Denuncias / Reports

Mali: The blessing of the Great Silence

Aid to the Church in Need (ACN): Interview with Fr. Perluigi Maccalli

Bamako, Dec.12.– After two years living as a captive in the desert, somewhere between Niger and Mali, the Italian missionary Father Pierluigi Maccalli, who was received by the Pope on November 9, 2020, recalled his first impressions in an interview conducted by the SMA Media Center a few hours after his liberation. Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) summarizes his impressive testimony given to the Society of African Missions (SMA) on 10 October 2020.

“I find it hard to speak because after spending such a long time in silence I now find myself in this world of quickly moving events and words”. These were Father Maccalli’s first words after liberation, which he experienced with great joy and emotion but also as a moment of confusion.

For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has classified any information about human rights abuses against people who practice Falun Gong as "state secrets," making it dangerous for anyone to investigate. Indeed, many who have were themselves victims of wrongful imprisonment and torture. The CCP has also used political and financial influence around the world to either keep journalists silent, or drive false narratives about Falun Gong.

Dec. 11.– A total of 921 lawmakers from 35 countries and regions worldwide issued a joint statement on International Human Rights Day to condemn the Chinese regime’s decades-long persecution of the spiritual practice Falun Gong.

Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, was introduced in China in the 1990s, known for its meditative exercises and moral teachings centered around three principles: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Monseñor Celestino Aós Braco denuncia los atentados, la violencia, la quema de Iglesias, el hostigamiento que padecen la institución y los fieles en Chile. 

Oct. 23.– “La violencia es mala, y quien siembra violencia cosecha destrucción, dolor y muerte. Nunca justifiquemos ninguna violencia”, aseguró monseñor Celestino Aós Braco, arzobispo de Santiago de Chile, en reacción de condena a los violentos ataques que sufrió el domingo 18 de octubre la Iglesia chilena.

“Ya hace un año sufrimos un estallido de violencia que nos causó tanto dolor personal, y tanta destrucción material que pensábamos habría sido una lección amarga y fuerte. Nos ha costado reconstruir las instalaciones, y ha exigido a los más empobrecidos sacrificios e incomodidades constantes; se les hizo la vida más penosa”, recordó.

El primer santuario en arder fue la Iglesia San Francisco de Borja, usado regularmente por el cuerpo policial de carabineros: fue saqueada y algunas de las imágenes religiosas quemadas en la calle. Horas más tarde la violencia alcanzó la Iglesia de la Asunción y su cúpula se desplomó consumida por las llamas. Era una de las más antiguas de la capital (construida en 1876). Ambas se encuentran en las inmediaciones de la ya famosa Plaza Italia, donde también fueron saqueados varios comercios y un supermercado. 

It is also the gravest example of a worldwide attack on human rights.  

Party cadres, usually Han Chinese, are stationed in Uyghur homes, a policy known as “becoming kin”.

Oct. 17.– The first stories from Xinjiang were hard to believe. Surely the Chinese government was not running a gulag for Muslims? Surely Uyghurs were not being branded “extremists” and locked up simply for praying in public or growing long beards? Yet, as we report in this week’s China section (see article), the evidence of a campaign against the Uyghurs at home and abroad becomes more shocking with each scouring of the satellite evidence, each leak of official documents and each survivor’s pitiful account.

In 2018 the government pivoted from denying the camps’ existence to calling them “vocational education and training centres”—a kindly effort to help backward people gain marketable skills. The world should instead heed Uyghur victims of China’s coercive indoctrination. Month after month, inmates say, they are drilled to renounce extremism and put their faith in “Xi Jinping Thought” rather than the Koran. One told us that guards ask prisoners if there is a God, and beat those who say there is. And the camps are only part of a vast system of social control.