"Arzoo Raja had been taken from outside her home on October 13 and two days later, as the family searched for her, police announced that they had received marriage papers claiming that Arzoo was 18 and that she had converted to Islam to marry her 44-year-old abductor, Ali Azhar," The Catholic Herald reports, adding, "The family were able to provide the authorities with an official birth certificate proving Arzoo was 13."

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The pontiff described the attack "reprehensible." He said Easter "was bloodied by an execrable attack which massacred many innocent people, mostly families of the Christian minority."

"I appeal to the civil authorities and to all the social components of [Pakistan] to do everything possible to restore security and peace to the population and, in particular, to the most vulnerable religious minorities," said Pope Francis.

"I repeat, once again, that violence and murderous hatred lead only to pain and destruction; respect and fraternity are the only way to achieve peace," the pontiff during his Regina Coeli address on Monday.

The attack happened in the eastern city of Lahore.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a Taliban splinter group in Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was believed to have been carried out by a suicide bomber.

The March 27 bombing is reported to be the bloodiest attack on Christians in Pakistan since the 2013 church bombing in Peshawar where over 80 people were killed.

Pakistani authorities have already arrested 17 people in a series of raids this week.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif canceled a planned visit to the United States after the attack, vowing that his government "will not rest until the cost of this blood is avenged."

Sources

Vatican Radio
CNN
Christian Post
Catholic News Agency
Image: Christian Post

The problem of Christian discrimination and persecution by Muslims is in fact two problems. Like unpunished crimes' victims who suffer twice, for the crime and for the injustice of the criminal's going scot-free, while the atrocities committed against Christians are unbearable enough on their own, the total indifference of the rest of the world adds to the pain.

Floods, earthquakes, natural calamities and man-induced ones like the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh attract lots of media coverage and offers of foreign aid, but this does not happen with what Raymond Ibrahim has rightly called "arguably the world's greatest humanitarian crisis" and Andrew McCarthy "the great unspoken civil rights issue.. [and] scandal of our day".

How much Western governments care about the plight of the Christians living in Muslim-majority countries can be seen by how indifferent they were to the systematic discrimination of which Pakistani Christians, during that country's 2010 devastating floods, were victims in the distribution of aid - essential to survival - ironically donated by those very same historically Christian Western countries.

The Vatican, to its credit, was one of the few to highlight that injustice. I have never heard of a Western government - or any other, for that matter - giving aid to Pakistan on that occasion only on condition that a fair and equal distribution was guaranteed.

In Islam "charity" has a different meaning from the Christian one, being a duty extended only to other Muslims. Continue reading

Sources

• Enza Ferreri's Blog
• Image: The Persecuted Church

Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based Philosophy graduate, author and journalist.