Francis made his views on the death penalty clear during his first speech in Bahrain last Thursday.

He chose the country's royal palace to address two of the most contentious political issues in the country.

One was Bahrain's treatment of prisoners; the other, its practice of capital punishment.

"I think in the first place of the right to life, of the need to guarantee that right always, including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken," Francis said.

His words were a direct challenge to his host, Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

The King invited the pope to Bahrain. He also ended the kingdom's de facto moratorium on capital punishment in 2017. Since then, six people have been executed.

At present there are 26 prisoners facing execution in Bahrain.

The Government has repeatedly denied any human rights violations or mistreatment of prisoners. "I was so happy to hear these words," said Zainab Ibrahim, whose husband Ramadhan has been on death row since 2014.

Ramadhan also heard the pope's speech live while watching BBC Arabic from prison.

"... This is really a moment that gave us hope, gave us joy for our family," Ibrahim said. "There are no words to describe the pain we go through as a family,"Ibrahim says.

Ahead of the pope's arrival for his 3-6 November visit to Bahrain, representatives from the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy met with officials from the Vatican embassy in Great Britain.

Their aim was to raise awareness of the situation of political prisoners and death row inmates in the kingdom. The institute also passed along letters from several inmates, directly appealing to the pope to take up their cases with the king, who has the authority to commute sentences or grant pardons.

"Your Holiness, ... you believe in spreading love and peace and in the message of Jesus, who always sought to lift the injustice and suffering of the oppressed and the needy who did not find anyone to help them," Ramadhan's letter said.

Sayed Ahmed AlWadaei, director of advocacy for the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, says he wasn't expecting Francis to directly address the issue, especially on his first day in the country.

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of US-based Catholic Mobilising Network against the death penalty, says "even as a small number of nations like Bahrain continue to execute and condemn their citizens to death, most of the world is moving in the other direction.

"More than 140 countries have rejected the death penalty either in law or in practice,"she says.

"Pope Francis' consistent witness...echoed Popes John Paul II's and Benedict XVI's opposition to the death penalty, but he "has gone on to clarify the Church's teachings against capital punishment, including with a historic revision to the Catechism in 2018" that it is now considered "legally unnecessary and morally inadmissible."

Source

• NCR

He was aiming to further solidify his outreach to the Muslim community and to offer support to Bahrain's small Christian minority.

Pope Francis and the King

Francis's first official engagement was a courtesy visit to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa at the Sakhir Royal Palace. There he was welcomed in an official ceremony.

Human Rights

Human rights and Bahrain's constitution were particular issues Francis raised with the King.

He cited the Bahraini constitution and urged "equal dignity and equal opportunities... for each group and for every individual". (In Bahrain Shias have fewer rights than Sunnis.)

This is "so that fundamental human rights are not violated but promoted", he said.

Religious freedom must be "complete and not limited to freedom of worship.

"I am thinking in particular of the right to life, of the need to always guarantee it, even with regard to those who are punished."

At present, 26 people are on death row in Bahrain. The only thing standing between them and their execution is the king's approval.

Francis also called for "humane working conditions" and condemned forced labour in neighbouring Qatar, where the World Cup will begin later this month.

"Men and women" must never be "reduced instead to a mere means of producing wealth," Francis said.

Joining forces for peace

Peace can be achieved only by moving beyond past conflicts, he said.

Instead, we need to join forces to promote the common good, Francis explained when he met Bahrain's Muslim Council of Elders on Friday.

This means getting to know one another, putting "a future of fraternity ahead of a past of antagonism ... the name of the One who is the source of peace."

The great religious traditions "must be the heart that unites the members of the body, the soul that gives hope and life to its highest aspirations."

Prior to the meeting, Francis delivered one of three keynote speeches at the closing session of "Bahrain Forum for Dialogue: East and West for Human Coexistence".

About 200 figures, leaders and religious representatives from around the world took part in the event.

Among them was was Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Egypt, Ahmed Al-Tayeb.

Like Francis, the Imam delivered a keynote speech. The other was delivered by King Hamad, who was the forum patron.

Francis called on interfaith leaders to be "exemplary models of what we preach, not only in our communities and in our homes - for this is no longer enough - but also before a world now unified and globalised."

As members of the Abrahamic faiths, they must look outside themselves and "speak to the entire human community, to all who dwell on this earth".

Unity in diversity

An ecumenical prayer meeting for peace at Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral was also on Francis's agenda.

Striving for "unity in diversity" will help the Christian community as a whole achieve peace, he told the Christian leaders at the meeting.

Source

• La Croix
• Brussels Times
• Middle East Monitor
• Crux Now
• Crux Now

The Vatican said the pope would visit the Gulf island country off the Arabian peninsula to take part in the Bahrain Forum for Dialogue: East and West for Human Coexistence.

In 2019, Francis visited Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, the first pontiff to visit the Arabian peninsula and say a Mass there.

Bahrain is about 70% Muslim.

The announcement gave no details of the programme. Continue reading

The problem for the Bahrainis is that their government is indeed "oppressive" and therefore lends itself to such easy substitution. Over the past 18 months, Bahraini security forces, aided by troops from Saudi Arabia, have engaged in a brutal crackdown against the island nation's own Syria-style uprising. Bahrain is home to the Arab Spring's forgotten revolution. Since February 2011, there have been near-daily protests against the regime, a repressive Sunni monarchy ruling over a Shia-majority country. These have been met with tear gas, live ammunition, mass arrests and torture. While the fighting in Syria is debated in the corridors of the United Nations building and reported on the front pages of the world's newspapers, the unrest in Bahrain is quietly ignored by our leaders and relegated by journalists to the box marked "news in brief".

"[The violence] has got worse," Maryam al- Khawaja, acting president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, tells me during a rare visit to London. "The Bahraini regime has made some superficial changes but the situation on the ground hasn't changed . . . Torture has moved from official torture centres to unofficial torture centres."

The death toll

Apologists for the Bahraini regime claim it is offensive to compare the moderate, pro-western king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, to the Assads or Gaddafis of this world. They point out that the death toll in Syria is far, far higher than in Bahrain. True, says Khawaja, "[but] one of the things you have to do is look at things per capita. Bahrain's population is 600,000 and you are looking at 100 people dead. If Bahrain had the same population as, say, Egypt, that's [equivalent to] more than 11,000 people dead in just a year and a half." Read more

Sources

• New Statesman
• Image: Muftah

Instead, the planned church — intended to be the main center for Catholics in the region — has turned into another point of tension in a country already being pulled apart by sectarian battles between its Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities.

Hardline Sunni clerics have strongly opposed the construction of the church complex, in a rare open challenge of the country's Sunni king. More than 70 clerics signed a petition last week saying it was forbidden to build churches in the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam.

One prominent cleric, Sheik Adel Hassan al-Hamad, proclaimed in a sermon during Friday prayers last month, that there was no justification for building further churches in Bahrain, adding, "anyone who believes that a church is a true place of worship is someone who has broken in their faith in God."

In response, the government ordered him transferred out of his mosque, located in the elite district of Riffa, where many members of the royal family live and the king has several palaces. But the transfer order touched off a wave of protests by the cleric's supporters on social media sites and by Sunni-led political blocs. Finally, the government was forced last week to cancel the order. Continue reading

The apostolic vicar, Bishop Camillo Ballin, said the move is being made because Bahrain is more central and "easily accessible for meetings and conferences of Church officials".

Bahrain's easier visa regime has been suggested as a factor in the vicariate's decision, which has come after several threats to the religious freedom of Christians in the region.

A Kuwaiti member of Parliament, Osama Al-Munawer, said he would submit a bill calling for the removal of all churches in Kuwait. After facing criticism, he later said that existing churches should remain, but he advocated a ban on the construction of any new non-Islamic places of worship.

In March, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah, reportedly said it is "necessary to destroy all the churches of the region" in accord with an ancient rule that only Islam may be practised there.

Shi'ite clerics in Iran are criticising Bahrain's Sunni monarch, King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa, for granting the Catholic Church 9000 square metres to build a new church, complaining that he destroyed dozens of Shi'ite mosques during the unrest that erupted there early last year.

In Bahrain the head of the Salafist Asalah party, Abdel Halim Murad, said the building of churches in Islamic lands was "haram" (forbidden) and that the sound of church bells could not be allowed to drown out the call to prayer in the Arabian peninsula, the cradle of Islam.

The vicariate tends to the spiritual needs of around two million Catholics in the Arab Gulf states, the vast majority of them expatriates from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Bahrain already has one Catholic church, built in 1939 and serving about 80,000 Catholics, and shares another place of worship with the Anglican community.

The apostolic nunciature in Kuwait will remain.

Source:

Catholic News Agency

CNSNews.com

Image: Arabian Gazette