What first comes into your mind when you see the word “Iran” in the headlines?
Some of us immediately reflect on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s relentless efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, while their go-vernment-sponsored mobs chant, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” For others, it’s Iran’s relentless military aggression in the Middle East and assassination squads else-where. Meanwhile, those of us who focus on international religious freedom recall that year after year, Iran is listed as one of the 10 worst persecutors of Christians in the world.
But there is another story that isn’t widely reported in our American media. Amazingly, there’s an explosive number of conversions to Christianity taking place in Iran.
I first became aware of this surprisingly good news when I lived in Israel – it was talked about among groups who were focused on Middle East evangelism. Then after I returned to the U.S., I read an unexpected report by Daniel Pipes, a Jewish researcher and author and friend of mine who wrote about it for Newsweek:
“Something religiously astonishing is taking place in Iran, where an Islamist government has ruled since 1979: Christianity is flourishing. The implications are potentially profound.
“Consider some testimonials: David Yeghnazar of Elam Ministries stated in 2018 that ‘Iranians have become the most open people to the gospel.’ The Christian Broad-casting Network found, also in 2018, that ‘Christianity is growing faster in the Islamic Republic of Iran than in any other country.’
“This trend results from the extreme form of Shi’ite Islam imposed by the theocratic regime. An Iranian church leader explained in 2019: ‘What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran? What if I told you no one follows Islam inside of Iran? …What if I told you the best evangelist for Jesus was the Ayatollah Khomeini [founder of the Islamic Republic]?”’
Northeast’s apostle of peace takes mission to violence-hit Manipur
Archbishop Emeritus Thomas Menamparampil of Guwahati, apo-stle of peace in no-rtheastern India, has gone to Mani-pur twice where ethnic violence has raged since May 3.
“It is not easy to describe what I am doing. I have visited Manipur already twice, spending three days each. I have been to the Kuki areas of Churachandpur and Kangpokpi, meeting with people in the relief camps. I have also been to the Meitei areas, meeting with their leaders,” the 87-year-old Salesian prelate told Matters India June 15.
Convert to Catholicism shares faith journey
We hear a lot about Christians indulging in “forced conversion.”
Those who propagate that theory seem to say: “Let those who have seen or experienced wait, let those who have heard, speak.”
I have nothing to say to such people
Allow me to share how I became a Catholic at the age of 34. I was then Devi Menon who came from an orthodox Hindu family in Kerala’s Thrissur district. I have two masters in business administration and one masters in another subject. I have worked with many national and overseas firms.
It is not that I decided to be a Catholic on December 31, 2014, and became one the next day. Becoming a Christian was not even in my wildest dreams. I did not become a Christian because of coercion, enticement, appeasement, temptation, provocation, allurement or out of fear.
I had my personal reasons for becoming a Christian. It was the culmination of my search for meaning in life by reading the sacred scriptures of various religions, including the Bible. What drew me to Jesus was my reading about the Holy Eucharist — the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Communion.
No one can become a Catholic expecting some material gain, because no such option or offer exists in the Church.
What I have inherited is spiritual contentment. My Jesus is my gain.
I only know about the Catholic Church. It does not baptize right away anyone who wants to become a Catholic
The Church must be convinced that that desire is the need of the person’s soul. The Church must be convinced of the accuracy, reality, and divine intervention in the circumstances leading to such sentiments. The person should know the essentials of the religion, learn and practice them.
He or she must be clear about the faith. One can become a Christian only after passing many great hurdles. In other words, one must be convinced that the faith in Christ is the need of the soul more than that of the person.
Thousands of missionaries of the Church now work in remote areas of India and overseas, among those who do not know Jesus or follow human values.
The Church will gain nothing by converting the economically backward and culturally deficient people in those areas.
These missionaries serve in those places fully aware of the dangers to their lives. They proclaim the love of Jesus and impart virtues and values to them because the Church is the reflection of the unbiased love of Christ.
People accept Jesus attracted by his message and the lifestyle of his missionaries. They also realize that Jesus’s love recognizes them as humans and not treat them like animals as some in society do.
Young nun, mother granted bail after weeklong incarceration
A newly professed nun, who was jailed along with four others for alleged conversion charges, were on June 13 granted bail by a court in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
Sister Vibha Kerketta was arrested June 6 and jailed the next day along with her mother and three others after her family organized a Mass in their home to thank God for her profession in the Daughters of St Anne, a Ranchi-based congregation.
The family lived at Schoolpara lane of Balachhapar village in Jashpur district, Chhattisgarh.
A group of Hindu fundamentalists, who barged into the house, accused her mother and others for conducting a healing session and insulting other religions.
A magistrate sent the nun and the other four to jail and set the bail hearing for June 13.
The Sessions Court of Jashpur accepted their bail application on furnishing 15,000 rupees by each of them, Jesuit Father Fulgence Lakra, a lawyer, told Matters India.
Cardinal Ferrao calls for responsible use of social media
Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão of Goa and Daman, president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops in India, has urged people to use the social media responsibly and avoid becoming social hermits.
The cardinal said this June 23 while releasing the Indian edition of the book “Towards Full Presence — A Pastoral Reflection on Engagement with Social Media” at function in the Archbishop’s House in Panaji, capital of Goa state.
“Social media offer a chance to encourage interaction with others, but they can also make us feel more alone. While using the social media, some people may develop the perilous tendency to isolate themselves from society by becoming ‘social hermits,’ which is a dangerous phenomenon,” the cardinal added.
Also present were Fathers Stephen Alathara, CCBI deputy secretary general, Duming Gonsalves, executive secretary, Commission for Catechetics; and Barry Cardozo, director of Goa Archdiocesan Centre for Social Communications, along with Menino Menezes and Hazel Rodrigues
Demolish wall blocking Catholic school, High Court asks police
The Madhya Pradesh high court June 28 ordered the state police to demolish a boundary wall they built seven days ago that blocked access to a Catholic school.
A single bench of Justice Sanjay Dwivedi also directed the police to make immediate access to St John’s Senior Secondary School with more than 2,300 students in the Damoh district of the central Indian state. The wall forced the school to start online classes.
School principal Sister Sophy Bharat said the police on June 22 night came with workers and built the boundary wall in front of the school’s main gate that prevented the students’ entry.
The students and parents, who reached the school the next day, were forced to return, unable to enter the school campus.
“We then started online classes to avoid any loss to the students,” Sister Bharat told Matters India on June 28.
The school is managed by the Servite Sisters Society under the diocese of Jabalpur. It is some 250 km northeast of Bhopal, the state capital.
The high court’s order says, “Looking to the interest of students and also of the general public, I am directing the respondents to provide an access to the school students to reach the school for a further period of 30 days.”
“In the meantime, the petitioner may also file a civil suit claiming right over the land and also move an application for injunction before the competent court and till then the respondents are directed to provide access by demolishing that portion of the boundary wall which is just in front of the school and covers the road, which would make it accessible to the commuters,” the order added.
The court wants the police to comply with the order immediately “without wasting any further time so as to avoid any loss to the students of their studies.”
Ringing in a new era: the historic return of Nazi-plundered bells to Poland
This past weekend, a Ger-man bishop and a German state premier took part in an initiative to bring bells stolen by the Nazis during World War II to their rightful homes in Poland.
Bishop Gebhard Fürst of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and Baden-Württemberg’s pre-mier, Winfried Kretschmann, completed the act of repatriation, which spanned three different locations within Poland, according to CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language partner agency.
The church bells were originally taken from the communities of Straszewo (formerly Dietrichsdorf), Frombork (Frauenburg), and Zegoty (Siegfrieds-walde), CNA Deutsch reported. Postwar, they found their way into Catholic churches in Württem-berg, Germany. On the week-end of June 24-25, they made their long-awaited return jour-ney, restoring an essential part of these communities’ Catholic heritage.
The repatriation of the chur-ch bells is part of a larger initia-tive, “Bells of Peace for Euro-pe,” initiated by Fürst. The project was inspired by renovations at the St. Martin Cathedral in Ro-ttenburg, which revealed that one of the cathedral’s bells originally hailed from what is modern-day Poland. An in-depth investigation of all Catholic churches in Württemberg further uncovered 66 additional bells from the same era, with 54 of them still active, according to the diocese.
In their words – Untold stories of victims of violence in Nigeria
Victims of violence in north central Nigeria have told The Pillar that they believe the Nigerian government will not bring any aid to them as their communities continue to face violence from marauders who have burned villages and crops, stolen cattle, and kidnapped people for ransom.
In Nigeria’s Niger state, a survivor of violence and abduction in one community told The Pillar about a March attack on her village, in which she and dozens of other people were kidnapped.
Abduction victims in Nigeria declined to show their faces to a camera, for fear of retribution.
The survivor, a 36-year-old mother of two who requested anonymity for her safety, recalled that “this year, precisely on Tuesday, 14 March, it was rumored that armed bandits would attack our village. We didn’t take it seriously as we went about our normal business.”
“On that fateful day, I went to fetch firewood. When I came to offload the first batch, I noticed my husband, who took our son to school, had brought him back. When I asked why, he said, there are fears that bandits are on their way to our community.”
“As we were planning to escape, we ran to the river to fetch water in case our children became thirsty while we are hiding. While we were there, they came and searched the entire village and found no one; by then, we were hiding in the surrounding bushes,” she said.
How the synodal way split Germany’s bishops
Four of Germany’s 27 diocesan bishops have refused to fund a committee created to implement the resolutions of the country’s controversial “synodal way.”
The synodal way’s logo at the final assembly in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 9, 2023. © Synodaler Weg/Maximilian von Lachner.
Cologne’s Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Regensburg’s Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer, Passau’s Bishop Stefan Oster, and Eichstätt’s Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke vetoed the release of money from a common fund known as the Association of the Dioceses of Germany (VDD), which requires the unanimous approval of the country’s diocesan bishops.
Their decision means that supporters of the synodal way must find an alternative source of funding for the ”synodal committee” ahead of its scheduled first meeting in November.
The committee, which is composed of diocesan bishops and lay people, is intended to pave the way for the creation of a permanent “synodal council” overseeing the Church in Germany — a proposal explicitly rejected by Rome.
Soon after the four bishops’ stance was made public, Irme Stetter-Karp, president of the influential lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), insisted that the synodal committee’s deliberations would go ahead as planned.
Recalling the origins of the synodal way, she said: “It was the bishops who, in unity, asked the ZdK in 2019 to begin this way with them.”
Iraqi Christians oppose move for ‘demographic change’ in Nineveh
Christian leaders and activists from five political parties have jointly issued a statement over large-scale real estate operations in the Christian stronghold of the Nineveh Plains, saying the move aims to change the demography and threaten the Christian heritage of the region.
Five political groups – the Assyrian Democratic Movement (Zowaa), the National Union of Beth Nahrain, the Abnaa al-Nahrain Party, the Assyrian National Party, and the Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac Popular Council signed the document to denounce the plan for the Governorate of Nineveh, Fides news agency reported on June 21.
The region is a traditional home of various races and religions, especially Christian-majority Chaldean, Assyrian, and Syriac communities belonging to different churches.
A major Christian political party “the Babylon Movement,” which controls four of the five seats reserved for Christian deputies in the Iraqi parliament, did not endorse the document.
The statement said the groups have received information from official and community sources that the municipalities of Nineveh are promoting transactions for the sale and ownership of residential lands in the Talkeif district, one of the districts of the Nineveh Plains, to individuals who are not from the region and who are not of the Christian component, Fides reported.
The groups said these initiatives are “a clear violation” of the Constitution and the 2013 ruling of the Federal Supreme Court.