A weeklong conference of Asian Church leaders has ex-pressed concern over shrinking democratic spaces in several countries in the region.
The June 5-10 conference at Marian Pilgrim Centre Bai Dau in the Vang Tau City of Vietnam regretted that the rulers in those countries have become totalitarian, violating their citizens’ basic rights and instilling fear among civil society groups that take up people’s cause.
“Wider surveillance and threatening national security laws are employed to silence the voice of the voiceless and the media who are standing for the cause of the poor and the marginalized,” the meeting noted.
The conference addressed the FABC 50, a document issued by the Federation of the Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) on its golden jubilee, and its implication for the region.
Another common concern in the region is migration that forces people to leave their counties out of economic compulsions and look for better opportunities in life. “The local Church fails to protect and safeguard the people on the move. The left behind families and abandoned children of the migrants become burning issues to be addressed with utmost urgencies,” the conference said.
The participants also observed a widening rich-poor gap in most Asian countries. The number of the poor and child labour have increased in the post Covid-19 period because of the government’s pro-rich policies. The conference attributed low minimum wages and informalization of the workforce as the reasons for unequal distribution of the wealth among people.
Another burning issue is the rise of religious fanaticism as many countries now witness in-tolerance among different religious groups, attack against the minorities especially the Christians who are minorities in many Asian countries.
The ‘My religion is better attitude’ limits the space for dialogue, encounter and learning between the religions and the cultures, the conference regret-ted.
The meeting also addressed ecological concerns and made a call to ‘Save mother Earth.’ “Modern life and its luxuries are built upon the cry of nature. Globalization and urbanization induced heartless development at the expense of the environment. The Digital technology also has caused enough havoc in the lives of families, especially among the youth and the children,” lamented the participants.

A Catholic parish priest accused of “offending state authorities” in Belarus said he understood the hardships facing prisoners of conscience after just four days in jail.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone – not a single hour in such a place,” said Father Andrej Kulik, rector of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish at Miory. “Many of my colleagues have sat in prison for various concocted reasons in recent de-cades, not just here in Belarus, and it made no difference that I was a Catholic priest.”
The 44-year-old pastor spoke after being arrested May 25 with two other clergy in the eastern Vitebsk Diocese in connection with social media posts.
In an OSV News interview, he said he had been allowed to return home May 28. He hasn’t been charged with anything and his case was sent for revision.
“My parish prayed for me, while my bishop requested my release and said he had discussed my case with state representatives and the Vatican nunciature,” said Father Kulik, one of 57 priests serving the Vitebsk Diocese’s 94 Catholic parishes.
“While the accusations against us are often similar, the details of each case are different. But prison isn’t a place where anyone should be.”

More than 1,000 corpses will be buried at the Mibilizi genocide memorial site in Rwanda on June 3. The bodies of 1,238 victims of the 1994 mass killings recently were exhumed from church-owned land, and according to a Catholic priest and diocesan official in Rwanda, the discovery of the cache of remains means the route to reconciliation is still long.
Father Théogène Ngoboka, Director of the Justice and Peace Commission of Cyangugu Dio-cese, carries out pastoral work in Rusizi prison, which has 3,850 inmates, of whom 1,300 are incarcerated for genocide.
“It is very deplorable, but it is our sad reality,” Ngoboka said of the newly discovered mass graves.
“During the genocide, bodies were thrown here and there. It is not surprising that bodies can still be found today, but what is very shocking is the high number of bodies that have been found in mass graves that were not reveal-ed until now. This shows that there is still a long way to go in the process of unity and recon-ciliation,” he told.
The remains of at least 1000 more victims of genocide were exhumed from church land in Gashonga village recently. How did you receive that news, and what does that tell you about the scale of the killings that took place some 29 years ago?

A Nicaraguan court on June 9 announced the “freezing and forfeiture” of all real estate and of all shares of commercial companies belonging to the 222 political prisoners who were deported to the U.S. in February.
The ruling by Criminal Chamber 1 of the Court of Appeals based in Managua, dated May 19, points out that the former prisoners were declared “traitors to the homeland” and therefore exiled from the country and stripped of their citizenship.
“This theft is another serious violation of fundamental human rights, since private property is a constitutional right and a basic legal guarantee recorded in multiple inter-national agreements signed by Nicaragua,” said former Nicaraguan presidential candidate Félix Maradiaga in a message shared with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. “It’s a very serious action against the 222 political prisoners in addition to the action that had been previously taken against another 94 people on another list, including my wife, Berta Valle,” he added.
According to Maradiaga, this latest court decision adds “to the list of humiliations that the dictatorship has committed against this group of Nicaraguans, who have also suffered imprisonment, torture, public defamation campaigns, family separation, and the violation of their constitutional rights.”
He also warned that “this theft irreparably harms the entire Nicaraguan legal establishment in matters of private property.”

Japan’s religious landscape is undergoing a transformative shift, which is all the more evident by looking at the growing number of mosques that have emerged in the country over the past two decades.
The change can be attributed to a lesser degree to increasing intermarriage between Muslims and Japanese citizens (many Japanese converted to Islam through marriage), but mostly to the rising number of immigrants coming from Islamic states.
The number of Muslims in Japan was estimated to be between 10,000 to 20,000 in the year 2000 while the current estimates are of over 200,000. That is a ten-fold increase in less than one generation.
Also, mosques that used to be an uncommon sight in Japan are no longer rare. As of March 2021, there were 113 mosques in Japan, up from only 15 in 1999.
A notorious case is the Masjid Istiqlal Osaka, which came up in Osaka’s Nishinari Ward last year. It is housed in a structure that was once a factory. Donations from Indonesians mostly funded the costs of the renovation work, and we know that the largest Muslim population in the world is found in Indonesia.
While this trend reflects a more inclusive Japanese society, it also presents challenges and friction.

In 2016, when President Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949 – and have never shaken.
The impulse is that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence.
The paradox, of course, is that Marxism was also a foreign import, one imposed on Chinese society – in Mao Zedong’s own words – from “the barrel of a gun.” It not only destabilized China’s existing social structures and spiritual traditions, but as Marxist-Leninism morphed into Maoism, also became a kind of national religion itself – with Mao Zedong in the role of savior.
This was not an accident. “Worshiping Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin is correct,” Mao said at a 1958 party conference, “because truth is in their hands.” In 1970, the “Great Helmsman” told Edgar Snow, an American journalist and Mao apologist, that the cult of personality was necessary strategy to “overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.”
But the ascendant faith in China when Mao and his troops embarked on “The Long March” that would put them in power wasn’t found in China’s ancient temples. It came from the Christian Bible, which was embraced by the western-educated modernists who’d helped overthrow the Qing dynasty in the early years of the 20th century.

A new survey from the U.S. Bishops’ Conference and George town University shows that the number of permanent deacons in active ministry in the U.S. last year is the lowest since 2011, which “is [a trend] in keeping with the slow decline of the diaconate over the past several years.”
The survey, “A Portrait of the Permanent Diaconate in 2022,” found that there are an estimated 13,695 permanent deacons in active ministry. The figure is about 1,000 less than the average number of permanent deacons in active ministry since 2011 – about 14, 635.
Commenting on the survey, Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing, chair of the USCCB Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life, and Vocations, highlighted the imp-ortance of permanent deacons to the church in a recent statement. He did not respond to a Crux re-quest for comment on the survey.
“Permanent deacons are essential to the Church’s ministry of love and service, especially to the poor and vulnerable,” Boyea said in the statement. “By virtue of their ordination, they give witness to Christ the Servant in the daily exercise of their work and ministry.”
The survey was published by the USCCB Committee on Cler-gy, Consecrated Life, and Voca-tions, in concert the Center for Applied Research in the Aposto-late (CARA) at Georgetown University. The same survey has been conducted on an annual basis since 2005, aside from a few years in between.

A new television channel has been launched in Iraq as an initiative to save Syriac, a language spoken for more than 2,000 years which was once the most common in Christian liturgies.
An ancient dialect of Aramaic, Syriac has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria. The goal of the new station Al-Syriania is “to preserve the Syriac language” according to its director Jack Anwia.
“Once, Syriac was a language widespread across the Middle East,” he said last week, adding that Baghdad has a duty “to keep it from extinction”. He added that “the beauty of Iraq is its cultural and religious diversity”.
Iraq’s government launched the channel in April with around 40 staff and a variety of programming, from cinema to art and history.
“It’s true that we speak Syriac at home, but unfortunately I feel that our language is disappearing slowly but surely,” said Mariam Albert, a news presenter on Al-Syriania.
“It is important to have a television station that represents us,” she added.
Syriac-speaking communities in both Iraq and Syria have declined over the years, owing to decades of conflict driving minorities to migrate. Today, Iraq is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim but also home to Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, with Arabic and Kurdish are the official languages.

Pope Francis’s medical team reported June 9 morning that two days after undergoing surgery for an abdominal hernia, the pontiff is continually improving and spent the morning reading following a lengthy rest the day before.
A June 9 statement from the Vatican said that Pope Francis “rested well during the night,” and that his medical team says his clinical status “is progressively improving and the post-operative course is regular.”
Francis breakfasted and got out of bed after, spending most of the day in an armchair in his room, allowing him “to read the newspapers” and to begin “the initial resumption of his work.”
Pope Francis underwent abdominal surgery Wednesday afternoon for what the Vatican described as “a lacerated incisional hernia” causing recurrent pain “and worsening sub-occlusive syndromes,” meaning there is a hernia in the abdominal wall at the place of a previous surgical incision in which the intestine goes out and comes in, creating discomfort.
The pope spent Thursday resting, and maintained a liquid diet, apart from receiving communion for the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi, which commemorates Jesus’s death on the Cross.
He also voiced gratitude for the many well-wishes and messages of support that have come in from around the world.
A Vatican statement Thursday evening said Francis was particularly moved by a message he received from the family of infant Miguel Angel, who was baptized by the pontiff on March 31, while Francis was admitted to the Gemelli hospital for bronchitis.