Interestingly, at that General Audience dedicated to St. Juliana, Benedict XVI issued an appeal for the release of Asia Bibi, who needs no introduction by now...
Pope's appeal for Asia Bibi
At the end of his general audience Wednesday Pope Benedict XVI joined the international community in expressing his concern for the plight of Christians in Pakistan, “often victims of violence or discrimination”.
He said “especially today I express my spiritual closeness to Mrs. Asia Bibi and her family, while I ask for full freedom to be restored to her, as soon as possible”.
Pope Benedict XVI added “I also pray for those who find themselves in similar situations, that their human dignity and their fundamental rights be fully respected”.
Nongovernmental organizations are re-launching campaigns against Pakistan’s blasphemy law following the recent death sentence of the Christian woman, Asia Bibi, a mother of five children. Bibi has been on trial for over a year after a row with a group of Muslim women.
She is the first woman to be convicted on charges of blasphemy in Pakistan – a law that the Christian minority says is often misused to settle personal scores.
“The death sentence has shocked the civil society here,” says Peter Jacob, Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace of the Pakistani Bishops Conference.
“Civil society in Pakistan is very active,” Peter Jacob told Vatican Radio. “There’s a number of appeals going on – signature campaigns – to make the authorities, the prime minister and parliament aware of people’s sentiment that this injustice is not acceptable to the people of Pakistan.”/
A few months ago, Asia Bibi had occasion to publicly thank Benedict XVI (and Francis) in her new book published in France recently.
Center, Asia Bibi with Anne Isabelle Tollet, with whom she co-wrote her memoir.
Asia Bibi’s memoir published in France
by Daniele Zappalà
Translated from
AVVENIRE
February 4, 2020
“If I had renounced my Christian religion and converted to Islam, I would not now be here before you.”
After a decade of imprisonment and tribulations, and then constrained to live under a false name in Canada after her release, the Pakistani mother Asia Bibi summarizes in that line full of pride her profound understanding of her Calvary, never deserted by hope tenaciously anchored on her faith.
The stages of her ordeal, the scathing interrogations, her moments of intimate prayer, the whole background of a story that has moved the entire world, are now recounted by her in the moving book
Enfin libre! (Free at last!), co-written with French journalist Anne Isabelle Tollet, and just published in France by Rocher.
Tollet had been among the journalists who persistently fought for the release of Asia, and who from the very start had aligned themselves with the Pakistani woman who had been unjustly accused of blasphemy towards Islam and condemned to death. Her supporters followed every excruciating day of her Calvary for eight years, and had gathered 31,000 signatures in support of her release.
She was imprisoned for a total of 3,421 days, until the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled on October 21, 2018, to annul her sentence and set her free.
“I know that I became a prisoner of fanaticism. Often, people ask why my case has become so well known in the world. They forget that it was because of the Popes,” she writes in grateful acknowledgement, in a chapter entitled “The popes’, dedicated to the role that Benedict XVI and Francis had played, in showing their nearness to the cause of the woman who had become a symbol of the marginalization of Christ’s followers in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world.
“The day I learned that Pope Benedict XVI knew who I was, I trembled under the thin and worn blanket that I had. But for the first time, I fell asleep with a warm heart”.
From that day, she says, an internal flame was lit in her: “With the Holy Father thinking of me and praying for me, I asked myself whether I was worthy of such honor and attention. And I still ask it today, because later, Pope Francis was also moved by my situation. I am just a peasant woman, and in the world, there are so many people who are suffering”.
Among the most persecuted of Christians, the most discriminated against, are the Christians of Pakistan, especially since the law on blasphemy against Islam came into force in 1989. There are some 4 million of them, 2 percent of Paksitan’s 201 million total population. But consider the ff statistics:
- 700 Christian girls are abducted every year, forced to convert to Islam and to marry Muslim men, especially in the rural areas.
- 16 Pakistanis were imprisoned for blasphemy in 2018 – 9 of them Christian, 4 Ahmadis (members of a Muslim sect founded in 1889 and persecuted because they believe their founder is the promised Mahdi/Messiah awaited by Muslims), 2 Muslims and a Hindu woman
- 42 Christians were released from prison last January 24 after having been jailed for protesting the destruction of a church in Lahore
Persecuted and condemned to death for having offered a drink of water to a Muslim woman beside whom she had been harvesting some fruit
[the blasphemy apparently was in offering the woman a glass 'contaminated' by her infidel impurity], Asia Bibi offers in her book a splendid lesson in spiritual resistance, enlightened by simple prayers she addressed everyday to the Virgin and to heaven. This was her shield that made her endure the whiplashes of humiliation and insults in solitary confinement.
“No, I never blasphemed, but Muslim fanatics used me to sow terror in my country. How could I, a 54-year old simple peasant woman, become a symbol of the worldwide fight against religious extremism?”, she humbly asks.
She reflects on one particular moment:
“Before the mullah of my village who had officially denounced me, I simply refused to give up my faith ine xchange for immediate freedom. I have asked myself why God had chosen to impose such sufferings on me. I fought long in the obscurity of my prison cell, fighting the battle of my life without any preparation”.
Her exile to Canada, after she was released, in a place that was never made known, would prove to be another trial, but there at least, reunied with her family, Asia recovered the joys of family life. She is now learning English and has discovered the magic of snow which she had never seen before. Meanwhile, one of heer daughters, steeled throughout her teenage years by the hard battle for her mother’s freedom, is studying to be a lawyer, to the great pride of her uneducated mother.
The family also thanks Salman Taseer, ex-governor of Punjab, and the Catholic Shabaz Bhatti, former Pakistani Minister for Minorities, who both fought to defend Asia, and paid with their lives for this, assassinated by extremists.
Asia dedicates a chapter to the lot of Pakistani Christians who “are not considered respectable persons” in their country, and whose destiny, "like a tiny seed, has nevertheless already yielded much fruit".
“We must never cease to believe and hope,” she writes. “I very much wish that to be Christian in Pakistan should no longer be a problem and that we should be treated like Muslim citizens are”.