Cardinal Jean-Louis Tau-ran, President of the Ponti-fical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, visited Saudi Arabia (April 14-20), where he was received by King Salman. During his stay, the media described the visit as a “desire for rapprochement,” as a “stage in the opening of the Saudi kingdom to other religions,” as a “ripples of openness.” However, Tauran’s own words were the most emblematic. For him, “What is threatening all of us is not the clash of civilisations, but rather the clash of forms of ignorance and radicalism,” words that describe in a nutshell all the religious tensions that afflict the world.

The visit itself was the first by a high envoy of the Catholic Church to Saudi Arabia, cradle of Wahhabism, one of the most radical currents in Islam. During his stay, the prelate spoke about issues such as freedom of religion and equal rights for believers of all faiths. Even if he did not explicitly address the issue of allowing churches in the country or even letting Christians worship, the visit had.

Nearly 9,000 Nepali immigrants living in the U.S. will lose their temporary protected status (TPS) after the Trump administration determined that the country has sufficiently recovered from a 2015 earthquake to accept their return. Aside from the deaths and injuries caused by the earthquake, said Lisa Parisio, an advocacy attorney for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), Nepal has not yet recovered from “massive damage to public and private infrastructure across the country,” including homes, health care faci-lities, schools, roads, sanitation and water purification infrastructure.

“All of this has resulted in a situation that remains in Nepal today where the country is absolutely in no shape to safely return the 9,000 TPS holders,” Parisio said.

In a statement April 26 announcing the decision, which came a day after the deadline for the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether or not it would extend the status, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen contradicted this assessment.

Nepal’s government is still up in arms over claims by the European Union that Christians are not being fairly represented in parliament, while sensitive issues such as the eating of beef or the rights of Hindus and mino-rity groups get much greater consideration.

On March 21, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) drew attention to the conclusions and recommendations in the final report on the House of Representatives and provincial assembly elections by the European Union’s Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) to Nepal, which was released in February.

The EUEOM raised the point that Christians were not represented in the election, which operates on a proportional representation system, despite comprising 1.4% of the population.

This would seem to indicate that Nepal’s electoral system is not fully inclusive, as has been claimed. In fact, the charter sets out no provision for religious inclusion apart from guaranteeing this for Muslims. Instead, inclusion is worked out on the basis of people’s caste or ethnicity.

Four decades is enough for an independent nation to determine its true identity.

However, recent political manoeuvrings, gradually influenced by a small but strong group of Islamist hardliners and lethal rise of radicalism in recent years, show the struggle for a true national identity for Bangladesh is intensifying.

Major political parties vie for power by appeasing hardliners and their supporters, while an increasingly authoritarian government tries to solidify power with unfair policies and laws disregarding democracy and greater public interests.

Militancy has weakened amid a crackdown by the government, but it has not withered as a recent event proves. A knife attack on Dr Zafar Iqbal, a prominent liberal intellectual, on March 3 was just a warning sign. Iqbal is one of Bangladesh’s best-known physicists, as well as a popular writer of science fiction and children’s books.

St Paul de Chartres Sisters in Vietnam were attacked by gang-sters while they were protesting construction of a house on their former land.

On May 8, a dozen nuns tried to prevent workers from building a house on the land next to their convent in Hanoi. Workers had taken trucks and tools to the site on the previous night.

Witnesses said gangsters employed to guard the site “insulted and attacked the nuns with batons and one nun was beaten to unconsciousness.”

They said many policemen were present but did nothing to stop the brutal attack.

In a petition to Hanoi authori-ties in 2016, the nuns said their congregation had taken legal ownership of the 200-square-meter land plot in 1949.

After 1954, when communists controlled northern Vietnam, the government rented a novitiate building on the site for an institute of microbiology. Authorities later divided the site and sold it to other people. The nuns have asked the government to return the land many times over the years.

A Catholic priest was shot and killed after saying Mass in the northern Philippine town of Gattaran in Cagayan province on April 29. Police said Father Mark Anthony Yuaga Ventura, 37, was shot twice by a lone gunman.

The priest was blessing children who attended the Mass while talking to members of the choir when a man in motorcycle helmet approached him.

Father Ventura sustained gunshot wounds to the head and chest and died at the scene, according to the police.

The assailant walked out of the gymnasium, where the Mass was held, and fled on a motorcycle with an accomplice.

Minutes after the shooting, pictures uploaded on social media showed the lifeless body of the priest on the ground near the altar.

Father Ventura, known for being an anti-mining advocate and for his work with tribal people in the province of Cagayan, was ordained a priest in 2011.