Thursday, June 30, 2005

News about Paulines in Pakistan

Church says biased report led to police raid on Catholic bookstore - Jun 30, 2005

Archbishop Evarist Pinto of Karachi presided over the reopening of a Catholic bookshop 12 days after police raided it and confiscated 150 compact discs and videotapes of biblical films.

Archbishop Pinto, speaking with UCA News at the June 25 reopening, called the police raid on the bookshop "a single, stray incident" based on a misunderstanding that took root in a prejudiced mindset.

The archdiocese owns the store, which the Daughters of St. Paul operate, reported UCA News, an Asian church news agency based in Thailand. The raid was conducted June 13, a day after the Urdu-language newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt ran a story alleging that Christians were selling CDs and videotapes about the lives of the prophets.

The newspaper report claimed the films contained blasphemous material. Muslim religious scholars, whose opinion the paper sought, reportedly issued a "fatwa," or religious edict, calling the material offensive to Muslims by depicting the prophets and defaming their character. Islam does not allow visual portrayals of God or the prophets.

 From "The Universe" Britain and Ireland's best-selling Catholic newspaper - founded in 1860

2 comments:

Sixtina87 said...

I think that horrible for the police to do that especially at a catholic book store!!!!!!! What did the Sister think of that when that was going on????

Anonymous said...

I am sorry to hear that Sister. May God protect them.