Bishop’s Tale Stresses Plight of Christians in Other Nations

Speeding through the dark streets on the outskirts of Lahore, the bishop knew he had to quickly secret the man and the 14-year-old boy out of Pakistan to save their lives.

The two Christians had barely escaped the hangman’s noose when an appeals court overturned their conviction on charges of blasphemy against Islam.

The court decided there was no evidence of guilt. But the pair’s release inflamed dozens of stone-throwing Muslims outside the courthouse, who believed that the boy and man had scrawled anti-Islamic slogans on the wall of a mosque in a rural Punjabi village.

“It was a very fearful time,” Bishop Samuel R. Azariah of the Church of Pakistan recalled this week during an interview in Los Angeles.

The bishop recounted his role in the flight to freedom and exile of the two Christians in 1995 as he spoke of the rising alarm over persecution of Christians and other minority religious communities in his own nation and others overseas.

The bishop’s Church of Pakistan is an amalgamation of Protestant denominations including Anglican, Methodist and Scottish Presbyterian. In some Islamic countries, he said, Christians are often not allowed to build churches.

In his homeland, the bishop said, he has seen churches ransacked, their Bibles burned and sacraments desecrated.

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Like some Muslim leaders in the United States who have suggested that American religious pluralism could serve as a model for religious tolerance overseas, Azariah appealed this week for greater interfaith dialogue and understanding in Islamic countries.

“I would say to my Muslim sisters and brothers living in this the U.S., take seriously now the tremendous need of changing the attitudes of their friends, relatives and neighbors in the countries from which they came on issues of tolerance, patience and religious freedom,” Azariah said.

Last week, the State Department released a report calling on U.S. immigration authorities to guarantee asylum in the United States to people facing religious tyranny.

The report, which covers conditions in 78 countries, said there is evidence in Sudan of forced conversion to Islam and religious-motivated torture and murder. In China, the report said, officials have been using “threats, demolition of property, extortion of ‘fines,’ interrogation, detention and reform-through-education sentences” against unauthorized religious and social groups. Four Roman Catholic bishops and hundreds of other clergy have been imprisoned or have disappeared, the report said.

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These and other findings followed intense lobbying of the Clinton administration to take a much stronger stand against the persecution of Christians in some foreign lands. The campaign was led by the National Assn. of Evangelicals, which represents more than 10 million Christians in 47 denominations, and was joined by the National Council of Churches, which represents 33 Protestant and Orthodox member churches with 52 million members. Others decrying Christian persecution include the United States Catholic Conference and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

But it is personal stories such as Azariah’s--which he will retell this Sunday to a local congregation--that he hopes will keep Christians in the United States focused on the plight of like-minded believers overseas.

He said that in the months leading up to the conviction of Salamat Masih, 14, and Rehmat Masih, 40, he had been threatened with death or beatings for hiding the men in his Lahore home.

He said he and the pair were heartbroken as he spirited them to Islamabad for a flight to Germany. The night is still singed into his memory.

“Bishop,” he said the boy asked, “where are you taking us?”

“I am taking you to a plane to be sent to Germany,” Azariah said he replied.

But the boy pleaded. “There is my village! Will you take me home, so I can say goodbye to my mother and my father?”

“I can’t,” Azariah said. “People would know.” Then he had to tell the man the same thing.

“I was in tears also,” the bishop said. “I said I can’t do that. If you walk in and someone sees you and kills you, the world will not forgive me.”

The case of the two Christians, who are not related, provoked an international outcry among Christians and diplomatic protests to the government of Pakistan to repeal its blasphemy law.

More than two years after the episode, the man and boy are still in Germany, Azariah said. He said that the Christian minority in Pakistan remains fearful despite instances of Pakistani government efforts to respond to problems after they occur.

In February, “Muslim mobs” destroyed homes and churches belonging to Christians in the Khanewal area, 160 miles south of Lahore in southwest Pakistan, according to a new State Department report.

Several months earlier, between 14 and 19 Christian families fled a nearby Punjab village after the arrest of a member of their community on charges of blasphemy.

Azariah said 13 churches had been desecrated and their furniture and altars ransacked in the two villages. More than 1,500 Bibles and hymnals were burned and the houses and the belongings of priests looted, he said.

“The church in the United States is still very ignorant about what is happening in Islamic countries,” Azariah, 48, said.

It is time, the bishop said, for U.S. Christians to familiarize themselves with the complexities of Islam that defy stereotyping--if for no other reason than that Islam may be the fastest-growing religion in the world and increasingly will be a factor in traditionally non-Islamic societies.

He said he worries about the future of religious minorities in his homeland.

“I wouldn’t say things have improved. Things will not improve as long as the militancy of Islam is there and as long as freedom of religion is not implemented.”

Azariah will deliver remarks Sunday at 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. at St. Luke’s of the Mountains Episcopal Church, 2563 Foothill Blvd., La Crescenta.