Pope Francis is ‘what the Holy Spirit is saying today’ - Ad Limina visit

Mar 02, 2018

By John Allen and Claire Giangrave
Bishop Sebastian Francis of Penang, President of the Bishops’ Conference of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, acknowledged that he and his group are in Rome for their Ad Limina visit. Not everyone shares their sense of enthusiasm, but he said that it is not the primary reason why they wanted to express gratitude to Pope Francis.

“It’s a genuine conviction that the direction Pope Francis is taking is what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church today,” he said.

Bishop Sebastian also expressed gratitude for a recent Federal Court ruling in Malaysia, a majority Muslim nation, requiring both parents of a child to agree in order to register a “conversion” of a child from one religion to another.

The late January ruling arose from an appeal brought by a Hindu, M Indira Gandhi, after her ex-husband, a Hindu convert to Islam, unilaterally declared their three children Muslims following his own conversion, and a Syariah court awarding him custody of the children. However, two of those children remained with Gandhi, but the 11-month-old child was abducted by the father and has not been seen since.

“Prior to the Federal Court decision, there was a tendency to function with two different constitutions — civil and syariah laws. We cannot be running a country with two constitutions side-by-side,” he said. “The Federal Court decision seems to go along with the Federal Constitution, which is secular and it’s supposed to be the paramount rule of law of the country.”

On the status of Christians in Malaysia, Francis stressed he does not feel like a “minority.”

“In our case, the so-called ‘minority’ is not insignificant,” he said. “When we lump together all the people of other faiths apart from Islam, it’s quite a big number. You’re talking about 35 per cent or so of the population.”--Crux Now