By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Members of the small Catholic parish in the city where Osama bin Laden was slain on Monday are holding their breath in fear of reprisals.
UCANews.com is reporting that the 150 Catholics in St. Peter Canisius Catholic Church in Abbotabbad do not know what to expect in the wake of bin Laden’s death, and have joined with other Christian churches in the area to formulate a strategy for the future.
Father Akram Javed Gill, pastor of St. Peter’s, said the parish has already been forced to limit its activities.
“I couldn’t conduct pastoral visits to homes yesterday after security increased,” he told ucanews. ”A healing prayer service scheduled today and upcoming Church feasts were cancelled. Also the four policemen posted guard for the church have been put on high alert.”
St. Peter’s has the only Catholic school in the area where 200 students, most of them Muslim, are educated.
On the day of the raid, he said, “We never saw helicopters flying so low. Nobody knew what was going on and we thought it was a military exercise at first.”
After bin Laden was killed in his compound by U.S. special forces, Father Javed and members of the Association of Churches of Hazara Division, a body of about five Christian churches in the area, took part in a secret meeting to discuss the potential new threats to the minority community.
“It is crucial to maintain peace for the scattered minority communities in the area,” he said. “We altered the venue at the last moment to avoid leaking the information about the gathering in a tense atmosphere.”
Father Javed is no stranger to religious persecution. Abbottabad is home to a large military establishment and he has already been forced to build higher walls around the church compound after Muslims objected to the “open display” of the statue of Mary in the church grotto. Last year, authorities also asked him to burn several copies of a pamphlet inviting Catholics to Marion devotions.
Members of Hazaras, a local ethnic group who revere bin Laden, do not believe the al Qaeda leader is dead and think reports of his shooting are nothing more than a conspiracy orchestrated by the United States.
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