Khazen.org

Antonio Socci
Libero

November 9, 2014
Shahzad Masih was 28 years old and his wife, Shama, 25, two young Catholics with four children. She was pregnant with the fifth. She was working in a job in a brick making factory known for exploiting its workers, whose owner, a Muslim, had already brutally beat her. She worked in Kasur, near Lahore, in that Pakistan where Christians are considered as trash. Last November 4th the two young people were falsely accused of having profaned pages of the Koran. They were tortured for two days, lynched by a furious mob and at the end thrown into an oven and burned. These slaughters are not rare. It is a continual horror that Christians undergo at the hands of a people and a State that daily humiliates them and threatens them with death by means of the notorious blasphemy laws. Pakistan is not a small country. It has the atomic bomb and has 180 million inhabitants, making it the sixth most populous nation in the world and the second most populous among Muslim nations after Indonesia. The fiery ordeal underwent by these two Christians in such a savage way was reported even in our own newspapers. But there was no action taken, neither by individuals, nor associations, nor institutions.

Someone made the accusation that public opinion was more scandalized by the investigation on the TV show, “Report”, on the source of the goose down used in making expensive ski jackets, namely, that the feathers were plucked from geese four times a year, causing the geese a great deal of pain—than by the fate of these Christians. In the same way people were scandalized by the involuntary killing of a bear in Trentino, while the killing of three Italian Sisters in an African country went unnoticed.

Eighty percent of victims of religious discrimination in the world are Christians. This is confirmed in this very week by two important statements: in the “Black Book of the Situation of Christians in the Word” (published by Mondadori), and the annual report of “Aid to the Church in Need”. It is a tragedy that has been ongoing for years. I published what has been going on twelve years ago as “the newly persecuted” and the scene was identical. The same for numbers: one hundred thousand Christians have been killed every year because of their faith. This means five victims a minute. The total of persecuted Christians is around 200 million, and the news of atrocities and massacres—if one has the will to pay attention to them—comes out daily. It is enough to read the reports of the representative of the press who have gone to Erbil to speak with the thirty thousand Christians who are in flight, who still are exposed to rain, to hunger and cold, because they have been driven from their homes by the terrorists of ISIS. Every family grieves over their own tragic circumstances: daughters seized and sold like slaves in the market in Mosul, husbands and sons killed and then crucified, buried alive, their throats cut, women raped. Recently a video was circulated by the militant Islamists that showed them haggling over the price of a slave. Sometimes they show young girls being sold for a cheap price. And in Africa we see the same tragedy enfolding. Just recently we heard of the fate of the 200 young women students seized in Nigeria by Boko Haram, raped and forced to convert to Islam and forced to marry Islamic men. And then there is Syria and the other Islamic countries. Then there are the Communist countries like China and its immense Gulag that has swallowed up heroic Catholic bishops. Then there is that inhuman concentration camp that is North Korea where thousands and thousands of Christians have simply disappeared in the jaws of the monster.

After the horror of the Christians burned in Pakistan the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, himself horrified, said on Vatican Radio: “Can one remain passive when confronted with crimes declared to be legitimate by religion?” No. One cannot.