Two priests from China's underground Catholic Church have been detained, a Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency said. The two had reportedly just given a rare interview to a foreign journalist.
The AsiaNews missionary agency reported on Friday that the Reverends Shao Zhumin and Paul Jiang Sunian, from the underground church in Wenzhou, were detained Thursday after celebrating Mass. The report said the detentions were unusual because the situation of underground priests in Wenzhou had been "calm" for some time.
On Friday, however, the Italian newsweekly Espresso published a two-page article in which it said it had interviewed the two priests, as well as a third, and that they had "risked arrest" by speaking to a foreign journalist.
The article said that two days after the interview was conducted, police followed the reporter and questioned her interpreter.
In the interview, the priests spoke of previous detentions, with Shao saying he had been asked after his Sept. 7, 1999, detention to make a declaration "to evaluate whether I had become patriotic."
Catholics who meet outside the sanctioned churches are frequently harassed by authorities.
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
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