Church in Pakistan grows amid persecution

BY ED WEST
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH in Pakistan has experienced a “miracle of survival and growth”, with a surge of vocations and ever larger numbers oining the faith in spite of increasing threats from Islamic extremists.
Seminary numbers are at a 15-year high, a new Catholic television channel has been launched and Catholic numbers continue to rise, according to a fact-finding mission by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
The visit by representatives of the charity, who conducted indepth interviews with bishops, priests, Sisters and lay people, as well as visits to key Church communities all over the country, underlined the rise of extremism described in the report as a “Talibanisation” of society.
Archbishop Lawrence Saldanha of Lahore, president of the Pakistani Catholic Bishops’ Conference, spoke of a new extremist “push” through to southern Punjab close to the country’s Christian heartland around Lahore.
With increasing pressure to conform to a strict Islamic culture and dress code, Church leaders said the Christian faithful felt threatened by a growing tide of intolerance, especially in rural areas and in the north of the country, an extremist stronghold thought to be the current home of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
John Pontifex, spokesman for ACN, said: “It’s the miracle of survival and growth. There are so many good men and women wishing to give their life to the Church.
“They see the Church as champion of a happier and freer Pakistan, and some of them are highly educated guys who could have done anything they wanted.
“Time and again during this visit, we were moved by the plight of the Christian faithful. I was shocked by the scale of suffering Christians and other minorities now experience in Pakistan.
“Their experience of discrimination, oppression and sometimes outright persecution is made worse by grinding poverty and a climate of increasing fanaticism and intolerance. The chances of incidents of this kind spilling over into violence are more likely than before.
“More than ever, Pakistan is a number one priority for ACN support and action. We returned with a heap of requests for help with everything from building a new seminary to supporting catechist training.
“Responding to such appeals for help is only possible thanks to the continuing compassion and generosity of ACN’s generous friends and benefactors.” Aid to the Church in Need has called for the repeal of Pakistan’s strict blasphemy law and last October hosted a visit to Britain by Bishop Joseph Coutts of Faisalabad who spoke out against abuses of the law, which frequently result in violence. Abuse of the country’s notorious Penal Code 295B and 295C has led to an increased threat of violence, most of it against Christians.
Mr Pontifex said that blasphemy laws “give licence to local bullies to wreak havoc, and the Christians are often the victims because they are vulnerable and defenceless”.
There have also been repeated cases of Christians being punished for refusing to convert. Last week Church leaders expressed outrage after a Christian committed suicide following the rape of his wife, supposedly as punishment after he refused to convert.
Arshad Masih, 38, who lived just outside Islamabad, refused his employer’s repeated requests to convert to Islam and, according to reports received by ACN, after he disappeared into hiding his wife was arrested and raped in police custody. In response a humiliated Mr Masih doused himself in petrol and set fire to himself. He died from his injuries.
In some rural areas Christians are prevented from using the same cooking utensils as Muslims, or of using the same tap. A 19-year-old Christian student, Javaid Anjum, died after being tortured in police custody after being caught drinking from a tap connected to a madrassa near Faisalabad in Punjab province.
Pakistan was formed as a secular stated but officially adopted sharia law in the 1970s, and in the past decade has become ever more hard-line, thanks to Saudifunded Koranic schools.
Although the government is opposed to the Taliban, which controls much of the tribal region on the Afghan border, Islamist extremists have many sympathisers within the country.
Mr Pontifex said that the country was being influenced by “a very toxic form of Islam that has become very intolerant of the outsider, and Christians are under threat not least because of their association with the West”.
The war in neighbouring Afghanistan, in which many civilians have been killed by US and British bombs, was used as a pretext, he said.
There are 2.5 million Christians in Pakistan out of a total population of 180 million. And yet despite their hardships, the Christian population is increasingly confident. Seminary numbers have doubled in four years, reaching a 15-year peak, with 20 would-be seminarians turned away last year because of lack of space. Such is the demand that ACN is supporting the construction of a new seminary in Karachi. Last week Good News TV, a Karachi-based Catholic cable television channel, started regular transmissions, broadcasting daily Mass, Christian witness testimonies, news and debates.
It is the latest stage of what the initiative’s director, Fr Arthur Charles, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Karachi, called a plan to “change the information landscape of Pakistan”.
New parishes, with schools, churches and convents, have been developed in Baluchistan province, west Pakistan, along with outreach and education programmes for the Kutchi Kholi and the Parki Kholi tribes in the south-east of the country.
ACN has helped to provide 70,000 Child’s Bibles in the national language of Urdu and a further 10,000 in Sindhi, spoken in the south-east.