CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 10:00 am (CNA).- The Chinese government is forcing Uyghur women to take contraceptives in an effort to slow the growing population. One expert called the campaign "a slow, painful, creeping genocide" of the reli… […]
CNA Staff, Jun 28, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- While hand washing and social distancing have been implemented around the globe as tools to fight the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, refugees face challenges in putting these recommendations into practice… […]
CNA Staff, Jun 27, 2020 / 02:02 pm (CNA).- A member of the Parliament of Victoria has urged that there be an inquiry into the treatment of Cardinal George Pell by the state’s police and judiciary, months after Australia’s High Court unanimo… […]
Rome Newsroom, Jun 25, 2020 / 05:20 am (CNA).- Korean Catholics marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War — a war which never technically ended — Thursday with Masses offered for reconciliation on the divided Korean peninsula.
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CNA Staff, Jun 24, 2020 / 02:05 pm (CNA).- Cardinal John Tong Hon, the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Hong Kong, has rejected concerns that new security and sedition laws for the province pose a risk to religious freedom.
“I personally believe that the National Security Law will have no effect on religious freedom, because Article 32 of the Basic Law guarantees that we have freedom of religion, and we can also openly preach and hold religious ceremonies, and participate in religious activities,” Tong Hon told the diocesan newspaper Kung Kao Po this week.
On May 28, the Chinese legislature approved a resolution imposing “security laws” on Hong Kong. These laws aim to criminalize anything Beijing considers “foreign interference,” secessionist activities, or subversion of state power, and will permit Chinese security forces to operate in the city.
Hong Kong is a formerly autonomous region of China. Since the handover from the United Kingdom in 1997, it has had broad protections for the freedom of worship and for evangelization compared to mainland China.
Cardinal Tong Hon said that he believed that the Diocese of Hong Kong would not be considered to be colluding with a foreign government, as the diocese “has always had a direct relationship with the Vatican; the relationship between the Hong Kong diocese and the Vatican should be regarded as an internal matter.”
“After the national security legislation, it should not be regarded as ‘collusion with foreign forces’,” he said to the newspaper.
Tong Hon’s predecessor, Cardinal Joseph Zen has expressed serious concerns with the new security laws, and especially the manner in which they were imposed on Hong Kong by the mainland government.
Speaking to CNA in late May, Zen said that he worries that the new laws will be used to subvert the freedom of religion that Hong Kongers currently enjoy.
“There is no more ‘one country, two systems.’ [China] didn’t dare to say it in those exact words, but the fact is there,” Zen said.
The Diocese of Hong Kong has been without a diocesan bishop since January 2019,when Bishop Michael Yeung Ming-cheung died unexpectedly. Since Yeung died, the diocese has been led temporarily by Cardinal John Tong Hon, Yeung’s predecessor, who retired from the post in 2017.
CNA has reported in January that the Vatican had approved Fr. Peter Choy Wai-man as the new bishop of the diocese, but delayed the public announcement of the appointment.
Choy is known to be close to Cardinal Tong, and is said to have a good working relationship with Chinese government authorities, both on the island and on the mainland. He was reported to have attended a meeting with the cardinal and Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, during the height of the pro-democracy protests last year.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 24, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- A federal religious freedom commissioner has said there is “no excuse” for the Trump administration “delaying action” to place sanctions on Chinese officials for abuses committed in the mass internment of Uyghurs.
Nury Turkel, a commissioner of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), said in a statement to CNA Wednesday that “USCIRF is disappointed that the U.S. government has not yet enacted targeted sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the mass detention of Uyghur and other Muslims.”
President Donald Trump signed legislation on June 17 that would impose financial and visa sanctions on individuals complicit in abuses in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act directs the president to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act—one of several laws authorizing the President to sanction human rights abusers.
China has established a network of camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) where as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities are or have been detained, according to estimates by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (China Commission).
In the camps, there have been reports of detainees subjected to forced labor, indoctrination, and torture. Chinese officials initially denied the existence of the camps before acknowledging them, yet describing them as vocational training centers.
Turkel, a lawyer and Uyghur rights advocate appointed to USCIRF by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that these abuses cannot be denied, citing reports of human rights groups and official leaked documents that implicate “Chen Quanguo, Zhu Hailun, and other senior Chinese officials” in the abuses.
“There is no excuse for delaying action against China,” Turkel said in the statement sent to CNA.
Last week, Trump told Axios that he had not yet implemented Treasury sanctions against Chinese officials complicit in the abuses in Xinjiang because “we were in the middle of a major trade deal.”
“When you say the Magnitsky Act, just so you know, nobody’s mentioned it specifically to me with regard to China,” Trump said.
In addition to USCIRF, other human rights advocates have publicly criticized the lack of sanctions. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), chair of the China Commission, tweeted on Monday that Trump was “lying” when he said he had not been told of the connection between Magnitsky sanctions and Chinese officials.
“Did you really not even know the topic of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act you just signed into law?” McGovern asked.
Other religious freedom advocates have pressed the administration to act quickly and implement sanctions, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) who tweeted that the administration “must fully implement the law” after it was signed.
Rubio was one of the China Commission co-chairs who wrote Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in 2018 and again in 2019, asking for sanctions against complicit Chinese officials and entities. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) also led the 2018 letter, and McGovern and Rubio led the 2019 letter.
President Trump’s stance on the Chinese government and mass detention camps has been in the spotlight recently, after former White House national security advisor John Bolton claimed that Trump gave his approval to Chinese president Xi Jinping on plans to establish the camps in Xinjiang.
Bolton has said that “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” He made the claims in a June 17 essay in the Wall Street Journal, adapted from his newly-published White House memoir “The Room Where It Happened.”
Asked about Bolton’s claims during an interview Monday, Trump said the book “is a total lie, or mostly a lie.”
“Everybody was in the room and nobody heard what Bolton heard,” the president said, adding that he believes Bolton’s book violated federal law by including classified information.
CNA Staff, Jun 22, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).- Chinese officials reportedly arrested an elderly bishop of the underground Catholic Church last week.
Coadjutor Bishop Augustine Cui Tai of Xuanhua, 70 years old, was taken by Chinese officials to an undisclo… […]
CNA Staff, Jun 18, 2020 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- The US Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a report Tuesday recommending a “binding agreement” between the United States and Pakistan, with the goal of encouraging Pakistan to improve its treatment of religious minorities.
Laws against blasphemy in Muslim-majority Pakistan have led to death sentences for many religious minorities, and the extrajudicial killing by mobs of many more accused of blasphemy.
This includes Servant of God Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic politician from Pakistan who the Taliban killed in 2011.
The US State Department has designated Pakistan a “country of particular concern” since 2018 for its record on religious freedom violations.
CPC designations can carry sanctions under U.S. law, but in 2018 and 2019 the State Department granted waivers to Pakistan that exempt them from any meaningful actions related to the CPC designation, USCIRF says.
USCIRF— which makes policy recommendations but does not create laws— recommended that the US set defined, concrete benchmarks for Pakistan to provide “greater clarity to a path off the CPC list and help improve religious freedom conditions, especially for the country’s religious minorities.”
Such a “binding agreement” to encourage countries to take steps to get off the CPC list has been used only once, which the US entered into with Vietnam in 2005 and which led to Vietnam’s removal from the list.
Pakistan’s state religion is Islam, and around 97 percent of the population is Muslim.
The country’s blasphemy laws, introduced in the 1980s, are reportedly used to settle scores or to persecute religious minorities; while non-Muslims constitute only 3 percent of the Pakistani population, 14 percent of blasphemy cases have been levied against them.
USCIRF urged the repeal of these laws.
The report also report recommended eliminating the practice of listing a person’s religion on their identification documents.The forced identification of a person’s religion on their ID has led to widespread discrimination and singling out of non-Muslims.
USCIRF urged Pakistan to begin an expedited review of all blasphemy cases, and to enforce proper handling of blasphemy cases according to existing due process rights.
It also advocated that those accused of blasphemy be treated humanely, that those accused be allowed to post bail, and enforcing criminal penalties for people who give false evidence against someone accused of blasphemy.
USCIRF said Pakistan must remove material denigrating religious minorities from educational curricula and train teachers on the importance of religious tolerance, as well as establish and train a special police task force to protect religious minority communities and their houses of worship.
In 2015, the Pakinstani government banned Ahmadiyya religious texts. Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, but Pakistan’s constitution does not recognize the Ahmadis as such.
There are about 500,000 Ahmadis in Pakistan. Some observers estimate the Ahmadi population in Pakistan is higher, but persecution encourages Ahmadis to hide their identity. USCIRF recommended the ban on the texts be lifted.
There are at least 80 people currently imprisoned in Pakistan for their religious beliefs. Many of those accused of blasphemy are murdered, and advocates of changing the law are also targeted by violence.
A recent high-profile case involved a Catholic woman, Asia Bibi, whom authorities sentenced to death by hanging in 2010 for blasphemy. She spent nine years on death row, but left Pakistan for Canada in 2019 at the age of 53 after her death sentence was overturned in October 2018.
Though the Pakistani Supreme Court in January 2019 upheld the decision to overturn her conviction, the verdict and her subsequent release from prison sparked protests from Islamic hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws.
In 2009, a mob of Muslims looted and burned a Christian neighborhood, killing six Christians by burning them to death. The attacks took place in reaction to a rumor that the Quran was desecrated in a nearby village.
In Punjab province last year, a mob attacked a Christian community after a mosque broadcast over loudspeaker a claim that the Christians had insulted Islam. In another incident in Karachi, false blasphemy accusations against four Christian women prompted mob violence that forced nearly 200 Christian families to flee their homes, the USCIRF said.
In 2013 the then-governing party of Pakistan, the Pakistan Muslim League, promised a quota for jobs in the educational institutes and the public sector for members of religious minorities. The Pakistan Peoples Party discussed an Equality Commission to monitor job quotas in Sindh.
Both parties are now in the opposition in the national parliament, and the proposed safeguards have not been put into action.
In May, Pakistan established a long-delayed National Commission for Minorities, which the country’s Supreme Court had called for in 2014. Hard-line Islamist groups threatened to protest the commission, while Catholic leaders called the commission “toothless.”
Catholic and other religious leaders in the country have repeatedly spoken out against the country’s treatment of minorities.
In August 2019, a number of Pakistani religious leaders signed a joint resolution encouraging the Pakistani government to adopt policies to protect religious minorities.
The conference to sign the resolution, organized by Aid to the Church in Need – Italy and by local advocate Tabassum Yousaf, was attended by Fr. Saleh Diego, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Karachi, who represented Cardinal Joseph Coutts.
Representatives of the country’s Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Baha’i communities also were present and signed the resolution.
In a Jan. 21, 2020 letter written on behalf of Philadelphia’s Pakistani Catholic community, then-Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput encouraged Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to shape a culture of religious freedom.
CNA Staff, Jun 15, 2020 / 11:40 am (CNA).- Cardinal George Pell told a group of Australian students that his Christian faith helped him persevere through his time in prison, and offered advice on how to overcome grief and stressful situations.
Pell, in one of his first public appearances since his April release from prison, spoke to an online silent retreat hosted June 5 and 6 by the Australian Catholic Students’ Association about suffering and the tools one can use to remain steadfast in faith through hard times.
The cardinal said his 13 months in prison were “difficult and unpleasant,” but not the worst possible form of suffering. He said his time in prison reinforced the truth of Christian view of redemptive suffering, according to The Catholic Weekly.
“I’m still teaching the same Christian message,” said Pell. “And I’m here simply to say that it works. Not in the sense that I was acquitted, but that this Christian teaching helped me to survive.”
Pell was convicted in 2018 of multiple counts of sexual abuse. On April 7, Australia’s High Court overturned his six-year prison sentence. The High Court ruled that he should not have been found guilty of the charges and that the prosecution had not proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
During the retreat, Pell gave five suggestions for anyone who is going through emotional hardship, including grief, loss, and personal suffering. The cardinal’s suggestions: exercise, avoiding large amounts of alcohol, eating healthy and regularly, sleeping a certain number of hours a night, and waking up at the same time each day.
He added that this routine, particularly ensuring regular exercise, helped him very much when he was in prison. He told the students at the retreat that it was especially important that, as young people, they take this advice sooner rather than later.
By creating these “good habits of mind and habits of practice,” a person will be led in the right direction during the inevitable intense times of suffering, he said.
“Whereas, if you’ve been sloppy and ill-disciplined and selfish all your life, it makes it so much harder to rise to the challenge,” he said.
In an Easter message published in April, Pell wrote of his incarceration that “I have just spent 13 months in jail for a crime I didn’t commit, one disappointment after another. I knew God was with me, but I didn’t know what He was up to, although I realised He has left all of us free. But with every blow it was a consolation to know I could offer it to God for some good purpose like turning the mass of suffering into spiritual energy.”
“The only Son of God did not have an easy run and suffered more than his share. Jesus redeemed us and we can redeem our suffering by joining it to His and offering it to God,” Pell added.
The cardinal’s Easter message included a proclamation of the Gospel: that Jesus of Nazareth died, and was resurrected bodily. “It was a return of his entire person from death, breaking the rules of health and physics, as Christians believe this young man was the only Son of God, divine, the Messiah…who redeems us, enables us to receive forgiveness and enter into a happy eternity.”
On April 7, the day he was released from prison, the cardinal told CNA that “prayer has been the great source of strength to me throughout these times, including the prayers of others, and I am incredibly grateful to all those people who have prayed for me and helped me during this really challenging time.”
CNA Staff, Jun 5, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- State-sponsored Catholic authorities in parts of China have issued regulations on the reopening of churches during the coronavirus pandemic. The new rules include a requirement that churches must preach on &ldq… […]
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