Asia Bibi, our Catholic sister
condemned to death for “blasphemy” in Pakistan
Antonio Socci on Rorate Caeli
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. There are those who have reported that Pope Bergoglio himself, even though speaking out on all sorts of things every day and more as well, has maintained silence concerning this tragedy. If he is the primary one to not speak about these horrors (he prefers to pontificate on gossip that goes on in parishes, a topic of tens of his homilies), then we cannot accuse the world of insensitivity. In effect Bergoglio never had the will to say one word, not even in defense of poor Asia Bibi, a mother living in poverty with four children who has been locked up for five years in a filthy prison where she has been tortured in unspeakable ways and who has been condemned to death by hanging only because she is a Christian. The poor woman wrote to the Pope, but in vain. Not even the confirmation of her condemnation to death in the court of appeal has moved Bergoglio, who is always very timid and reticent in dealing with Muslims.
UPDATE: This is a picture of the Christian couple in Pakistan mentioned in the article, who were brutally beaten to death, and their bodies burned, by a crowd of fanatical Muslims.
Catholicism Pure & Simple 
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