Christians and other religious minorities in Pakistan live in fear of persecution and even execution or murder on false charges of blasphemy against Islam, the World Council of Churches (WCC) has said. The Council, the Geneva- based global body linking Protestant and Orthodox churches in 110 countries, has called on the Pakistani government to change a law promulgated by military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq that allows for the death penalty for blaspheming Islam.

(Photo: Christians in destroyed home in Gojra, 2 Aug 2009/Mohsin Raza)

Since the law was adopted in 1986 religious minorities in the country have been “living in a state of fear and terror … and many innocent people have lost their lives,” the WCC said in a statement.

Pakistan is an overwhelmingly Muslim country where religious minorities account for roughly 4 percent — three quarters of whom are Christians — of its 170 million people.

In early August, the WCC head, Kenyan Methodist Samuel Kobia, protested to the Pakistani government over violence in Punjab province when Muslims torched Christian homes and 8 people were killed, seven of them burned to death. Reports at the time said the attacks in Gojra town were sparked by allegations, denied by church leaders as well as Pakistani government officials, that Christians had desecrated the Koran.

Pakistani government officials said the violence, which also brought protests from Pope Benedict, was the work of Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda and the country’s Taliban movement.

(Photo: Christians grieve after funerals of Gojra attack victims, 2 Aug 2009/Mohsin Raza)

Read our report from Geneva here.

Charges of oppression of Christians in Pakistan are frequently heard in international meetings such as the WCC session. Complaints often surface at United Nations meetings. What do you think? Are these charges justified?

Before responding, consider the following articles in the international secular and Christian press. Are they accurate? If you think they don’t portray the real situation in Pakistan, how do you think international media should report about the Christian minority in Pakistan?

– Six Christians burnt alive in Pakistan violence (Reuters, 1 Aug 2009)

– Pakistan hurt by killing of Christians: church head (Reuters, 4 Aug 2009)

– Christians demand repeal of blasphemy laws (UCANews, 6 Aug 2009)

– Scrap blasphemy laws which bring shame on Islam and Pakistan, Muslim scholar says (Asianews, 10 Aug 2009)

– Some 20 million Christians to mark ‘black day’ against persecution in Pakistan (Asianews, 11 Aug 2009)

– Violations of human rights in Pakistan: 75% of cases remain unpunished (Asianews, 21 Aug 2009)

– Intolerance is sweeping across Pakistan (The Guardian, 24 Aug 2009)

– Pakistan gains from defending diversity (Daily Star, 24 Aug 2009)

– Punjab: Christian victims of the massacres in Gojra reported by police (Asianews, 25 Aug 2009)

– PAKISTAN: Attacks on Christians Spotlight Blasphemy Laws (IPS, 25 Aug 2009)

– Pakistan: Christians want blasphemy laws repealed (SperoNews, 26 Aug 2009)

– Memo to U.N.: Stop Muslims from killing Christians (WorldNetDaily, 27 Aug 2009)

– Church dissatisfied over slow prosecution of rioters (UCANews, 2 Sept 2009)

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Christian churches have been taking stock of where they stand on dialogue with Islam. With so much interfaith discussion going on, they’re not all singing from the same sheet and wonder whether they should (or even could). So about 50 church leaders and experts got together near Geneva last weekend to exchange information on their approach to, and experiences concerning, dialogue with Muslims. “With such a succession of meetings where we get together with Muslims, we wanted to have a meeting among ourselves and ask whether we have 2,000 different answers and what that might say about us,” said Thomas Schirrmacher of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).

The World Council of Churches (WCC) said the idea for the meeting“emerged from an ecumenical process of response to the Common Word”  initiative on Christian-Muslim dialogue. Held outside Geneva, it brought together representatives from the WCC, World Evangelical Alliance, Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion, Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, World Methodist Council, several Orthodox churches and other Christian groups. I have spoken to a few of the participants and received some texts since the meeting to get an idea of how their exchange shaped up.

“The idea was that we come together to share our different experiences with Islam and our different theological approaches to Islam to seek an ecumenical understanding,” said Rima Barsoum, the WCC’s person responsible for relations with Muslims. An “ecumenical understanding” does not mean a common understanding, as became clear at the meeting. Participants described various points of view that no two-day meeting could overcome. Orthodox and eastern churches that live as minorities in Muslim countries have a different perspective from those in the West that know Muslims as a minority. The Vatican’s approach is to focus more on the theological questions while the World Evangelical Alliance has stressed the issue of living together peacefully. “My feeling after Geneva is that there is such a wide spectrum of representation that a common stand would be very difficult indeed,” said David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham in Britain.

Catholicos Aram I, the Beirut-based head of the Armenian Apostolic Church(See of Cilicia), displayed that view of minority Christians in the Middle East in his opening speech. “The prevailing misperceptions, ambiguities, polarisations, tensions and collision (of values between Muslims and Christians), hijacked and sharpened by politico-ideological agendas and geo-political strategies, can be transformed only through a shared life in community,”he said. Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon, former Anglican bishop of Kaduna, gave a run-down on the often tense relations between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria: “Our biggest problem is that of ignorance: both communities are ignorant of their religion and that of their neighbour.”

Rev. Dan Madigan S.J.warned in his presentation against trying to fit the Abrahamic religions into a standard schema with pre-determined categories. This often leads to parallels between the Koran and the Bible or Mohammad and Jesus, he said, but this was a category mistake. “The most important common belief our traditions share is that the Word of God has been spoken in our world — the eternal divine word that is the essence of God,” he said. However, Jews hear the word of God in the Torah and rabbinic reflection and study. Muslims hear it in the Koran. “For Christians, on the other hand, God’s word is spoken primarily, not in words, but in the flesh … What Jesus is for the Christian, the Koran (not Mohammad) is for Muslims. What Mohammad is for Muslims (the human channel through which the word of God entered the world), Mary could be said to be for Christians. Of course, that Mary role does not exhaust the reality of who Mohammad is for Muslims.”

Rev. Peter Colwell of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland told me Madigan’s comments were “quite a revelatory observation for many participants. I think you’ve got to come out of the Catholic or Orthodox tradition to actually see that.” BTW Colwell has produced a short guide to the Common Word as “a resource for churches and individuals who wish to explore these issues more deeply and who wish take the opportunity the letter affords to develop local inter-faith relations.”

Schirrmacher said several church representatives asked him why the World Evangelical Alliance gave such a quick and positive reply to the Common Word invitation to dialogue while issuing quite a critical note analysing the content of the Common Word statement. “There’s a simple answer,” he said. “The WEA was founded in 1854 on the issue of freedom of religion. For us, agreeing on content and sitting down under the roof of religious freedom to live together peacefully are two different issues. We could sign on immediately to this peace offer — which is what it is, they’re saying they want to live peacefully with Christians in the world –- without taking much time to think about which consequences that may have for the Trinity or whatever. This is tougher for the Catholic Church because they have not conducted the dialogue politically, but from the basis of having the same God and wanting to talk about theological issues. The Orthodox churches, which have always been minority churches and persecuted, had no problem with the evangelical approach because the theological and political issues are separate for them.”

A second meetingwas held in Mechelen near Brussels in mid-week, this time with Muslims. Some church delegates went directly from one meeting to the other. This one was less focused on interfaith dialogue as such, but did mention in its final statement: “As Muslims and Christians we call for mutual learning through opening up of mosques and churches to visitors from other communities and also to learning through engagement of people. This includes scholarly encounter and academic interaction. We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing. We pledge ourselves to avoid generalisations about the other.”

“We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing…” – that’s an interesting way of putting it.

The Christian-Muslim dialogue trains continues to roll. The next stop is the Vatican on November 4 and 5, when about 25 signatories of the Common Word will meet Pope Benedict, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran and other interfaith experts of the Roman Catholic Church.

Recognising when religion plays a part in a military conflict can be a tricky business. Its role can easily be overemphasized, underplayed or misunderstood. Having covered several such conflicts myself, I was curious when I saw Ted Olsen’s post at Christianty Today about how John McCain stresses Georgia’s Christian heritage when talking about its conflict with Russia. When Russian forces rolled into Georgia in support of pro-Moscow separatists there,  McCain’s reaction statement noted that Georgia was “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion.” In his televised discussion with leading evangelical pastor Rick Warren on Saturday, he said “the king of then Georgia in the third century converted to Christianity. You go to Georgia and you see these old churches that go back to the fourth and fifth century.”

History is fascinating but McCain’s use of it here begs the question whether there is an actual faith factor in this conflict or just in his presentation of it. Russia, after all, is also a traditionally Christian nation, but he made no mention of that. After the fall of communism there, the Russian Orthodox Church has resumed its traditional role there — as has the Georgian Orthodox Church in the Caucasian republic after state-sponsored atheism lost out there too. There are no obvious doctrinal disputes that divide them.

Church-to-church relations also seem reasonable. According to the Russian news agency Interfax, senior officials of the two churches spoke by telephone last week and “declared their common peacemaking position and readiness to cooperate in this field.” Patriarchs of both churches have called for a ceasefire and condemned the violence among fellow Christians. “Orthodox Christians are among those who have raised their hands against each other. Orthodox peoples called by the Lord to live in fraternity and love confront each other,” Russia’s Primate Alexiy II said. “What is most important (is that) we (are) united with Christian faith and must live peacefully without blood,” Georgian Catholicos Patriarch Ilia II said.

Since Orthodox churches are organised nationally, each side naturally reflects in some way its own country’s political view of the crisis. But even in his protest letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Ilia’s only reference to religion was his lament that Orthodox were killing each other.

Other religious authorities — Pope Benedict after an Angelus prayer and the World Council of Churches and Conference of European Churches in a joint statement — have also mentioned the two countries’ common Christian heritage in their calls for a ceasefire but not implied it played any role in the conflict.

On his Crunchy Con blog, Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher — a convert to Orthodoxy — branded McCain’s comments as “total and shameless pandering to Evangelicals. As if Russia isn’t a Christian nation. As if Russia hasn’t been Christian for over a thousand years. As if Christianity had anything to do with this conflict.”

Beliefnet editor-in-chief Steven Waldman saw McCain signalling three possible messages to evangelical voters: (1) I think having Christianity as an official religion is a fine idea in general, (2) This is just like the Cold War when the forces of Christianity are at war with the forces of Atheism or (3) I view the protection of Christians from attack worldwide as an important goal.”

What do you think? Does McCain’s selective mention of religion have any relevance to this conflict?

There seems to have been a silver lining to the Dutch anti-Islam film “Fitna” that far-right PVV party leader Geert Wilders released in late March. We noted already the strife that many people feared didn’t materialise. Now the country’s National Coordinator for Counterterrorism says the long debate about the film actually brought Christian and Muslim groups closer together.

It said in the English translation of its latest report:

“The commotion surrounding the Fitna film appears to have resulted in overtures* between Christian and Islamic organisations. Several organisations with a Christian foundation have strongly criticised standpoints of the PVV parliamentary party chairman with respect to Islam and, together with Muslim organisations, are taking initiatives to reduce the social tensions in the Netherlands and abroad. Remarkable in this context is a collaboration between the World Council of Churches and the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (Protestanse Kerk in Nederland, PKN) on the one hand and the Muslims and the Government Liaison Committee (Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid, CMO) and the Islam Contact Group (Contact Groep Islam, CGI) on the other hand. In March 2008 these organisations conducted a ‘reconciliation mission’ to Muslim organisations in Egypt to neutralise any detrimental effects of the film.”

*The Dutch original is actually a bit stronger. It says there has been a “toenadering” (rapprochement) between Christian and Muslim groups. “Overtures” implies an initiative towards cooperation without making clear that something happened, whereas rapprochement does. And, as the report made clear, something did happen.

Nearly two weeks after ordained bishop Fernando Lugo was elected the next president of Paraguay, the Roman Catholic Church is still trying to figure out what do about him. The Vatican doesn’t want to have a bishop donning the presidential sash — mixing the priesthood with politics — but it also believes that once a bishop always a bishop, since ordination is a lifelong sacarament. The Vatican is dropping signals that it wants to find a non-controversial solution, and pundits doubt it will return the “bishop of the poor” to a lay state.

But there is no modern precedent to guide the Holy See. One Italian media outlet turned back to Talleyrand, the French bishop-turned foreign minister under Napoleon, even though the case bears no resemblance to modern Paraguay. The Vatican already suspended Lugo from his priestly duties after his entry into politics, and the Vatican envoy to Paraguay Orlando Antonini (pictured smiling with Lugo above) was quoted by Vatican Radio saying the next move was up to the pope.

Antonini added, perhaps tellingly, that Lugo wanted to remain within the Church, even though the Paraguayan leader has been quoted saying he was willing to be reduced to the lay state (here’s the Vatican Radio story in Italian). He abandoned his duties as a bishop three years ago, saying he felt powerless to help Paraguay’s poor.

While the Vatican is acting cautiously, other Christians have expressed their delight in Lugo’s landmark election to a country where corruption and poverty are endemic. The World Council of Churches, which groups the main non-Catholic Christian churches, praised Lugo’s committment to the poorest in line with “the rich tradition of a Latin American Christianity which has struggled to follow Jesus amidst a reality marked by inequality and lack of justice.”

The Council’s Secretary General Samuel Kobia said he was praying for Lugo’s “administration to bring more justice and reconciliation to the Paraguayan people,” as well as the possibility of “building a society that reduces the gap between the rich and the poor and addresses corruption”. Here is the full text in Spanish.

The dust had hardly settled from the Magdi Allam baptism story when Saudi King Abdullah announced he wanted to promote dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The World Council of Churches came out with its endorsement of the Common Word dialogue appeal after consulting member churches (many of which have already responded positively). And the World Economic Forum issued a study that says, among other things, that fewer than 30% of Muslims and Christians polled thought the other faith was sincerely interested in better understanding and cooperation. What’s going on?

The first thing to say is that these all seem to be different developments. We’ve already covered the Magdi Allam baptism story. That incident looks like a bit of unexpected turbulence that should calm down now that Common Word signatory Aref Ali Nayed criticised the Vatican for it and L’Osservatore Romano said the baptism was not a hostile act towards Islam. For more on this, see Nayed’s statement, his El Pais interview today (English, Spanish) and the L’Osservatore Romano editorial (Italian).

King Abdullah’s comments popped up in the Saudi press on Tuesday. He has been making positive comments and taking interesting steps such as his November visit to the Vatican and a recently announced plan to retrain Saudi imams to preach moderation. But what this latest statement really means is still unclear. It is not connected to the Common Word initiative, which has some Saudi signatories but otherwise no link to Saudi Arabia. It is not clear whether the Saudi religious establishment, which is usually more conservative than the royal family, has signed on to this. And it is not clear whether the foreign Muslims who Abdullah says he wants to lead to dialogue with Christians and Jews really want to be that close to a Saudi project. It is certainly interesting to hear the Saudi king speak of inter-faith dialogue, especially when he includes Jews in it, but there are still a lot of question marks over this plan.

The World Economic Forum report “Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue” was actually unveiled back in January, but the annual Davos summit — with all its politicians and business leaders — is not exactly a place where religion takes centre stage. So the World Economic Forum has turned the spotlight back on it again with a symposium in London. Here’s our original story and the PDF of the full report.

This dialogue activity is going on while there are continuing protests about the reprinting of the Danish “turban bomb” cartoon of Mohammad and a countdown to expected protests about an anti-Islam film by Dutch MP Geert Wilders. It makes it hard to talk about “Christian-Muslim relations” when they’re going in opposite directions at the same time.

The Rev. Samuel Kobia has informed the World Council of Churches (WCC) Central Committee that he won’t seek a second five-year term after all. The WCC has just put out a statement that “buries the lead,” as we say, by starting off saying it has appointed a search committee for a new head, to be elected in September. It then says Kobia had informed the Central Committee of his decision, citing personal reasons for not running again. His term ends in December.

“The central committee received this news with regret but accepts the decision of the general secretary. We want to respect his decision and privacy,” WCC Central Committee moderator Rev. Dr. Walter Altmann said Monday night, according to the statement. “We want to express the deep gratitude of the World Council of Churches for the dedicated services he has given to the council since becoming general secretary in January 2004.”

Only a few days ago, Samuel Kobia from Kenya was running unopposed for a second five-year term as general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at its Central Committee meeting now being held in Geneva. The story seemed pretty ho-hum. Then the German Protestant news agency epd revealed he had a “digital doctorate” from a unaccredited diploma mill in the U.S. Now he’s in danger of losing his job running the WCC, the global Christian grouping of 349 churches (mostly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox) that represent more than 560 million believers around the world. Our correspondent in Geneva Robert Evans reports he may be on his way out. The rumour making the rounds is that we may hear as early as Tuesday that he will not be there much longer.

All because of a phony Ph.D? No, there’s a lot more where that story came from. The epd also ran a scathing interview with Lutheran Bishop Martin Hein of Kassel, the top German on the WCC Central Committee, in the run-up to the meeting. He made it abundantly clear that the German Protestants, who contribute one-third of the WCC budget, had lost patience with Kobia. Here’s a taste of what he said:

“The WCC takes stands on everything. The World Council of Churches does not have to be a little United Nations.”

Hein noted the WCC played an active role during the Cold War and the apartheid era in South Africa but added: “The real difficulty is that both those political challenges are now gone.”

He criticsed Kobia for taking decisions without much consultation and traveling around too much: “I’m sometimes amazed how often the secretary general is on the road.”

“In the long term, one-third of the costs of the WCC cannot come exclusively from Germany,” Hein said, adding he thought other churches in the Global North, including the Orthodox churches, could give more.

Kobia, 60, told a news conference last week that he saw visiting outlying faith communities around the world as part of his mandate. Responding to another complaint voiced by Hein, he said the WCC had cut back on some of its many programmes.

Kobia would be the first head of the WCC to serve only one term if he steps down. The first general secretary, Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft of the Netherlands, served from 1948 to 1966. Kobia’s immediate predecessor, Konrad Raiser from Germany, served from 1993 to 2003.

The Rev. Samuel Kobia, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), has had to drop his Ph.D in religious studies from his resumé because it came from a U.S. diploma mill that was never accredited and no longer exists. Ouch!

Kobia told a news conference in Geneva he had no idea that the Louisiana-based university had no right to award the degree he got in 2004 after three years of work via the Internet.

“Hearing of the status of Fairfax University was a shock to me. I followed their programme in good faith,” said Kobia, a 60-year-old Methodist from Kenya. If it’s any consolation, Sweden’s Labour Minister Sven Otto Littorin had to purge his CV of a Fairfax MBA last year after a blogger broke a similar story.

It’s interesting to note who broke the Kobia story. The news first came in a report from Geneva on Tuesday by the Evangelischer Pressedienst (epd), the German Protestant news agency. It landed just before a meeting of the WCC central committee that is due to re-elect Kobia for another five-year term as head of the global Christian grouping of 349 churches (mostly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox) that represent more than 560 million believers.

Kobia is the only candidate, but he has been criticised by some European church leaders for his extensive travel and his management style. The issue has apparently not been discussed in public at the central committee but there are rumours in the corridors that some churches from the Global North were against him. But the feeling is that he’ll get the Swedish treatment — an embarrassment and a scare, but he’ll be able to keep his job.

Do you think Kobia or Littorin could have failed to notice their university was dodgy? Do you think resumé fraud — intentional or not — should lead to dismissal?

Attenzione! The Vatican will issue an important doctrinal document on Friday “on some aspects of evangelisation.” Pope Benedict has a long track record of making sharp distinctions between Catholicism and other religions in his doctrinal declarations. Some of these have upset other Christians, others have angered Muslims and been challenged by Islamic scholars. This new text has been written by papal aides, not the pope himself, but it is expected to be a close reflection of his views. What Vatican observers are waiting to see is how clearly it states the Catholic view on converting others and how other religions react.

The document from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed for over two decades before becoming pope in 2005, comes at a time of growing Catholic difficulties with Anglicans, Protestants and evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Its hesitant reaction to an invitation leading Muslim scholars for a theological dialogue has raised questions about its interest in inter-faith relations. And evangelisation is now a sensitive topic for Christian churches. The Vatican is working with the World Council of Churches, the World Evangelical Alliance and Pentecostal leaders on a code of conduct for missionary work .

The declaration is expected to say that conversion remains a goal of Catholic missionary efforts and that Catholic theologians must not water this down by arguing that other faiths can be paths to salvation. This recalls Dominus Iesus, a document issued in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that said the Catholic Church was the only true church of Jesus Christ and others were “gravely deficient.” In fact, the document should be a guide on how to put Dominus Iesus into practice. The CDF began this process with a clarification of the 2000 document last June — a clarification that caused dismay among leading Protestant theologians.

Doesn’t the Roman Catholic Church have the right to restate its traditional beliefs? Of course it does. But it also operates in a broader context than the Catholic world alone, a context where Vatican documents are read carefully by other faiths for indications of how the world’s largest church thinks and what it plans to do. In a globalised world, leading religions are involved in inter-faith and ecumenical dialogues to foster better understanding among peoples. These efforts have led to much improved contact and comprehension among religions in the past few decades. Pope John Paul preferred this kind of dialogue, such as the 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Italy, but Cardinal Ratzinger kept his distance.

In recent years, this ecumenical drive seems to have slowed. Many faiths seem to be putting a renewed emphasis on their own identity. Again, that’s their right, but it does sometimes rub other religions the wrong way. Pope Benedict has done that before in the past, for example with Dominus Iesus (which upset Anglicans and Protestants) or with his 2006 Regensburg speech (which upset Muslims). He has shown more interest in working with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Wolfgang Huber, the top Lutheran bishop in Germany, has been especially critical of Benedict’s approach, for example calling the restatement of Dominus Iesus “an affront” to Protestants.

The line-up for Friday’s news conference in Rome about the new document indicates it is meant mostly as an internal text. It will be presented by CDF Prefect Cardinal William Levada, Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and CDF Secretary Archbishop Angelo Amato.

Notably absent will be the two cardinals who head dicasteries — the Vatican equivalent of government ministries — that deal directly with other faiths. They are Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Kasper was openly critical of the CDF in a speech to cardinals in Rome last month, saying the powerful dicastery “aroused perplexity and created discontent” by issuing its document restating Dominus Iesus last summer.

A statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) last week stressed issues expected to be part of the CDF document as well. In that statement, the bishops criticised Father Peter Phan, a leading theologian teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, for creating “considerable confusion” about Christ, the Church and other faiths. They restated Church teaching that Jesus Christ Catholicism was the only true church, Jesus Christ was mankind’s only saviour and other religions were “a preparation for the Gospel.” (Read John Allen’s full analysis here)

How do readers who follow developments in ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue see the way relations between faiths are going under Pope Benedict? Is his emphasis on traditional Catholic positions making it easier or more difficult to promote understanding among religions?