Pope Francis thrills small Gulf Catholic community with big Mass in Bahrain

News Network
November 5, 2022

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Pope Francis said Mass for thousands of Catholics in Bahrain on Saturday, thrilling members of the small foreign Catholic community from around the Gulf and urging them to show kindness to their hosts, even if they feel sometimes badly treated.

The crowd of about 30,000 people that filled Bahrain's National Stadium was the second-largest gathering for a papal Mass on the Arabian Peninsula, following one that drew more than 100,000 in the United Arab Emirates in 2019.

"This is a miracle," said Mary Grace Fortes, 36, a Filipino who works at the reception of a hotel in Bahrain. "So important for us."

Like many Filipino women who work outside their country, Fortes is married and sends money back home to help support her family, including her husband and 16-year-old son.

Hundreds of Catholic foreign workers were bussed in over the 25-km (16 mile) King Fahd Causeway that links Bahrain with Saudi Arabia, where there are no churches and where Catholics cannot worship openly.

"The Bahrainis arranged everything perfectly for us," said Jos Chazoor, 53, who is from Kerala in India and works as a manager for a medical equipment company in Saudi Arabia.

Chazoor's 75-year-old mother was too overcome with emotion to respond to a reporter's questions just before the pope arrived in the packed stadium to an enthusiastic welcome by faithful waving yellow-and-white Vatican flags.

"She is too thrilled to talk," said Chazoor, who drives with his mother over the causeway from Saudi Arabia regularly to attend Mass in one of Bahrain's two churches, which provide pastoral care for the some 160,000 Catholics in Bahrain.

In his homily, Francis appeared to praise Bahrain's relatively open policy towards non-Muslims.

"This very land is a living image of coexistence in diversity, and indeed an image of our world, increasingly marked by the constant migration of peoples and by a pluralism of ideas, customs and traditions," he said.

Foreign workers, many of them from Asia, provide the backbone of Gulf economies, working in sectors such as construction, hospitality, transport and the oil and gas sector.

The International Labour Organisation says the Gulf's migrant workers have long faced problems including exploitation by recruitment agencies and employers, poor work conditions, limited access to justice and limited or no freedom of association.

Francis urged his listeners to be kind even to those native people in the Gulf area who do not treat them well, saying this was key to the Gospel message of loving your enemies.

He said they should always be "persevering in good even when evil is done to us, breaking the spiral of vengeance, disarming violence, demilitarizing the heart".

As Francis was driven on a open popemobile through the crowd on the stadium's pitch just before the start of the Mass, a speaker on the altar platform shouted "God bless the pope, God bless the royal family."

A Bahrain government spokesperson said 111 nationalities attended the Mass in the island state, where foreigners comprise about half of Bahrain's population of roughly 1.5 million.

The prayers of the faithful during the Mass were read in languages spoken by foreign workers including Tagalog, Swahili, Malayalam, Tamil and Konkani.

The Mass was attended by one of the sons of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and several government ministers. 
 

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News Network
March 15,2024

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Bengaluru: Prime Minister Narendra Modi would formally kickstart the BJP's Lok Sabha election campaign in Karnataka on Saturday from Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge's home turf— Kalaburagi.

He is scheduled to address a mega public meeting at the district headquarters town's N V Ground at 2 pm.

Kharge, who had represented Kalaburagi (Gulbarga Lok Sabha segment) twice in the past, lost to BJP's Umesh Jadhav by a margin of 95,452 votes in the 2019 general elections here— the octogenarian leader's first electoral loss in his political life spanning several decades.

BJP has once again fielded Jadhav from the segment.

Speculations are rife that the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, who has the role of managing the party nationally and coordinating with the opposition I.N.D.I.A bloc, may not contest the coming polls and, instead, the Congress is likely to field his son-in-law Radhakrishna Doddamani, a businessman, who also manages educational institutions.

On March 18, Modi will be in Shivamogga, the home district of veteran BJP leader B S Yediyurappa, and is scheduled to address a huge public meeting at 2 pm.

Yediyurappa's son B Y Raghavendra is the sitting MP from Shivamogga and has been re-nominated by the party. Yediyurappa's other son B Y Vijayendra, who represents Shikaripura assembly constituency in the district, is the state BJP President.

BJP has announced candidates for 20 seats in the State, which has a total of 28 constituencies.

After being ousted from power by the Congress in the 2023 Assembly polls, the BJP now is making a strong bid to regain the lost ground in Karnataka.

The BJP won 25 out of total 28 seats in the previous elections, and had ensured the win of a party supported independent candidate in Mandya. The then ruling Congress-JD(S) alliance had come a cropper winning just one seat each.

It is a role reversal of sorts for JD(S), which joined the NDA last September and has forged an electoral alliance with the BJP. The regional party is expected to contest in three seats— Mandya, Hassan and Kolar.

Sharing details of Modi's visit, state BJP General Secretary Sunil Kumar on Wednesday said BJP National President J P Nadda, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath along with other leaders will visit different Lok Sabha constituencies for campaigning in the coming days.

Speaking about the party's poll preparations, he said: "We have divided 28 Lok Sabha constituencies into eight clusters for Lok Sabha elections. Keeping in view the local political and geographical background, programmes and strategies are being worked out in those eight clusters."

Several senior leaders including Shah and Nadda have already visited one of these clusters, Kumar said, adding, "Workers' convention, well-wishers' contacts have been made and election preparations are on in all these eight clusters. In the second phase, large public meetings will be held."

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News Network
March 28,2024

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Russia says it is "extremely hard to believe" that Daesh could have staged the recent hugely deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall that the country's intelligence and security officials have blamed on Ukraine and its Western backers.

Four gunmen burst into the Russian capital's Crocus City Hall on Friday and began shooting at the people, who were attending an event. The Takfiri terrorist group has allegedly claimed responsibility for the massacre that killed at least 143.

Speaking on Wednesday, however, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova cast that claim into serious doubt.

"In order to ward off suspicions from the collective West, they urgently needed to come up with something, so they resorted to ISIS (Daesh), pulled an ace out of their sleeve, and literally a few hours after the terrorist attack, the Anglo-Saxon media began disseminating precisely these versions," she said.

The chief of the Russian internal intelligence (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov has suggested that not only Ukraine, but also the United States and Britain might have been behind the shooting.

The Russian Federal Security Service has also said the gunmen planned to travel to Ukraine, where they were to be welcomed as "heroes." The FSB said Western intelligence services aided the attackers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also suggested that Ukraine stood to derive benefit from the attack and that Kiev might have played a role.

He has said that someone on the Ukrainian side had prepared a "window" for the gunmen to escape across the border before they were captured in western Russia on Friday night.

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News Network
March 26,2024

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There is no let-up in the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip despite a UN Security Council resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire.”

Israel carried out air raids and artillery strikes on several parts of Gaza on Tuesday, hitting residential buildings and gatherings of displaced people, “killing and wounding hundreds of people”, the Palestinian Information Center said.

Among the victims are 15 people, including four women and children, who were killed in an attack on a house in the neighborhood of Mosbeh, north of Rafah.

Media reports also said that fighting on the ground continued unabated.

That’s while the UN Security Council on Monday adopted a resolution for an “immediate ceasefire” for the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The resolution was put forward by the 10 non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. The US abstained and the 14 other council members all voted in favor of it.

After the vote, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote on social media platform X that failing to implement the resolution “would be unforgivable.”

Palestinian resistance movements have welcomed the resolution, but Israel’s minister for military affairs Yoav Gallant said Israel will not stop its attacks in Gaza. 

“We will operate against Hamas everywhere – including in places where we have not yet been,” Gallant said.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, also said in a post on X that the attacks will continue until all the captives taken by Hamas during its October 7 blitz are released.

Israel unleashed its war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed more than 32,300 Palestinians and injured over 74,000 others.

The Tel Aviv regime has also imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

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