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May 7, 2019 | The Valley Catholic
IN THE CHURCH
Churches have been targets of attack in South Asia, Southeast Asia
By Michael Sainsbury
Catholic News Service
BANGKOK (CNS) -- Several experts
believe the threat to churches in South
and Southeast Asia has increased
following the Easter bomb attacks
that killed more than 250 people and
injured 500.
Churches in those regions -- which
have 150 million Catholics and other
Christians -- have been the focus of at-
tacks in a growing number of countries
in recent years, including fatal bomb
attacks on churches in the Philippines
and Indonesia by Islamic radicals in the
past 12 months.
Authorities in Sri Lanka and Aus-
tralia have confirmed the Sri Lanka at-
tackers had links to Islamic State, which
claimed credit for the attack. Militant
preacher Zahran Hashim, who authori-
ties believe died as one of the suicide
attackers at the Shangri-La Hotel, has
been named the founder and leader of
the now banned National Thowheeth
Jama’ath group responsible. DNA tests
are being undertaken to confirm this.
“Radical Islamic groups, some af-
filiated with larger extremist networks,
have been quietly gaining influence
in an arc of countries extending from
the Maldives to the Philippines archi-
pelago, and the threat they pose can
no longer be ignored,” Brahma Chel-
laney, professor of strategic studies at
the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy
Research, wrote for his widely distrib-
uted Project Syndicate column.
“In fact, the grisly Sri Lankan bomb-
ings are a reminder that Asia -- not
the Middle East -- is the region most
afflicted by terrorist violence.”
The prognosis comes as the so-
called Islamic State has splintered and
gone back underground following the
defeat of its caliphates in Iraq and Syria
as well as the continued operation of
other terrorist groups linked to al-
Qaida in the region.
“In the wake of the Sri Lanka at-
tacks, Indonesia needs to be particular-
ly alert to the increased role of pro-ISIS
women; possibly enhanced attraction
of churches as targets; and the possibil-
ity of someone with international jihad
experience entering the country,” said
Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-
based Institute for Policy Analysis and
Conflict. The group published a report
on the Ongoing Problem of pro-ISIS
cells in Indonesia April 29.
Jones said that while authorities in
Indonesia, the world’s most populous
Muslim country, appeared to have the
terrorist threat reasonably under con-
trol, it was possible for some groups
Filipino women hold placards during a Sept. 3, 2016, protest in Manila condemning the
bombing at a market in Davao. Experts cite a heightened danger for more than 150 million
Catholics and other Christians across South and Southeast Asia following the April 21,
2019, Easter bomb attacks that killed more than 250 people and injured 500. (CNS photo/
Romeo Ranoco, Reuters)
to slip through the cracks as they had
done in the May 2018 deadly church
bombings at Surabaya.
But she added that it was “hard to
think of any government in the region
that would be as lax as Sri Lanka. South-
east Asian governments with large
Muslim populations are particularly
vigilant; China, of course, is turning
Xinjiang into a technological state-of-
the-art detention center for Uighurs.”
Jones told Catholic News Service she
believed that “the added significance
of churches is just for pro-ISIS groups,
not al-Qaida. They’ve been recirculat-
ing the ideological justification that
appeared in a number of IS magazines
in recent years.”
Church services were canceled
across Sri Lanka the weekend of April
28 and churches were closed indefi-
nitely as a precautionary measure. On
April 26, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of
Colombo told reporters that church
officials had seen a leaked security
document describing Roman Catholic
and other churches as major targets.
“We don’t want repetitions,” Cardi-
nal Ranjith said.
But on April 28, people in Colombo
prayed outside St. Anthony’s Shrine, one
of the attacked churches that suffered
significant damaged. Authorities also
tried to persuade Muslims to refrain
from traditional Friday prayer services
on April 26, but some were open and,
like all religious sites in Sri Lanka, are
now subject to heavy security.
On April 29, the Sri Lankan authori-
ties banned the burqa, a Muslim female
face covering, a move it has been mull-
ing since the attacks. Such a move has
not prevented ongoing attacks in other
nations, such as France, where it has
been instituted.
“We now have info that there are
about 140 people in Sri Lanka linked
to the Islamic State. We can and we
will eradicate all of them very soon,”
President Maithripala Sirisena said.
Chellaney noted that Muslim mili-
tants who had returned from fighting
for Islamic State and other groups in
Syria and other part of the Middle East
are present in a range of Asian counties
“from the Philippines and Indonesia to
the Maldives and Uzbekistan.”
He likened the current situation to
that of three decades ago when Osama
bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders
emerged after cutting their teeth in
the U.S.-backed war against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan.
“This new generation of jihadi vet-
erans could haunt the security of Asia,
the Middle East and the West for years
to come,” he said.
Still, Jones said that while she could
not “speculate on the role of returnees,
in Indonesia, the biggest danger is
from those who never left, not those
coming back.”
She believes the biggest danger
will come, like in Sri Lanka, from
small groups. “These groups by and
large come together with little vetting,
training, indoctrination, weapons or
experience. What they have in unlim-
ited quantities is zeal and a desire for
recognition.”
Christian Life Impossible Without the Holy Spirit, Pope Says
By Junno Arocho Esteves
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY -- Christians must
allow themselves to be guided by the
Holy Spirit if they expect to live a Chris-
tian life, Pope Francis said.
Only through the Spirit can men
and women “rise from our limitations,
from our deaths,” the pope said in his
homily April 30 during morning Mass
at the Domus Sanctae Marthae.
“A Christian life -- or a person who
calls himself or herself a Christian --
that does not leave space for the Spirit
and does not allow the Spirit to go
forward is a pagan life, dressed as a
Christian one,” he said.
The pope centered his homily on the
day’s Gospel reading in which Jesus
Pope Francis gives the homily as he cel-
ebrates Mass in the chapel of his residence,
at the Vatican April 30, 2019. (CNS photo/
Vatican Media)
speaks to Nicodemus about the need
to be “born of the Spirit.”
Listening to and understanding
God’s will through the power of the
Holy Spirit, Jesus said, is similar to
hearing the sound of wind blowing,
yet “you do not know where it comes
from or where it goes.”
Jesus’ message to Nicodemus, the
pope explained, is that “we need to be
reborn” and “give way to the Spirit.”
“The Spirit is the protagonist of
Christian life; (it is) the Spirit -- the Holy
Spirit -- that is in us, that accompanies
us, that transforms us and is trium-
phant within us,” he said.
Pope Francis encouraged Christians
to heed Christ’s words to his disciples
after his resurrection and “receive the
Holy Spirit” who will “be your com-
panion in Christian life.”
“Let us ask the Lord,” the pope said,
“to give us this knowledge that we can-
not be Christians without walking with
the Holy Spirit, without acting with the
Holy Spirit, without letting the Holy
Spirit be the protagonist in our lives.”