We know Pakistan punishes blasphemy with the death penalty, but how many blasphemers are there in Pakistan? From July 13, we have an answer, thanks to a report by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony.
It claims that 400,000 social media accounts spread “extremely blasphemous material against the most revered figures, including Allah Almighty (God), the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the Ahl al-Bayt (Prophet’s family), the Mothers of the Believers, the Companions of the Prophet, the Holy Quran, and the national flag [of Pakistan, which includes Islamic symbols].”
Even considering that the same individual may have multiple accounts, the number of those risking the death penalty is enormous. Through which method the Ministry arrived at the figure of 400,000 and the claim that an “epidemic” of blasphemy is hitting Pakistan is not explained.
Doubts arise when we read in the report that, among the owners of these 400,000 accounts spreading blasphemy, “the FIA [Federal Investigation Agency] Cyber Crime Wing has already apprehended 140 individuals involved in these crimes, with 11 of them having received the death penalty from trial courts and two having their death sentences confirmed by the High Court.”
Seven-year-old girl raped because she is Christian
In early July, Javeria, a seven-year-old girl, was raped in Chichawatni, a rural subdistrict (Tehsil), in Sahiwal district, in what is the latest and most chilling example of violence against women.
This problem is widespread in Pakistan, with tens of thousands of cases each year, affecting mainly girls and women from ethnic and religious minorities, this according to local human rights activists.
Javeria is from a Christian family. On the day of the attack, she had gone to a store to buy certain things. When she did not return, her father, Javed Masih, started looking for her, eventually finding her in an abandoned building while a man was raping her.
The man fled the scene but was later apprehended by police, while the girl was admitted to Sahiwal District Hospital for a few days.
Voice for Justice, a Pakistani organisation that provides legal aid to those who cannot afford it, offered to represent Javeria, whose family is destitute.
Like Javeria, “girls from to religious minorities are specifically targeted because they are less likely to receive help from police and other officials in the search for justice,” Voice of Justice chairman Joseph Jansen explained.
“Often in these cases the culprits are not prosecuted and police agents tend to side with the people from the majority religion, i.e. Muslims,” he lamented.
Card Sako forced to leave Baghdad and move to Erbil
The highest authority of the Chaldean Church in Iraq, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, has been forced to leave the patriarchal see in Baghdad and move to a monastery in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, via Istanbul.
This is a direct consequence of the “deliberate and humiliating campaign” against the Chaldean patriarch by the Babylon Brigades, a pro-Iranian Christian militia.
Such persecution is compounded by the decision of Iraq’s president to withdraw “the Republican Decree (147), an unprecedented [act] in Iraqi history”, Card Sako says in a statement in Arabic and English posted on the patriarchate’s website.
A few days ago, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid withdrew what could be called the “institutional recognition” of the office of the patriarch.
According to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Arab, al-Kildani wants to include the Christian question in its political agenda and use it “in the service of the militias that control Iraq behind whom is Iran”, unlike the patriarch who has always tried to “preserve the independence of the Chaldean Christian community.”
According to the governor of Wasit, Muhammad Jamil al-Mayahi, Cardinal Sako “is a symbol of unity and brotherhood, and his departure from Baghdad is a loss for all of us.”
Meanwhile, in the cities of Karamlesh and Erbil Iraqi Christians have rallied in support of the Chaldean patriarch.
“The entire Christian community of Iraq is threatened, and Chaldean and Syriac Assyrians have united to affirm their support for the patriarch of the Chaldean Church,” said several associations, such as the Assyrian Democratic Movement, the Popular Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Council, the House of Mesopotamia (Bet-Nahrain) Patriotic Union, the Sons of Mesopotamia (Bnay Nahrain) Party, and the Assyrian Patriotic Party.
Lebanese saint who unites Christians and Muslims
St. Charbel Makhlouf is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession — both Christians and Muslims.
“St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Father Louis Matar, coordinator of the Shrine of St. Charbel in Annaya, Lebanon, told CNA.
Speaking in Arabic with the help of an interpreter, Matar said the shrine, which encompasses the monastery where the Maronite Catholic priest, monk, and hermit lived for nearly 20 years, receives approximately 4 million visitors a year, including both Christians and Muslims.
Lebanese Catholics pray at the shrine of St. Charbel, the country’s patron saint. EWTN News
Matar, who is responsible for archiving the thousands of medically-verified healings attributed to the intercession of the Maronite priest-monk, said that many miraculous cures have been obtained by Muslims.
Since 1950, the year the monastery began to formally record the miraculous healings, they have archived more than 29,000 miracles, Matar said. Prior to 1950, miracles were verified only through the witness of a priest. Now, with more advanced medical technology available, alleged miracles require medical documents demonstrating the person’s initial illness and later, their unexplainable good health.
One of the miracles documented by Matar at the end of December 2018 was that of a 45-year-old Italian woman. Suffering from a neurological disease, she was hospitalized after it was discovered she had tried to commit suicide by consuming acid.
In Nigeria, kidnapping priests becomes a growth industry
Father Joseph Azubuike, a Nigerian priest who was kidnapped on July 10, has regained his freedom along with three other men travelling with him who were also taken.
Azubuike’s release, along with the three other kidnap victims, was confirmed to Crux by the Vicar General of the Abakaliki Diocese in Nigeria’s south-eastern Ebonyi state, Father Donatus O. Chukwu.
Chukwu explained that Azubuike had been kidnapped “in the evening hours of Monday, July 10, less than a kilometre from his rectory of St. Charles Parish, Mgbalaeze Isu, Onicha Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, Southeast Nigeria. He was returning from a pastoral engagement when the incident happened. They were taken into a forest.”
The kidnappers demanded a 50 million Naira ransom (roughly US $66,000) or Azubuike would be killed, Chukwu said.
In a report titled, “The Economics of Nigeria’s Kidnap Industry,” the research firm SBM Intelligence estimated that between July 2021 and June 2022, no fewer than 3,420 people were abducted across Nigeria, with 564 others killed in violence associated with abductions.
Dictatorship in Nicaragua freezes fund for retired priests
In a new attack against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, the dictatorship of President Da-niel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has frozen the Church’s retirement fund for priests, according to lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina.
The lawyer is the author of the report “Nicaragua: A Perse-cuted Church?”, which catalogs the more than 500 attacks against the Church in the country since 2018.
“Elderly priests are not re-ceiving their pensions from the national insurance fund for priests, the product of years of contributing, due to the bank accounts of the Catholic Church being blocked,” Molina wrote on the social media site X
“The national insurance fund for priests is an institution that was created more than 20 years ago by the CEN [Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference] intending a retirement fund for priests. It’s not exactly insurance, because it doesn’t cover health issues or other Social Security issues. It’s intended as a retirement fund,” Molina explained to the Nicara-guan newspaper Confidencial Digital.
The fund receives $150 a year from active priests, parishes, and Church institutions in addition to what is collected on Ash Wednes-day.
Visa denials face applicants from developing nations ahead of World Youth Day
Officials of the Catholic Church in India have asked the government of Portugal to ease the process of granting travel visas for young people planning to attend the August 1-6 World Youth Day in Lisbon, in order to accommodate almost 1,000 Indians hoping to take part in the event.
Often dubbed the “Olympics of the Catholic Church,” World Youth Day is a massive gathering of young people from around the world launched by St. John Paul II.
Whenever the event is staged in an affluent venue, however, there are often difficulties in granting visas to participants from developing nations, out of concern that some youth will remain behind and become undocumented workers and residents.
In many cases, young people hoping to make the trip are also required to be interviewed by embassy officials, though in some parts of the world applicants have reported not being called for the interview despite repeated requests.
“We are facing a lot of issues and many rejections this time,” Machado said. “We are not even sure whether all registered will get a visa to travel.”
“They look for a guarantee that the visitors will return home” from a third party willing to assume the risk. “That’s very difficult to get,” Machado said. Over 1,300 groups comprised of more than 28,600 individuals from across the United States, will travel to Lisbon, Portugal, for the thirty-seventh World Youth Day (WYD) gathering with Pope Francis.
Manipur church burnings debated by European Parliament as Modi attempts to silence discussion
After 13 weeks of ethnically-based violence in India’s troubled north-eastern state of Manipur, the European Parliament in Strasbourg is holding an emergency debate.
But opposition to holding votes on the resolutions has come from India, through lobbyists employed in Europe by the Hindu nationalist BJP government of Narendra Modi.
“It’s actually extraordinary. It’s quite an unexpected development”, commented Caroline Duffield of persecution charity, Open Doors.
“What it is, they’ve tabled emergency resolutions on the Indian government’s handling of the security crisis in Manipur. And really, the language is scathing, the criticisms are profound”, she said.
Details of attacks on Christians sent to Premier Christian Radio in past days has put the number of burnings of church buildings, schools, seminaries and the homes of ministers at 564, since 3 May.
These amount to 263 churches belonging to the Kuki-Zo tribe, 93 Kuki Christian buildings and 238 churches belong to Christians from the Meitei ethnic group, which witnesses say were destroyed by Hindu Meitei nationalists.
Six political groupings in the European Parliament have tabled the resolutions, which will be voted on tomorrow.
A motion laid by Spanish MEP Miguel Urbán Crespo on behalf of The Left Group criticises the “authorities´ response” to minority groups in India, saying it “has stoked ethnic divisions,” adding that “political leaders and public authorities explicitly advocated hatred towards these minorities with impunity.”
“They’re denouncing the BJP political elite, for the use of nationalist rhetoric”, reflected Caroline Duffield. “So it’s an extraordinary resolution debate underway” she told Premier Christian Radio.
For the European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats), a resolution tabled in the name of Croatian MEP Željana Zovko and 12 others, “strongly urges the Indian authorities to continue to employ all necessary measures” to halt religious violence.
Dictatorship in Nicaragua confiscates convent of sisters it abducted and expelled
In a new attack against the Catholic Church, the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua canceled the legal personhood and confiscated the assets of a congregation of women religious.
Members of the Sandinista police “like criminals broke into the house of the Sisters of the Fraternity of the Poor Ones of Jesus Christ at midnight yesterday; they were going to leave the country soon,” tweeted Martha Patrica Molina on July 2.
Molina is a Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher who authored the report “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church?”, which details over 500 attacks against the Church by the regime.
The Nicaraguan media outlet Article 66 reported that the Ministry of the Interior took the measure July 4 and that the sisters were going to leave Nicaragua next week since the authorities had not renewed their residency permit.
The sisters later tweeted that they have gone to El Salvador to continue their mission to serve the needy.
The rationale used for the decision to seize the convent was that the congregation “failed to comply with its obligations” by not reporting its latest financial statements and because the term of its board of directors had expired in February 2021.
Catholic Church is most credible institution in Nicaragua, CID Gallup poll finds
A new survey commissioned by the Nicaraguan media outlet Confidencial and conducted by market researcher CID Gallup of Costa Rica revealed that the Catholic Church is the most credible institution in Nicaragua despite the harsh persecution to which it has been subjected for some years by the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
The survey indicated that 48% consider the Catholic Church to be the most credible institution, while the Ortega presidency has only 26% credibility.
Along the same lines, the personalities enjoying the most favorable opinions are former presidential candidate Félix Maradiaga with 48% followed by journalist and activist Cristiana Chamorro Barrios with 43%.
Maradiaga was imprisoned by the Ortega regime, deported Feb. 9 along with 221 other political prisoners, and lives in exile in the United States.
Regarding the level of corruption in the last six months, 56% responded that it has increased, while 23% believe it is unchanged and only 13% indicate that it has decreased.
The latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) evaluated by Transparency International placed Nicaragua as the most corrupt country in Central America and the third most corrupt in Latin America, surpassed only by Venezuela and Haiti. Regarding the Ortega regime, 61% disapproved of its work, 29% approved, and 10% didn’t know or did not respond. The survey was carried out between June 14 and 20 with 823 people interviewed. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.93% and the confidence level was 95%.