Thank God! But let us continue praying until she gets out of Pakistan safely and with her family in Canada...
Left, Asia's husband with one of their daughters when they were in Rome to ask the pope, among others, to intercede for her - in vain, of course.
Asia Bibi allowed to leave Pakistan after
Supreme Court upholds her acquittal for blasphemy
The mother of five spent eight years in prison following
an argument with Muslim women about drinking from a bucket of water
By Neville Lazarus
January 29, 2019
Christian Asia Bibi is allowed to leave Pakistan after the country's top court upheld her acquittal on blasphemy charges.
Ms Bibi, who spent eight years on death row, will now be free to join her daughters who fled to Canada and were granted asylum there.
The 54-year-old was acquitted in October - eight years after she was convicted with the death penalty for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a dispute with her neighbours.
But she has remained under guard at a secret place since her acquittal two months ago by the Pakistani Supreme Court, as Prime Minister Imran Khan's government attempted to quell anger over her exoneration by radical Islamists, who staged nationwide protests and almost brought the capital Islamabad to a standstill.
More than 3,000 members of the radical Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) group were arrested on charges of terrorism after the protest, with its leader and high profile members still in prison.
This afternoon, three members of the Supreme Court of Pakistan dismissed their appeal against Ms Bibi's acquittal.
[I wish someone would write about the courageous justices who voted to acquit Ms Bibi in both two verdicts. That the Supreme Court of Pakistan even considered to hear the case at all was already quite a surprise - but that they have now acquitted her twice is extraordinary. One did not think - after reading all we have about the unquestioned supremacy of Islam in Pakistan - that the country's Supreme Court, not to mention its current president, would not take a hard line against this Christian woman, but it seems they do uphold the rule of law and abided by sheer common sense in deciding she had not committed blasphemy at all! May their tribe prosper and may there be many more Muslim public officials like tme.]
Heavy security surrounded the court as the verdict was due, with paramilitary troops and quick response units deployed in sensitive areas in the capital.
Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin infamously said - after Asia's first acquittal - that her case was entirely an 'internal matter' for Pakistan, implying that, therefore, the Vatican could - and would - do nothing to help her and her family find asylum anywhere, least of all at the Vatican! Remember those Muslim refugees Pope Francis brought back to the Vatican with him in a spontaneous gesture (to set an example of 'welcome' for all migrants) after a trip to the 'migrant' camp in Lesbos??? Has he lifted a finger for any persecuted Christian anywere yet?
On the contrary, he has left all those faithful underground Catholics in China twisting in the winds of arbitrary official persecution by Beijing if they refuse to join the 'official church'. Which Bergoglio has honored and placed above the clandestine Catholics by rehabilitating formerly excommunicated official Chinese bishops (a couple of whom reportedly have families they openly live with) and, adding insult to injury, placing them in charge of dioceses formerly headed by underground bishops while reducing the latter to subordinates.
Where is there in the gospel, or in plain decency, that justifies all that? And simply because Bergoglio wants to be the first pope to visit China???
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Not entirely unrelated to the above story is this commentary by Antonio Socci, which is not the first paradox-rich criticism of a pope everyone hailed at the beginning as not just 'the most popular pope ever' but also - and quite admiringly - as the most populist of popes.
Bergoglio versus 'the people'
Translated from
January 27, 2019
It is becoming increasingly clear that for the peoples of the East and of the West, Papa Bergoglio has become a ‘big problem’.
[Even critics as trenchant about Bergoglio as Socci is would probably not make such a sweeping statement - because while this pope may have become a ‘big problem’, to the Church and to the world at large, few among those peoples are even aware of it. To most of them, he is 'the pope' which means he could not possibly be a problem at all in general. But let's allow Socci to make his case.]
The ‘Venezuela case’ has made this obvious, as does the Vatican’s alliance with the Communist Chinese regime, and before that, the eplosion of the immigration emergency wich has destabilized Italy and most of western Europe.
On all three subjects, Bergoglio is in frontal conflict with the people most affected, and, of course, with the policy of the White House under Donald Trump. It was not by chance that the pope attacked Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Bergoglio’s ponitifate is, in fact, a product of the Obama/Clinton era of world politics, whose agenda he has been carrying forward though he no longer has the political support of many governments of the West (France’s Macron is already a very lame duck).
[But there still remains Merkel’s Germany which is the de facto leader of the European Union and which just signed an agreement with France – once Germany’s most targeted historical enemy in Europe – to somehow strengthen the common bond with Macron of Europism versus nationalism.]
But the first Bergoglian destabilization obviously has targeted the Church which had represented, up till Benedict VXI, the oldest and most authoritative institution in the world. Which now, under Bergoglio, has been precipitated into what is arguably the greatest crisis in her history.
[As divisive as Arianism was – and even more substantially and institutionally, as the Great Schism of 1057 and Luther’s Schism in 1517 – the crisis today is not just of agreater magnitude but of a different order of weight, for two principal reasons:
1) The world today, unlike the world in the centuries of Arianism and of the two great schisms so far, is almost immeasurably vaster in its population but is also thoroughly blanketed and permeated by a communications network that simultaneously and instantaneously disseminates information across the planet, in a way that was unthinkable in its scope and power even just two decades ago; and
2) More importantly, because the main cause of the Present Crisis happens to be the man who is supposed to be pope – therefore. symbol of Church unity and defender and upholder of the faith, he who is supposed to confirm his brethren in the faith Instead, he is the opposite of all that, because he is basically anti-Catholic in the views he is most active at promoting, and anti-Christ for daring to edit Jesus’s words to suit his personal purposes, and for acting as if he knows better than Christ what the Church should be, namely one in his, Bergoglio’s, likeness and image.
Even Bergoglio’s most perceptive critics fail to hammer away at this anti-Christ hubris that drives everything Bergoglio says and does. Yet it must be pointed out again and again, every time he says and does something that harms the faith, He cannot be spared the most obvious criticisms just because he happens to be the legitimate pope. On the contrary, it becomes dutiful to point underscore the point insistently, repeatedly and relentlessly.]
Bergoglio has radically overturned the connotations of the papacy. It is no longer about a spiritual message, but a worldly one. No longer does it have any supernatural (divine) significance, but only and always, political. He has replaced the announcement of Christ as the only Savior with the announcements of the politically correct United Nations which bear the rabid anti-Catholic stamp of the radical left.
It is the ‘old’ Liberation Theology reborn. It is not by chance that Cardinal Cipriani, for 25 years Archbishop of Lima and Primate of the Peruvian Church, was promptly replaced when he reached 75 by a priest, Carlos Castillo, who was a leading disciple of Gustavo Gutierrez, founder of LT
[as it came to be preached and practiced in Latin America in the 1980s onwards, after being born among the progressivist theologians of Belgium].
The Argentine pope is friendly and on terms of close dialog with illiberal regimes – be they Islamic, socialist or communist – while he is consistently harsh against the Western leaders who do not think like him (notably Trump and Italy’s Matteo Salvini).
In Latin America, he has had nothing but friendship
[and even praise] for Cuba, the Venezuela of Maduro, and President Evo Morales of Bolivia
[the only head of state enlisted in the frankly socialist and leftist ‘popular movements’ Bergoglio has encouraged, assembled and met with a number of times over the years], the one who gifted him with a crucifix fashioned out of the hammer-and-sickle.
In recent days, 20 former heads of state and/or government in Latin America protested in an open letter Bergoglio’s Christmas Day message urbi et orbi in which he spoke in positive terms of Venezuela and Nicaragua. They said:
“The [people pf Venezuela] are victims of oppression by a militarized narco-dictatorship, which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty and personal integrity and, as a result of deliberate public policies and unbridled corruption, has scandalized the world and that have subjected them to widespread famine and lack of medicine. In Nicaragua, in the middle of last year, 300 were killed and 2,500 wounded in a wave of repression”.
In that context, the signatories of the letter said, Bergoglio’s words
“can be understood by the victimized nations that they should come to agreement with their victimizers. In particular, in the case of Venezuela, the government has caused the flight of 3 million refugees, which the United Nations predicts will reach 5.9 million in 2019”.
Yet for the refugees from Maduro’s regime, Bergoglio has shown none of the obsessive interest he continues to show for the migrants who have been seeking to enter Italy
[at least 500,000 succeeded in the five years before the change of leadership in the Italian government last year].
Instead, the Vatican provoked a diplomatic scandal when it chose to send a representative to the recent swearing-in of Maduro for a new [and illegitimate] term as president, an event that was snubbed by most South American and European countries.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan people protest to no avail, the Venezuelan bshops denounce the oppressions by Maduro’s regime, and Venezuela itself is in an institutional crisis because the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidò (with the support of the free world, including that of the USA under Trump) has been recognized as the legitimate interim President of Venezuela as he seeks to liberate the Venezuelan people from the successor of Hugo Chavez.
Which was all very embarrassing for Bergoglio, who was in nearby Panama and but chose not to say a word about the Venezuelan situation.
[Asked about what words he had for Venezuela at his airplane news conference on Jan 28, this is what he said with his typical incoherence and refusal to take the right side:
I support in this moment all of the Venezuelan people – it is a people that is suffering – including those who are one side and the other. All of the people are suffering. If I entered to say, “listen to these countries,” or “listen to these others who say this,” I would be putting myself in a role I don’t know. It would be a pastoral imprudence on my side, and it would do damage. The words. I thought about them and thought about them again. And I think with this I expressed my closeness, what I feel. I suffer for what is happening in Venezuela right now. And for this I desire that they come to an agreement. I don’t know, not even saying to come to an agreement is okay...
It must be pointed out that even an exclusive interview given by this pope to a Chinese journalist in 2018 was shocking, in the words of Sandro Magister,
“for the words with which the pope absolved in toto China’s past and present, saying the regime should ‘accept the way it took for what it was’ like ‘running water which purifies everything’, including the murder of those millions of victims of the Chinese Communist regime whom the pope was careful never to refer to, not even in veiled terms”.
[This is, of course, one of those stunning statements – made with absolute, calculated and self-serving moral relativism to advance a personal agenda - that, if said by any world leader, and worse if said by a pope, would have earned Bergoglio the widespread condemnation of the media – or at the very least, strong protest.
But the statement was simply ignored by almost everyone and was not even brought up by the media when the Vatican and China announced their ‘secret deal’ last year. A convenient deliberate glossing over which spared Bergogliacs from even having to defend their master for those incredible words, which even the most critical commentators appeared to have forgotten themselves in their denunciations of the Vatican’s deal with China.
If Bergoglio had been so quick to absolve the Communist Chinese for all the political massacres they carried out in the past, why are we now surprised that the Vatican is silent in the face of the escalating anti-Christian persecutions carred out by Beijing since signing the agreement with the Vatican? Those persecutions are ‘trifling’ compared to the scale of the political massacres that have defined the Communist Chinese regime, so how and why should the Vatican protest them?]
And that is how the Vatican signed an agreement which has substantially turned over the Church in China to the Chinese Communist government.
It is the same indifference
[to which one must attach the adjective ‘scandalous] which the Cardinal Seretayr ofta, Pietro Parolin, manifested when he said recently that the Vatican was doing nothing to help Asia Bibi and her family because the tragedy of that poor Christian woman “was an internal question for Pakistan”.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Bergoglio continues to think he has the right to dictate the country's immigration policy, which is a prerogative of the State alone. Yet Bergoglio has had a leading responsibility for the formidable wave of unwanted immigration that inundated Italy for five years until the change of government last year.
And not just with his continuous almost daily interventions to open up Italy’s frontiers to undocumented immigrants.
It was learned recently that back in October 2013, after another mass drowning of would-be migrants off Lampedusa, he made a direct telephone call to then Premier Enrico Letta, who in response launched Operation Mare Nostrum [whereby the Italian Navy stationed ships off the northern African coast to rescue would-be migrants from their frail boats (provided them as transport by the human traffickers they paid to get them to Italy) and to bring them to Italy safely, in effect, opening wide Italy’s doors to illegal immigration.]
This is a pontificate that has been pernicious not just for the Church but for peoples en masse.
And what about this?
Pope slams Catholic media for ‘cruelty,
exaggerated self-praise, denouncing heresy’
by Jeanne Smits
January 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Catholic media that identify and condemn statements and actions not in line with Catholic doctrine are opposing the “centrality of compassion” and hampering evangelization in substance, Pope Francis told the bishops of Central America during his meeting with them at World Youth Days in Panama.
His words triggered an editorial piece by Andrea Tornielli on VaticanNews in which the new editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication doubled down on Franciss’ attacks, comparing his words to
a “photograph of a reality that unfortunately is plain for all to see” and adding his own criticisms of “media that proclaim to be Catholic.”
These are the Pope’s precise words:[ quote]
I am worried about how the compassion of Christ has lost a central place in the Church, even among Catholic groups, or is being lost – not to be so pessimistic. Even in the Catholic media there is a lack of compassion. There is schism, condemnation, cruelty, exaggerated self-praise, the denouncing of heresy…