India witnessed a record 486 incidents of violence against Christians during 2021, which ended on a violent note for the community that makes up only 2.3 percent of the country’s over 1.3 billion population.
Data collected by the United Christian Forum (UCF) showed an upward trend in such violent incidents over the last few years but 2021 was termed as the “most violent year” in the country’s history. The past two months witnessed over 100 incidents as if to warn the community during Christmas, it said.
The 486 incidents top the previous record of 328 incidents in 2019. They were also far more widespread than previously recorded with incidents reported in 20 states and two union territories.
The UCF in a press release said that violence against Christians has been increasing steadily since 2014 with 127 incidents in that year, 142 in 2015, 226 in 2016, 248 in 2017, 292 in 2018, 328 in 2019, 279 in 2020 (perhaps pandemic gave some relief to Indian Christians).
”In almost all incidents reported across India, vigilante mobs composed of religious extremists have been seen to either barge into a prayer gathering or round up individuals that they believe are involved in forcible religious conversions,” says the UCF’s latest report
The UCF attributed the high incidence of violence to “impunity.” Police recorded formal complaints in only 34 of the 486 cases due to which “such mobs criminally threaten, physically assault people in prayer, before handing them over to the police on allegations of forcible conversions.”
The UCF is an inter-denominational Christian organization that fights for the rights of members of India’s Christian minority. Its Convener A C Michael said the steady year-on-year increase in violence against a peace-loving community had escalated in the last quarter to alarming numbers.
China forbids foreigners from spreading religious content online
In the U.S. China rivalry that involves a complex mix of diplomacy, trade wars and sanctions, religion has come under increased pressure after the communist regime banned online propagation of religion by foreign nationals, purportedly to make religion more Chinese-oriented.
On Dec. 22, the Chinese government issued a new norm that proscribes all foreign institutions and individuals from spreading religious content online. China cited national security interests for enacting the new law, the first of their kind to monitor online religious affairs, reported ucanews.com.
The new rules, titled Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services, were made two weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping attended a national religious work conference. In his address to that conference Dec. 4, Xi stressed making religions Chinese in orientation and developing them in the Chinese context.
The United States, the United Nations and others have criticized China’s repression of 1 million Uyghur Muslims, in Xinjiang province, where China allegedly is holding Uyghurs in detention camps.
Michelle Bachelet, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has sought to visit Xinjiang for years to verify the prosecution of Uyghur Muslims on religious grounds, but a U.N. spokesman said so far, no such visit had been made possible by the Chinese government.
China denies abuses in Xinjiang and says its policies and detention camps are meant for vocational training and to curb Islamic extremism. The United States cited China’s arbitrary detention and forced sterilizations of Uyghurs — part of treatment the U.S. has called genocide — when it announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that being in February. The United Kingdom, Australia and Canada joined the diplomatic boycott, which still allows athletes to participate.
Pakistan’s top court grants bail to Christian facing blasphemy charge
The Supreme Court of Pakistan’s decision to grant bail to a Christian accused of blasphemy should give hope to others facing the charge, according to a prominent lawyer.
Saif ul Malook welcomed the court’s ruling on Jan. 6 that Nadeem Samson should be released on bail.
“It is a very important ruling, the first in the judicial history of Pakistan,” the lawyer said in a video call reported by the Jubilee Campaign, a non-profit promoting human rights.
Samson, identified as a Catholic by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), was arrested in 2017 and imprisoned in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, after a property dispute.
He was charged with insulting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The 42-year-old’s supporters believe that he was falsely accused of the crime, which is punishable by death in Pakistan, an Islamic republic in South Asia with a population of almost 227 million people.
Malook, who represented Asia Bibi, a Catholic mother acquitted of blasphemy in 2018, petitioned the Supreme Court at a hearing on Jan. 5 to break with the practice of denying bail to people accused of blasphemy.
Indigenous Christians living in fear in Bangladesh village
Indigenous Christians are living in fear after violence by land grabbers from the Muslim-majority community in Bangladesh’s Rajshahi district.
At least 10 Christians were beaten while two of them landed in hospital in critical condition in Badhair village in the Tanore area of the northern district in the past week.
The village is home to more than 200 indigenous people, mostly Christians. They are now scared to step out of their homes. The men fear going to the market while children are not being sent to school, say locals.
The cause for the attacks is 12,500 square meters of khas land (government-owned fallow land) on which 23 indigenous families have been settled for years. Some influential people want to remove them and occupy the land themselves.
Biplob Tudu, 40, an indigenous Santal who was taken to Tanor subdistrict hospital in critical condition, said he was attacked while returning home from the market in a three-wheeled vehicle on Jan. 3.
“I was accosted by a mob of around 10 Muslims who pulled me out of the three-wheeler and beat me with rods. They broke my bones,” Tudu, a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, told.
Myanmar cardinal pleads for peace after 38 killed in ‘Christmas massacre’
After nearly 40 people were killed in a brutal attack in east-ern Myanmar right before Christmas, Cardinal Charles Bo of Yangon made an appeal to both government and opposition forces to stop the violence and begin pursuing peaceful dialogue.
The killing of at least 38 civilians in Mo So village, in Myanmar’s Hpruso, Kayah (Karenni) State “is a heart-breaking and horrific atrocity which I condemn fully and unreservedly with all my heart,” Bo said in his Dec. 26 message.
He offered prayers for the victims, their families, and the survivors of “unspeakable and despicable act of inhumane bar-barity.”
“The fact that the bodies of those killed, burned, and mutilated were found on Christmas Day makes this appalling tragedy even more poignant and sickening,” he said, noting that as the rest of the world celebrated the birth of Christ with joy, the people of Mo So village suffered death, shock, and destruction.
At least 38 people, including children, were killed late last week in an attack by Myanmar’s military in a region of the country where fighting has escalated between resistance groups and junta forces.
International UK-based humanitarian group Save the Children said two of its workers who were heading home for the holidays following a humanitarian trip to the area are still missing, after their vehicle was targeted in the attack, which took place in the eastern Burmese state of Kayah, also known as Karenni.
Suspected militant accused of beheadings Christians killed in Indonesia
Indonesian security forces killed a suspected militant accused of beheadings in a shootout Tuesday in a sweeping counterterrorism campaign against extremists in remote mountain jungles, police said. Provincial police chief Rudy Sufahriadi said Ahmad Gazali, 27, also known as Ahmad Panjang, a key member of the East Indonesia Mujahideen network, was fatally shot by a joint team of military and police officers near Uempasa hamlet in Central Sulawesi province’s mountainous Parigi Moutong district. It borders Poso district, an extremist hotbed in the province.
Taliban order Afghan shop owners to behead mannequins
The Taliban have ordered shop owners in western Afghanistan to cut off the heads of mannequins, insisting the human figures violate Islamic law.
A video clip showing men sawing the plastic heads off women figures went viral on social media.
Since returning to power in August, the Taliban have increasingly imposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, severely curtailing freedoms, particularly those of women and girls.
“We have ordered the shopkeepers to cut the heads off mannequins as this is against (Islamic) Sharia law,” Aziz Rahman, head of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the city of Herat, told AFP on Wednesday.
“If they just cover the head or hide the entire mannequin, the angel of Allah will not enter their shop or house and bless them,” he added, after some clothes vendors initially responded by covering the heads of mannequins with plastic bags or headscarves.
Rome church condemns swastika-draped casket at funeral
The Catholic Church in Rome on January 11 strongly condemned as “offensive and unacceptable” a funeral procession outside a local church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute. Photos and video of the scene outside St. Lucia church following the Monday funeral service were published by the Italian online news portal Open. They showed around two dozen people gathered outside the church as the swastika-draped casket emerged, shouting “Presente!” with their right arm extended in the fascist salute.
In a statement Tuesday, the Vicariate of Rome strongly condemned the scene and stressed that neither the parish priest, nor the priest who celebrated the funeral, knew what was going to transpire outside after the funeral Mass ended.
It called the swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag “a horrendous symbol irreconcilable with Christianity.”
“This ideological and violent exploitation, especially following an act of worship near a sacred place, remains serious, offensive and unacceptable for the church community of Rome and for all people of good will in our city,” it said.
The statement quoted the parish priest, Father Alessandro Zenobbi, as distancing himself and the church from “every word, gesture and symbol used outside the church, which are attributed to extremist ideologies far from the message of the Gospel of Christ.”
Italian news reports identified the deceased as a 44-year-old former militant of the extreme right-wing group Forza Nuova, who died over the weekend of a blood clot.
Pope Francis is technically the bishop of Rome, but he delegates the day-to-day management of the diocese to his vicar, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis.
‘Polite persecution’ of Christians gathers pace in Europe
European communities, with their sprawling churches, ancient cities, culinary skills, dance, music, et al, were once proud of their Christian roots. They slowly became secular in the 20th century and the evolution continues to move in a trajectory of despising the Christian faith and its followers.
When former German chancellor Helmut Kohl suggested that Turkey would never join the European Union (EU), it was hard to dismiss the criticism that he was speaking on behalf of Europe’s Christian fraternity and his concern for preserving a common cultural heritage.
When Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi described it as a Franco-British plot to prevent the princess from marrying a Muslim
In the past, despite a policy-based separation of church and state, they worked together in crises as hands of the same body. In a secularized society, the state distanced itself from the church in the guise of nationalism and secular policies.
This has led to populist leaders in Europe interpreting religion according to their political views. Their current mantra of “inclusion” excludes the continent’s Christian roots and traditions. According to liberals, Europe’s strength lies in its diversity, and embracing differences of approach is necessary to pre-vent another war from taking place among European nations.
Italian bishop bans no-vaccinated priests from distributing communion
A bishop in the southern Italian region of Campania is making waves for his recent decision to ban priests, religious, and lay people who have not been vaccinated from distributing communion at Mass in a bid to curb Italy’s rising infection rate.
Bishop Giacomo Cirulli, who leads the Dioceses of Teano-Calvi and Alife-Caiazzo, in the Italian region of Campania, which has had 11,815 new COVID cases and five new COVID-related deaths in past 24 hours, issued a decree announcing the ban earlier this week.
In the Jan. 8 decree, Cirulli said the status of the pandemic “is constantly and seriously worsening,” and invited the faithful under his pastoral direction to “respect and strictly enforce prophylaxis and the sanitation norms for the containment of the pandemic within our churches and in the relevant premises.”
Specifically, he urged faithful to obey the rules of a May 7, 2020, Memorandum of Under-standing between the Italian government and CEI on the resumption of liturgical celebrations, which bans the use of holy water and the reception of communion on the tongue, requires Mass attendees to maintain at least three feet of distance, use hand sanitizer, and to wear face masks.
Cirulli asked Mass-goers to “to strictly respect the distance and therefore the number of admissions into the liturgical hall” in the days and weeks to come.