Just a couple of weeks ago I read Bhatti statement in The Catholic Register, published from Toronto, during his visit to Canada. He met with senior ministers, including the foreign minister, in Ottawa and brought to their notice the harassment and sufferings of Christians in Pakistan. He especially highlighted the blasphemy law. He said he was targeted for killing, and that he was not afraid to die for his faith. Unfortunately, it happened. What a sad state of affairs. A regular contributor to the paper, Fr. Raymond J de Souza has, under the heading Militant Islam Winning, issue Jan 30, 2011, written, "In the nearly 10 years sice 9/11, the preoccupying question has remained. Wash the jihadist violence of th day representative of Islam or a perversion of it?.... In Pakistan last year, a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death under the country's blasphemy law, which makes it a capital offense to insult the prophet Muhammed. When the prominent governor of the Punjab province, Salman Taseer, spoke out against the blasphemy law and in support of Bibi, he was brutally murdered by his own bodyguard on Jan. 4. .... Moderate Islam as a shaper of culture and politics in Pakistan was buried for at least a generation with Taseer." Taseer's assassin surrendered to police and after his court appearance he was garlanded and paraded through the streets. Pakistan is indeed a theocratic state, though not constitutionally. The state turns a blind eye to the killings of Christians. Fr. Raymond says, " Islamic problems can only be solved by Muslims.... January 1011 may well mark the month when it became clear that militant Islam will have the upper hand for the next generation. Muslims will bear the brunt of that in terms of violent deaths, loss of liberty and cultural backwardness. But Christians too will pay a fearsome price. Their blood is already running from their churches into the streets. .." (Fr. Raymond is the pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary parish on Wolfe Island and chaplian at Newman House at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario).
Eugene
