Taiwan 'can be the bridge' between Vatican and Beijing

Taiwan church can also serve as a link between underground and patriotic churches in China, says Father Jeroom Heyndrickx.

Wang Yu-yuan (left), former Taiwan ambassador to the Holy See. Seated are Father Heyndrickx, the founding director of the Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation at Leuven Catholic University in Belgium, and Gu Weiying, a retired professor on Catholic history. (ucanews.com photo)

Taipei:  The Catholic Church in Taiwan can play a bridging role between the Vatican and Beijing as well as between the government-sanctioned and the underground church communities in China, agreed speakers at a seminar.

Belgian Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, a sinologist who makes frequent visits to China and Taiwan was one of three speakers at the Taipei seminar hosted by the Chinese Christian Spirit Community on Dec. 2, said he is optimistic on China-Vatican relations .

Father Heyndrickx said he saw that mainland China has become a "person of dialogue" since the government’s reform and opening policy in late 1970s while the Vatican is a "church of dialogue."

"The Taiwan church should serve as a bridge between the underground church and the patriotic church," said Father Heyndrickx who is the founding director of the Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation at Leuven Catholic University in Belgium.

"With Fu Jen Catholic University, including the theology school, accepting students from mainland China, it is the greatest gift that the church in Taiwan gives to the church in China," he said.

The idea of a "bridge church" was proposed by the late Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi to persuade the Vatican not to give up on Taiwan when diplomatic relations between the two parties faced crisis in 1999, said another speaker Ku Wei-ying, a retired professor on Catholic history.

"The former Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, said in 1999 that the Vatican was not severing ties with Taiwan," said Gu. "It was just moving the doorplate of the ‘Nunciature of China' to where it was originally from," he said.

Ku implied the doorplate has no indication it refers to People's Republic of China or Republic of China, often known as Taiwan.

Ku anticipated that China and the Vatican might take a "gradual approach by first setting up a liaison office."

The third speaker at the seminar, Wang Yu-yuan, a former Taiwan ambassador to the Holy See, said that Taiwanese should be paying attention to the Vatican's efforts to broker a deal with Beijing over bishop appointments in mainland China.

"Pope Francis has repeatedly expressed goodwill to the Beijing authorities and his wish is to establish normalized relations," said Wang.

"It shows relations between the two parties have never been better as now," he said.

Media attention in Taiwan over the issue is currently tempered with anxiety given that the Vatican is the only European state that Taiwan maintains diplomatic relationships with.

While negotiations are said to be about bishop appointments, there are concerns in Taiwan that this might ultimately lead to changes in Taiwan-Vatican diplomatic relations.

Wang thinks that since the China-Vatican working group was formed only this year, negotiations will still take some time.

Giving a comparison, Wang said the Holy See has conducted nearly 10 years of progress with Vietnam's communist regime since initial contact began in 2007.

There are an estimated 300,000 Catholics among Taiwan's 23 million people.

Source: UCAN

Children of no country: Stateless and forgotten in Malaysia

With no legal status, a path to a better future eludes them.

Two children play in the cart they use to transport goods around the market for a small fee in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. Their parents are Filipino migrants. (Photo by Jefferi Chang)

Kota Kinabalu:  Amira broke into a smile when the word "school" was mentioned. "Do you want to take them? Do you know where I can send them?" she asks before adding, "no one wants them."

The mother of two was referring to five-year-old Nasir and three-year-old Noori, both sitting with her on top of an orange plastic container by the waterfront in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah state, Malaysia.

The three had just finished a lunch of rice, fish and vegetables and are heading home to a small room they rent for RM650 (US$155) a month.

They belong to no country, part of a steadily growing multitude with no citizenship or place to call home, unable to claim the things that governments can provide, like health care and education.

The 30-something housewife is keen for her children to get what she never had — a formal education that could lead to a better future.

"If they were in the Philippines they would be able to go to school," she says regretfully.

Nasir and Noori are among thousands of migrant children and refugees who have traveled to Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, in search of a better life. It has proved elusive.

There are no official figures but Torben Venning, a Dane who was involved in trying to provide basic education to thousands of immigrant children in Sabah, guesses there are tens of thousands.

He believes generations are being condemned to a life of hardship because they lack education.

"I worked with stateless and unregistered children in Sabah from 2004 - 2015," he said in an email.

Children born to migrant workers from Indonesia and the Philippines lack legal documents and are ineligible to attend state schools.

Aid projects run by NGOs and churches have limited impact. Authorities see aid as an encouragement to stay — a political minefield in a restive country.

As of last year, unregistered children born in Sabah to Indonesian parents are believed to number around 70,000 with 30,000 more from Filipino parents.

Most of the Indonesian children live in Sabah's palm oil plantations, where their parents work. Filipino children generally live in urban areas where their parents work in construction or domestic service.

Malaysian immigration law does not grant legal status to children of immigrants but with several hundred thousand immigrants having been in Sabah for decades, tens of thousands of children remain unregistered.

The Malaysian government has accepted NGOs to provide education to them, some plantation companies provide schools and, since 2006, the Indonesian government has been providing teachers and education.

Children of Philippine migrants generally have more difficulties. They only have access to informal and often unlicensed education projects in town areas.

The armed incursion by a band of Suluk Filipinos and violence on the east coast of the state in the town of Lahad Datu in 2013 disrupted life for Suluk families.

They live in constant fear of arrest. Many have lost their jobs due to discrimination making it hard for their children to attend even informal classes.

The Bajau Laut, a sea-dwelling people, also remain largely stateless without any access to school and medical care.

Their movement at sea has been restricted due to security measures after the incursion and many have been reduced to beggary. Their children roam towns as street children.

They are by far the most vulnerable migrants in Sabah. Infant mortality from curable diseases is said to be high and some of them can only access polluted drinking water.

Detention for long periods due to the lack of documents is common and there are unconfirmed reports of deaths in detention, especially women and children.

Amira, originally from Zamboanga in the Philippines, left Lahad Datu three years ago. "Life is better here in [Kota Kinabalu]. There are security checks and raids but it's okay. There is work and we can survive," she said.

"Our children make themselves useful selling plastic bags and carting goods for a little money," she says. It's a schooling of sorts.

Her son, Nasir takes a final gulp of water from a plastic Coca-Cola bottle and tosses it into the sea along with a plastic bag of fish bones. They join the flotsam and jetsam littering the waterfront.

Further away, two young boys are taking a break from helping their parents. One, pushing a cart, growls like a car engine and the other sits inside, playing along — a celebration of childhood and perhaps a rite of passage too.

Source: UCAN

Weddings are no fairytale for Indonesia's child brides

Activists decry lack of government effort in preventing rights violations against young girls as a result of child marriages.

Jakarta:  Sukesih was only 15 when she married in 1997.

"I was a fourth grader. I had to stop school. It was because of the economic difficulties faced by my father, a pedicab driver with five children to feed," she told ucanews.com.

She gave birth to a girl in May the next year. For the first few months, her husband, working as a daily laborer, met all the daily needs. When her daughter was three months, however, she had to work as a laundress to make ends meet as her husband stopped working.

That was when the real problems surfaced.

"We argued a lot," she said. "He repeatedly hit me, cursed me and then kicked me out."

In 1999, she divorced her husband.

"I couldn't take anymore," she said.

A year later, she married again and gave birth to two more daughters. However, hard times forced her to work as a migrant in Bahrain for two years. She sent all her money to her husband, who sometimes worked as a motorcycle taxi driver.

"When I returned in 2009, I found my husband had married another woman. We had fights. I was often subjected to domestic violence," she said.

Not surprisingly, she left him.

In 2011, she married yet again. Still, similar problems frequently surfaced.

Sukesih is now 35 and among more than 700 million women around the world who have fallen victim to child marriage, a global phenomenon that remains a serious problem in Indonesia, in which 50,000 girls marry before the age of 15 every year.

Child marriage is a violation of human rights and against international law, according to the U.N. and rights groups. It deprives girls of their childhood, an education and exposes them to health risks especially with regard to childbirth and their general well-being, it says.

Future prospects are also grim and the girls are at greater risk of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their husband and his family, they say.

According to UNICEF, one in six Indonesian girls, about 340,000, are married before their 18th birthday each year.

Indonesia is 37th on the global child marriage index and has the second-highest rate in Southeast Asia, behind Cambodia.



Irrelevant law

Misiyah Misi, director of women's rights group the Institute of Alternative Education Circle for Women, said Indonesia's 1974 marriage law setting 16 as the minimum age at which women can marry should be changed.

The minimum age is often ignored or not enforced resulting in many child brides under 16 years of age she said.

"Several groups have filed petitions for a judicial review of the law, but they were rejected by the Constitutional Court," she told ucanews.com.

In March 2014, the Women's Health Foundation and a coalition of activists and organisations filed an appeal, arguing that the law was inconsistent with a 2002 child protection law that defines a child as being under 18.

It was also inconsistent with a 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which Indonesia ratified in 1984, they said.

In June 2015, the court dismissed the appeal, saying a change to the minimum age for marriage was not warranted since there was no guarantee that increasing the age from 16 to 18 would reduce divorce rates or other social problems.

President Joko Widodo should issue a presidential decree banning child marriage and enforce it, Misi said.

"It is the time for president to act," she said.



Impacts and measures

For 46-year-old Uun, she said she had no choice but to marry off her only daughter when she was 16.

"She had been in a relationship with the man for five years. I was afraid she would get pregnant outside of marriage," she said.

Social pressure was also a reason she said, adding that people in her village in West Java's Kuningan district were gossiping and pointing fingers.

Lenny N. Rosalin, deputy head for child growth and development affairs at the Ministry for Women Empowerment and Child Protection, said even though a law setting a minimum marriage age exists enforcement is hampered by social attitudes that allow child marriage to flourish.

As such, her ministry is looking to tackle the problem by trying to change attitudes, she said.

"We've formed child forums in which children are encouraged to serve as agents of change and we introduced awareness programs to educate parents," she told ucanews.com.

"We are also encouraging schools to provide sex education and religious and tribal leaders to campaign against child marriage," she said.

Holy Family Father Hibertus Hartana, secretary of the Indonesian bishops' family commission, suggested all related parties should work together.

"There must be four elements: family, government, religious leaders and tribal leaders. They have to sit together and work together to tell people about the negative impacts of child marriage," he said.

For the likes of Sukesih the damage has already been done.

"I hope in the future, there will be no more child marriages," she said.

Source: UCAN

Is India's fight against black money a political game?

Critics smell corruption in Modi's anti-corruption drive.

By Ajay Kumar Singh
Bhubaneswar:  When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his decision to withdraw high value bank notes overnight on Nov. 8 he called it a "masterstroke" and "game changer." But many now wonder if the Indian population have been made to suffer for Modi's political benefit.

He appealed to the people to sacrifice a little inconvenience for two days and help destroy terrorist's funds and choke the black market. But it has been far more than a little inconvenient.

The chaos and struggle of the poor continues, especially in the villages as they struggle to change their high values notes to smaller ones. Within a week of the announcement at least 33 people died directly or indirectly due to the struggle to get cash.

There are stories of poor people committing suicide out of frustration as they could not manage their expenses; sick people dying while their attendants and relatives stand in long bank and ATM queues. Anger and frustration is mounting as Modi's promise falls apart.

The move was tough for India's cash-based economy where the devalued banknotes of 500 and 1000 rupees constitute 86 percent of the cash in people's hands.

The majority of Indians, such as farmers who constitute at least half of the 1.2 billion population and small-time traders, depend on cash in a country where banking is a relatively new phenomenon.

Studies show that only 53 percent of Indians have bank accounts and 40 percent of them are dormant. That shows the scale of India's cash economy.

While de-valuing the notes, the government also issued a re-designed 500 rupee note and introduced a new 2,000 rupee note. On the face of it, the move looked like the best way to choke fake currency, black market stashes and tax evasion.

But with no added security features, fake 2000 rupee notes began to appear in several parts of India within a week of them appearing in the market. Fake notes were also found with terrorists who attacked the Indian army on the India-Pakistan border, reports said.

Senior Indian economics like Kausik Basu have said that a major chunk of India's black money is invested in real estate and gold. However, the government has announced no plans to bust these pockets of illegal funds.

The fight against black money was a campaign platform that Modi used in the 2014 national elections. He promised to bring back to India money that India's rich and famous, including politicians, had stashed away in Swiss banks. But, after two years in office, he has not yet fulfilled his promise.

He can't actually go after the black money in Swiss accounts because a lot of it belongs to the people who propelled him into power as well as those who sanitized his image from that of an anti-minority politician to a development-friendly statesman.

Even so, he has been keen to keep up his image of an anti-corruption crusader. He needed to divert the issue away from the black money stashed abroad to that stashed at home.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in its Human Development Report 2015 said that 80 percent of Indian women do not have bank accounts. The banned notes are reported to account for 86 percent of all the cash in India.

In the past years, despite best efforts, cash recovery has been less than six percent of undisclosed income seized from tax evaders, according to a report in Hindustan Times. So it seems this move will not end black money.

Banks received 2 trillion rupees or roughly $29.8 billion within a week of the government announcing the withdrawal as people, mostly poor and middle class, queued up to deposit or exchange their old bank notes.

This helped banks who were reportedly running short of cash and sinking in at least US$17 billion of bad debt. Media, especially social media, say the more cash the banks have the more they are able to write-off corporate debt. The same companies that helped Modi to his present chair will benefit when their bad debts are written off.

The State Bank of India has already written off 70,000 million rupees (more than US$1 billion) of unpaid loans from 63 willful defaulters, including industry tycoon Vijay Mallya's now defunct, Kingfisher Airlines.

Mallya has moved out of India and now leads a posh life in England. Invalidating bank notes was a trick of the government and the Reserve Bank of India to take money from the pockets of ordinary Indians to pay for the luxury life of the rich.

In the fight against black money and corruption, Modi's government is also silent on political parties. It is estimated that over 75 percent of the money that political parties use for electioneering is unaccounted for. But the country still has no law to investigate a political party for corruption.

The move is aimed at the 2019 state election in Uttar Pradesh, a key state politically. Modi wanted to drain funding from rival parties who rely on donations from government employees and small-time vendors.

The move on bank notes is a well thought out political strategy to eliminate Modi's

political rivals. However, for single parents, children and vulnerable people, the assurance of ending graft is nothing but a political drama.



Ajay Kumar Singh is a Catholic priest and human rights campaigner based in eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar.

Source: UCAN

Sri Lankan priest campaigns against giant Christmas tree

It's the type of commercialization of Christmas that should be protested against, says Father Sarath Iddamalgoda.

Sri Lanka:  A Sri Lankan priest is using social media to rally support against the building of the world's tallest artificial Christmas tree in Colombo.

Using social media, Father Sarath Iddamalgoda believes the Christmas tree being installed at the Galle Face Green esplanade in the country's capital is a waste of money.

Estimated to cost Rs.20 million (US $133,000) the priest has been vocal on Facebook against the tree's construction calling it an "absurd thing."

Father Iddamalgoda launched the campaign at the end of November when he posted a message calling for people interested to join in and protest against this kind of commercialization of Christmas and waste of public funds.

"There are some priests and lay people who have supported my idea," Father Iddamalgoda said adding that he had also received a statement issued by the National Christian Council against this project.

On completion the tree is expected to be 114 meters tall.

Source: UCAN

Nagaland church seeks repeal of good governance day on Dec 25

Northeast India has sizable Christian population.

Guwahati:  Church bodies in Northeast India opposed NDA government’s decision of holding good governance day on Christmas Day on December 25. The church bodies felt that this will hurt the sentiment of minorities.

Church body, Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC) the decision if not reversed will be discriminatory move against the minorities. Mizoram Kohhran Hruaitu Committee (MKHC), a committee of church leaders in the State has moved President Pranab Mukherjee to repeal the Central government’s decision to observe Good Governance Day on Christmas Day.

Northeast India has sizable christens population. In a statement NBCC said the controversy over Narendra Modi government’s decision to observe national Good Governance day, has returned to hurt the sentiments of Christian minority in India and majority in Nagaland. “The decision was an attempt to dilute the importance of the day and unless rectified, will go down in history as a “discriminatory move against religious minorities.”

NBCC said it could not agree more with Narendra Modi’s stand that Good Governance was the key to a nation’s progress and lauded his commitment for a transparent and accountable administration for the betterment of the common citizens. However, it said observing it on an auspicious occasion was “thoughtless and insensitive” particularly to the Christian minority in India.

NBCC slammed the motive to hold Good Governance on December 25 as nothing short of following the Sangh’s policies to suppress religious minorities in secular India.

NBCC said it honoured former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and had nothing against him though Good Governance Day was set on December 25 (Vajpayee’s birthday). However it said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was well aware that December 25 was a sacred day and known as Christmas the birth of Jesus Christ, celebrated for the last 2000 years by Christians worldwide.

NBCC said the government was today playing with the sentiments of 2.4 crore plus Christians in India and asked what would be next? It reiterated that the utmost priority of any progressive government ought to be peace and harmony but such instance as above, that disturbed people’s minds and undermined the nation’s secular fabric would only lead to the establishment of tyranny of the majority.

“If such tendency was not restrained, then democracy would be one that ruled on behalf of the majority community and not on the basis of “rightness and excellence,” NBCC observed.

NBCC urged upon the Central government to “stay away” from causing divisions and keep away from instigating communal feelings and insecurity but instead go ahead with programmes without infringing on religious rights, whether it be majority or minority so that India could be known the world over, as a secular country with tolerance.

Recently State BJP president of Mizoram, Dr JV Hluna, stated that ‘Good Governance Day’ will never be observed on Christmas Day in the Christian-dominated state of Mizoram.

Source: Economic Times

Jayalalithaa’s ‘special relationship’ with her Catholic teachers

Over the years, her association with her school and her teachers had remained strong.

Jayalalithaa (bottom right) in a 1957 photograph, when she was in the 4th grade at Bishop Cotton Girls High School in Bengaluru. Photo: EGK & Son Studio

Chennai:  While Jayalalithaa’s political and film career have been in the spotlight through her life, she considered her schooldays to be the “happiest” and “most normal days” of her life.

She moved to Chennai from Bengaluru when she was 10 years old and joined the Sacred Heart Matriculation School, also known as the Church Park Presentation Convent. Located near the Gemini Flyover, the sprawling school grounds nurtured great academic ambitions in Jayalalithaa, who reportedly was interested in pursuing a career in law before her entry into films.

“I absolutely loved my school days. I was the best outgoing student in my year and was the unanimous choice for the same, according to my headmistress and teachers. I consider this my proudest achievement,” she reminisced, in the late 1990s in a rare television interview. She also topped the matriculation examinations, and had received a scholarship for her academic performance.

Over the years, her association with her school and her teachers had remained strong.

Sister Clare and Catherine Simon, her teachers from Sacred Heart School, were invited to attend the swearing-in ceremonies when she was elected the Chief Minister, even though she was not in touch with them on a regular basis.

In June this year, when Catherine Simon died, Jayalalithaa released a statement, condoling on the death of her 88-year-old physical training teacher.

“She was a great influence on my life and we shared a very special relationship as a teacher and student. I had the good fortune of being her student from 1958 to 1964,” she said.

In an interview to ‘Kumudam’ early in her acting career, she had recalled a letter that Catherine Simon had written about her dances in the movie 'Aayirathil Oruvan', and had said that she had immensely appreciated it.

Source: The Hindu