Filipino seminarians to drug war victims: we remember you

CNA Staff, Apr 17, 2020 / 07:00 pm (CNA).- Reports of an Indian hospital’s segregated wards for Hindu and Muslim coronavirus patients drew concern from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, though Indian authorities strongly disputed the allegation.

“USCIRF is concerned with reports of Hindu and Muslim patients separated into separate hospital wards in Gujarat,” the commission said on Twitter and Facebook April 15. “Such actions only help to further increase ongoing stigmatization of Muslims in India and exacerbate false rumors of Muslims spreading COVID-19.”

The bipartisan U.S. federal government commission linked to a story in the Indian Express newspaper that cites a hospital official and a patient in the city of Ahmedabad in the western coastal Indian state of Gujarat.

India’s Ministry for External Affairs opposed the commission, saying it was spreading “misguided reports” and “adding religious color” that distracts from India’s efforts to combat the novel coronavirus.

“No segregation is being done in civil hospitals on the basis of religion, as clarified by the Gujarat government,” the ministry said April 15.

The reports concern Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, where there are some 1,200 beds prepared for patients suffering from the novel coronavirus.

Medical Superintendent Dr. Gunvant. H. Rathod described the hospital division to the Indian Express, saying “generally, there are separate wards for male and female patients. But here, we have made separate wards for Hindu and Muslim patients.”

“It is a decision of the government and you can ask them,” he said.

Deputy Chief Minister and Health Minister Nitin Patel said he was not aware of the situation and would make inquiries. Ahmedabad’s district magistrate, K.K. Nirala, also was not aware of any decision, the Indian Express reports.

However, the Indian Express cited a hospital patient who said the names of 28 men in a ward were called out, and they were moved to another ward.

“While we were not told why we were being shifted, all the names that were called out belonged to one community. We spoke to one staff member in our ward today and he said this had been done for ‘the comfort of both communities’,” the patient said.

The Gujarat Health and Family Welfare Department said the reports were “absolutely baseless.” Rather, it said, patients are treated based on symptoms and severity and “according to treating doctors’ recommendations.

As of Wednesday, new known cases of coronavirus in Gujarat rose by 127 to 766, with 88 cases in Ahmedabad. The death toll there totals 33, the Times of India reports.

The Indian newspaper The Week reported that the commission had previously criticized India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which became effective in January 2020.

In December 2019 the commission expressed concern about the legislation, which enshrined a pathway to citizenship for immigrants but specifically excluded Muslims. The commission recommended U.S. sanctions on India as a possible response.

The U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom reviews alleged religious freedom violations and makes policy recommendations to the U.S. president, Secretary of State, and Congress.

The commission’s 2019 report said that religious freedom conditions in India “continued a downward trend” in 2018. It said India’s “history of religious freedom has come under attack in recent years with the growth of exclusionary extremist narratives—including, at times, the government’s allowance and encouragement of mob violence against religious minorities—that have facilitated an egregious and ongoing campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities. Both public and private actors have engaged in this campaign.”

Mob violence against Christians by Hindus has been particularly acute.

In August 2019, six suspected members of a radical Hindu group were arrested after dozens of Catholics were attacked on a Marian pilgrimage from Karnataka to the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Velankanni, a coastal town in south east India.

In September, around 500 armed Hindu extremists attacked a Jesuit mission in the Archdiocese of Ranchi. Armed with sticks, chains, iron bars, knives, and pistols, the mob beat tribal students including two who were seriously injured, and also seriously damaged the school’s facilities.

Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal has said numerous mob lynchings of Christians have occurred in which the victims are accused of eating beef or otherwise harming cattle, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.

Karnataka state suffered a wave of anti-Christian violence in 2008, when Hindu extremist groups led attacks on churches, schools and homes of Christians and physically beat hundreds of people. A 2011 independent report on the violence, known as the Saldhana Report, charged that attacks were pre-planned and backed by the state’s highest government authorities.

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Karachi, Pakistan, Mar 1, 2019 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- Before Sister Ruth Pfau arrived in Pakistan in the 1960s, life for leprosy victims in the country was filled with suffering and ostracization. In addition to the discomfort of the disfiguring disease itself, victims would often be isolated from society by others who feared catching the illness.

But the work of Sister Pfau – a German-born Catholic missionary who devoted her life to eradicating leprosy in Pakistan – transformed the lives of thousands of victims, making such an impact in the country that she became known as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan.”

“It was due to her endless struggle that Pakistan defeated leprosy,” the German Consulate in Karachi said on Facebook after Sr. Pfau’s death in 2017.

Sr. Pfau was born in Leipzig in 1929, but her childhood home was destroyed by bombing during World War II. After the war, her family escaped the communist regime in East Germany and moved to West Germany, where Sr. Pfau studied medicine.

After joining the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, Sr. Pfau was sent to India to join a mission in 1960. On her way there, she was held up due to visa issues for some time in Karachi, where she first encountered leprosy, an infectious disease that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms, legs, and skin areas around the body.

In 1961, Sr. Pfau travelled to India where she was trained in the treatment and management of leprosy. Afterwards, she returned to Karachi to organize and expand the Leprosy Control Program. She founded the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre in Karachi, Pakistan’s first hospital dedicated to treating the disease, which today has 157 branches across the country and has treated more than 50,000 leprosy victims.

“Well if it doesn’t hit you the first time, I don’t think it will ever hit you,” she told the BBC in 2010 about her first encounter with leprosy.

“Actually the first patient who really made me decide was a young Pathan. He crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal, as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog.”

“The most important thing is that we give them their dignity back,” she told the BBC at the time.

She was also known for rescuing children with leprosy, who had been banished to caves and cattle pens for years by their parents, who were afraid of contracting the disease themselves.

Sr. Pfau trained numerous doctors in the treatment of leprosy, and in 1996 the World Health Organization declared that leprosy had been controlled in the country. By 2016, the number of patients under treatment for leprosy in Pakistan had fallen to 531, down from 19,398 in the 1980s, according to the Karachi daily Dawn.

The nun won many honors and awards for her work, both from Pakistan and Germany. In 1979, the Pakistani government appointed her Federal Advisor on Leprosy to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

The Pakistani government also honored her with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, one of the highest awards available to citizens, in 1979, and the Hilal-e-Pakistan in 1989. She was granted Pakistani citizenship in 1988. In 2002 she won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, regarded as Asia’s Nobel prize.

She also authored several books about her experiences, including “To Light A Candle,” which has been translated into English and “The Last Word is Love: Adventure, Medicine, War and God.”

Sr. Pfau died Aug. 10, 2017 after being hospitalized in Karachi a few days earlier due to complications related to age. She was 87 years old.

Pakistani leaders mourned her death, praising her contribution to the well-being of their nation.

Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussein called Sr. Pfau’s work unforgettable, saying, “She left her homeland and made Pakistan her home to serve humanity.” He pledged that “her great tradition to serve humanity will be continued.”

Harald Meyer-Porzky from the Ruth Pfau Foundation in Würzburg said Sr. Pfau had “given hundreds of thousands of people a life of dignity.”

Sr. Pfau’s funeral was held Aug. 19, 2017, and she was buried at the Christian cemetery in Karachi.

An earlier version of this article was published on CNA Aug. 11, 2017.

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Melbourne, Australia, Aug 9, 2019 / 08:36 am (CNA).- Cardinal George Pell has written a letter thanking supporters for their prayers and saying he is “disturbed” by the preparations for the forthcoming synod on the Amazon.

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