Sister Ambika Pillai is seated at a table while answering the children’s questions around the table, all busily creating decorations out of colored paper.
Pillai, a member of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Garden, is the secretary of Navjeevan (New Life) Children’s Home in Khandwa, a town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
The children at the center mostly come from broken families — typically abandoned or orphaned — who end up loitering around train stations; oftentimes, their fathers were addicted to drugs and their mothers were unable to make enough money to support their families, Pillai said.
“In some cases, children run away after being scolded or questioned by parents for something,” Pillai told GSR, adding that in such cases, “we do our best to reunite them with their families.”
Wearing a loose black skirt and a shawl swung around her neck, the nun gets up from the table and walks with the help of a stick and a prosthetic leg.
Six years ago, she lost her left leg in a train accident.
Sister Pillai’s “dedication to serve the runaway children even after losing a leg is amazing,” said Pranay Barve, one of the nun’s friends who is tasked by the railways to identify such children.
Virginity test on Catholic nun unconstitutional: Delhi Court
The Delhi High court has declared a virginity test conducted on a Catholic nun as part of a probe into the murder case as “unconstitutional.”
“The virginity test conducted on a female detainee, accused under investigation, or in custody, whether judicial or police, is declared unconstitutional and in violation of Article 21 of the Constitution which includes right to dignity,” a single bench of Justice Swarana Kanti Sharma said on February 7.
The petitioner, Sister Sephy, was convicted in the murder of Sister Abhaya, a 19-year-old junior nun on March 27, 1992. He had moved the High Court in 2009 challenging the Central Bureau of Investigation for subjecting her to the virginity test during the probe a year earlier.
The young nun’s body was found in the well of St. Pius Convent in Kerala’s Kottayam town and some Church officials termed her death as a case of suicide.
The Delhi court, however, has refused to grant her relief such as compensation and action against the officials for subjecting her to the illegal test.
The Delhi court’s verdict that came 15 years after the nun filed the petition said, “Virginity testing is a form of inhuman treatment and the same violates the principle of human dignity.”
“The test, being violative of right to dignity of an individual, cannot be resorted to by the state and the same shall be in teeth of the scheme of Indian Constitution and the right to life enshrined under Article 21,” it asserted.
Sister Sephy had also questioned the CBI for subjecting her to the test 16 years after the alleged crime had taken place and the need for virginity test to prove a murder case.
“Most shockingly, in the present case the virginity test was used to determine the truth of the accusation of murder against the petitioner,” the Delhi court said.
“Undoubtedly, the test in itself is extremely traumatic for a victim of sexual assault as well as upon any other women in custody and is bound to have devastating effect on the psychological as well as physical health of the person,” the court added. (See Focus)
Pakistan mosque blast scares Christians
The suicide blast at a mosque in Pakistan, claiming the lives of 101 people — mostly policemen — and injuring more than 220 on Jan. 30, has set alarm bells ringing among the country’s Christian groups.
The blast in Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bordering the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, is the deadliest since twin suicide bombings at the city’s All Saints Church that killed 70 worshippers and injured more than 120. The attack in 2013 was the worst strike on Christians in Pakistan.
Atif Javed, a Catholic, whose six friends and their families were injured in the church blast, expressed fear for his wife who works at the social welfare department close to the targeted mosque in the sixth most populous city in Pakistan.
“Nobody is safe. We try to return home early when we go out shopping and eating,” Javed told.
“We don’t trust words and await what plan they have to protect us”
“We were worried about her when the news came in about the mosque blast. On the phone, she described the blast as an earthquake initially. A Christian police officer, who lives adjacent to the mosque, lost his mother,” Javed added.
Corruption, freedom suppression plague Asian nations
Governments in multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region suppressed basic freedoms and civic space amid rising authoritarianism and high level of corruption, says a new report from Transparency International (TI).
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea are ranked among the worst Asian nations to curb civic space and basic freedoms, according to the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2022 report published on Jan. 31.
The Berlin-based global anti-graft watchdog said that “grand corruption remains common, and the overall situation has barely improved” among Asia-Pacific nations.
While the report pointed out some Asian countries making headway in their fight against corruption, the region scored an average of 45 points out of 100 for the fourth year in a row.
The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).
Among the Asian nations, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan scoring 83, 76, and 73 points each were ranked in the top three spots.
“Asian leaders persisted in allowing anti-corruption commitments to fall on the back burner”
Among the tail-enders were Afghanistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea scoring 24, 24, 23, and 17 points respectively.
Despite the Asian sub-continent seeing multiple diplomatic summits to ease international tension and reduce corruption, the results were widely varying, TI said.
“Asian leaders persisted in allowing anti-corruption commitments to fall on the back burner, while Pacific governments refocused and recentered their efforts to combat it,” the annual report read.
It specifically pointed out Malaysia’s (47 points) 1MDB scandal terming it as a “grand corruption” that implicated banks, celebrities, and institutions across six countries.
In 2022, former prime minister, Najib Razak, was jailed for his involvement in the scandal.
Vietnam diocese buries 700 aborted foetuses
A diocesan pro-life panel in southern Vietnam celebrated a special requiem Mass and burial for 700 aborted foetuses on Jan. 29 where participants dedicated themselves to raising awareness of human dignity in the communist nation where students lead the pack in seeking abortions.
Led by Xuan Loc diocese’s pro-life committee, the special Mass at Bac Hai Church in Bien Hoa City, in the southeast region of Vietnam, was attended by hundreds of pro-life volunteers from different faiths. The cemetery is home to over 62,000 unborn babies.
Before the burial, the dead foetuses were cleaned with alcohol, wrapped in white cloth, given names, decorated with flowers, and placed in the church for people to pray for.
“Burying dead foetuses is to apologize to unborn babies for the pain and suffering we make them endure … and to pray for other babies to be safe,” Father Joseph Nguyen Van Tich, one of two priests who concelebrated the Mass said.
The other priest was Father Vincent Nguyen Minh Tien.
Although people took ten days off to celebrate the Tet (Lunar New Year) festival in January, early terminations did not subside and volunteers still collected 700 dead foetuses from local clinics and hospitals, Father Tich said.
The southeast Asian nation with a population of 99.4 million records 300,000 terminations per year, mainly among girls aged 15-19. Of them, 60-70% are students, according to studies.
Chinese Christians start prayer campaign amid state purge
Members of a Protestant House Church in northern China, forcibly shut down last year, launched a prayer campaign for the well-being of detained pastors, leaders, and their family members amid a government crackdown, says a report.
Five prayer requests were sent to the members as the authorities in the Yadou district of Shanxi province have continued an investigation into the Linfen Covenant House Church, China Aid reported on Feb. 7.
Linfen Church and a church-run school were shut down last November, citing unauthorized religious and educational activities, according to Bitter Winter magazine.
Last August, police arrested the church’s preachers — Li Jie and Han Xiaodong — and placed them under house arrest. Later, following interrogations of church members, police arrested Wang Qiang, a leader and co-worker of the church.
The three arrested were charged with “fraud” allegedly based on testimonies of church members that they “defrauded” congregants through tithings and offerings.
Linfen Covenant House Church is a sister church of Zion Reformed Church in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, which was raided last November.
The police reportedly disrupted the Sunday liturgy and arrested seven Christians for attending an “illegal gathering” by violating Covid-19 pandemic rules.
North Korean defectors ‘discriminated’ in South Korea
North Korean defectors residing in South Korea face discrimination due to language barriers and negative perceptions about their country causing many to have psychological breakdowns, says a new survey.
The Korea Hana Foundation (KHF) in its 2022 North Korean Refugees Social Inte-gration Survey found that one in every five North Korean defectors face discrimination due to their “speech, lifestyle, and attitude,” Catholic Peace Broadcasting Corporation (CPBC) reported on Feb. 1.
Park Joo-myung, 43, felt that apart from the support and benefits provided by South Korea to settle in, the defectors’ North Korean accent is also a factor that impacts discri-mination. “I felt a lot of alienation because of [my] North Korean accent. So, I have no choice but to react sensitively to even passing [comments],” Park said.
KHF is a non-profit public organization established by the Ministry of Unification in 2010 to help defectors settle down through its multi-faceted projects.
In the organization’s 2022 annual survey among 2,198 of the estimated 30,000 North Korean defectors in the county, 19.5% of respondents acknowledged facing discrimi-nation of some sort, CPBC reported.
In contrast, 16.1% had experienced dis-crimination while trying to settle down in South Korea in 2021.
Concerning the reasons for discrimination, “negative perception about the existence of North Koreans” among South Koreans ranked second at 44.2% after the speech, lifestyle, and attitude issues.
The assumption that North Koreans “lack the ability compared to South Koreans in terms of professional knowledge and skills” ranked third at 20.4%
The Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Bishop Audo: after 12 years of war, the earthquake falls on us like a new bomb
“Now it is even more important to be close to the people, who are terrorized by this earth-quake.” For Jesuit Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, “among the many we have had, this is a disaster that, so to speak, we are not used to. After 12 years of war, this is a new tremendous bomb, lethal and unknown, which falls on us.”
The earthquake that shook southern Turkey and north-central Syria at 4:17 a.m. local time on Monday, February 6, is the most violent in eight centuries. This was reported by Marlène Brax, director of the Lebanese Geophysics Center, interviewed by the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour. The earthquake had a magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale, with epicenter located in southern Turkey.
The Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo describes to Fides “a city of two and a half million inhabitants without electricity, water and heating. It is very cold, winter is harsh. I see people in the streets or in cars. They are afraid, they do not know what will happen, because it may not be over, and there are rumours that new strong and devastating tremors may follow.” In fact, A new 7.6 magnitude earthquake tremor was recorded in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmaras at 1:24 p.m. local time, and was also felt in Damascus.
In Syria, the provisional death toll reported by official Syrian sources, which is unfortunately set to rise, speaks so far of 371 people killed and more than 1,000 injured as a result of the quake. Hundreds more victims are already being counted in Syrian areas outside the control of the government of Damascus. Churches in the area are also beginning to come to terms with the devastation suffered as a result of the earthquake. In Turkey, Bishop Paolo Bizzeti, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, reported that Iskenderun Cathedral has collapsed, and churches of the Syrian Orthodox and Orthodox communities in that city have also been destroyed. “Here in Aleppo”, Bishop Audo reports to Fides, “Melkite Archbishop Georges Masri has been pulled alive from the rubble, but his Vicar is still under the destroyed building, and they still have not found him.”
Ukraine Catholic Church moves from Russian-affiliated Julian calendar
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church announced Feb. 6 that that the world’s largest Eastern Catholic Church will change liturgical calendars this fall, changing the date of several liturgical feasts, as Ukrainian Christian distance themselves from the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The move means that Ukrainian Catholics will begin this year celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25, but will for now continue to celebrate Easter on a later date than most of the world’s Catholics and Protestant Christians.
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Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk announced Monday that the Ukrainian Catholic Church will mostly discontinue using the Julian calendar, a liturgical calendar used almost exclusively by the Russian Orthodox Church and other eastern churches influenced by it.
Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, announced that the change had called for during a Feb. 1-2 synodal meeting of the Church’s bishops. In the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the synod of bishops is a policy-setting body, which governs the Church in line with the major archbishop and the pope.
For a large part of Ukrainian society, the Julian calendar is perceived as a marker of the “Russkiy mir,” or “Russian world,” ideology, which has been used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his invasion in Ukraine.
In polling conducted by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture last year, 60% of Ukrainians said the country’s churches should move away from the Russian-influenced liturgical schedule.
In a resolution passed last week, the bishops of the UGCC explained that Catholics had asked for a change, and that they had consulted with clergy and monasteries about the move.
The bishops decided that a changeover will happen September 1, but have allowed for parishes to transition more slowly, taking even until 2025, with permission from their diocesan bishops.
Muslims Rebuke Archbishop on ‘Gay Blessing’
Muslim leaders in England are rebuking the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, over the Church of England’s proposal to teach school children that same-sex unions are valid.
The admonition coincides with Pope Francis’ trip to South Sudan. He was accompanied by the archbishop of Canterbury and the moderator of the Church of Scotland — both pro-LGBT leaders whose denominations offer “same-sex blessings” and “same-sex marriage” in several countries.
On Friday, the Association of British Muslims wrote to Welby expressing its “concern about the teaching of sexual identity politics in schools, including Church of England schools.”
From summer on, “every Church of England primary school will teach that both heterosexual and homosexual marriages have equal validity,” Paul Salahuddin Armstrong, head of the ABM, noted in the letter obtained by Church Militant.
Armstrong acknowledged that British law recognized “same-sex marriage” but stressed that “many faith communities, both locally and globally, still hold to the traditional definition of marriage as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the formal union of a man and a woman, as recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife.’”