishops for investigation, Pope Benedict was aware of many examples of abuse. It was his office in 2003 that expedited the process for laicizing priests guilty of sexually abusing minors.
Although he mostly stayed out of public view in retirement, in April 2019 the former Pope published what he described as “notes” on the abuse crisis, tracing the roots of the scandal to a loss of a firm faith and moral certainty that began in the 1960s. The church’s response, he insisted, must focus on a recovery of a sense of faith and of right and wrong.
The Munich investigation followed two years of research and covers the period from 1945 to 2019, centering on who knew what about sexual abuse and when, and what action they took, if any, KNA reported. The report identified 497 victims and 235 abusers, but the lawyers who conducted the study say they’re convinced the real numbers are much higher.
Four volumes with almost 1,900 pages comprise the “litany of horror” that lawyers presented. They spoke of the “total failure” of a system, at least until 2010.

Bishop Eugenio Coter, an Italian who has been a missionary in Bolivia’s Amazon region since 1991, has a great sense of hu-mour: You ask him for a picture of himself, and he sends one in which he is holding a sloth.
Coter has been leading the Apostolic Vicariate of Pando since 2011. It’s a 64,000 square mile region with 260,000 inhabitants, 60,000 of whom live in 450 communities deep within the Amazon rainforest. To go from one community to the other, clergy and religious use small planes, boats, jeeps and motor-cycles.
The bishop spends a month a year living on a boat, but he says that is “fortunate,” since during most pastoral visits, he ends up staying in a tent or someone’s shed.
The primary source of inco-me for the inhabitants of this region come from the jungle, with almonds, plantains, acai and other fruits being the main products.
However, Coter says there are other “industries” of a more criminal nature, including “the seasonal trafficking in human beings,” a criminal endeavour that spiked in 2020 when thousands of Haitians and Cubans entered the region — they trek from Guyana, walking through Brazil and Bolivia as they head to Chile. The “coyotes” the bishop said, take advantage of the migrant’s desperation. Some of these criminals double as drug traffickers, another illegal industry in the Pando region.

In a country at war, it’s a region at peace, thanks to a retired South Sudanese Catholic bishop who has championed friendship among those who once saw each other as enemies.
During the civil war between southern Sudanese and the government in Khartoum, Sudan, Bishop Paride Taban was bishop of Torit, working to keep people alive in the middle of a decades long struggle. Though imprison-ed and beaten by Sudan People’s Liberation Army rebels, he bore no grudges and worked to foster reconciliation when the rebels took power following a landmark 2005 peace agreement.
But Bishop Taban knew political agreements signed by politicians weren’t going to make much difference on the ground, especially among the nomadic pastoralists in his diocese who viewed other tribes as enemies, competitors for the only real thing of value in the parched landscape: cattle. The age-old tradition of cattle raiding, essentially a violent sport that allowed young men to obtain the cows they needed to buy a bride, had been transfor-med by the addition of high-powered weapons left over from war. What had once produced only occasional injuries from spears now frequently turned into a massacre.
In 2004, Bishop Taban resigned as head of the Torit Diocese. The following year he founded Holy Trinity Peace Village in Kuron, where, as bishop, he had built a bridge over a river that was impassable during the rainy season. While the bridge opened up transport to a neglected area of the country, it posed a dilemma.

Following the publication of an experts’ report on how sexual abuse was handled in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, the German Catholic news agency KNA spoke to Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors since its creation and president of the Institute of Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University. Father Zollner said, “Each one individually should take a concrete, perceptible and understandable position and signal that they understand. The lawyer (Marion) Westpfahl said some-thing that I also noticed in my discussions with theologians: Church representatives give the impression that they do not believe in the power of the sacra-ment of reconciliation – the confession – when they deal with the sins and failures of those in position of responsibility. Examination of conscience – in this case: the experts’ report – confession, repentance and an act of compensation: All these are, according to classic Catholic teaching, a condition for forgiveness. This is true for individuals, but also for dioceses and bishops’ conferences.”

Afghanistan is the new No. 1, according to the 2022 World Watch List (WWL), the latest annual accounting from Open Doors of the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian.
“This year’s findings indicate seismic changes in the persecution landscape,” said David Curry, president of Open Doors USA.
Since Open Doors began its tally in 1992, North Korea has led the ranking. But since Afghanistan’s takeover by the Taliban last August, Afghan believers have had to leave their country or relocate internally. Many lost everything they had, notes the report, while house churches were closed in their wake. “Before the Taliban, it was not great, but it was good,” said one evacuated Afghan, requesting anonymity in hopes that he may one day return. “[Now] Christians are living in fear, in secret, totally underground.”
Overall, 360 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s 1 in 7 Christians worldwide, including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 15 in Latin America.
Last year, for the first time in 29 years of tracking, all 50 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels on Open Doors’ 84-question matrix. This year, all 50 again qualified—as did 5 more nations that fell just outside the cut-off. overall, the top 10 nations only shuffled positions from last year. Somalia held steady at No. 3, as did Libya at No. 4, Eritrea at No. 6, and India at No. 10. Yemen rose two spots to No. 5, replacing Pakistan which fell three spots to No. 8. Iran fell one spot to No. 9, and Nigeria rose two spots to No. 7, completing the group.
Violations of religious freedom in Nigeria are tied to a rapidly growing Islamist presence in the African Sahel. Mali rose to No. 24 from No. 28, and Open Doors fears it may increase further next year. Burkina Faso held steady at No. 32, and Niger jumped to No. 33 from No. 54. Nearby, the Central African Republic (CAR) rose to No. 31 from No. 35.
“The epicenter of international jihadism is now [in] the Sahel area,” said Illia Djadi, Open Doors senior analyst for freedom of religion and belief for sub-Saharan Africa. “This terrorism is moving south … and predominantly Christian countries like Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast are now affected.” (None rank on the watch list.) Countries with Christian majorities rank relatively low in the top 50, and include Colombia (No. 30), Cuba (No. 37), Ethiopia (No. 38), the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC (No. 40), Mozambique (No. 41), Mexico (No. 43), and Cameroon (No. 44).
Of the top 50 nations:
11 have “extreme” levels of persecution and 39 have “very high” levels. Another five nations outside the top 50 also qualify as “very high”: Kenya, Sri Lanka, Comoros, United Arab Emirates, and Tanzania.
· 18 are in Africa (6 in North Africa), 29 are in Asia, 10 are in the Middle East, 4 are in Central Asia, and 3 are in Latin America.
· 34 have Islam as a main religion, 4 have Buddhism, 2 have Hinduism, 1 has atheism, 1 has agnosticism—and 10 have Christianity.