“The Christian community has been terrorized and frightened by a small group of miscreants, who are intent on making them believe that Christians are second-class citizens of Pakistan. We ask the government to take strong measures to protect minorities and to implement policies that can help us become a more peaceful nation and create a better society.”

“It was a heartbreaking scene,” he said. “They were given a mass burial in a rain-soaked grave. These are poor villagers who don’t have money for food, much less coffins.”

Due to visa restrictions and financial difficulty, many young Christians in Syria and Lebanon were unable to travel to Portugal for the event. But with the help of ACN, they organized their own activities, in parallel with the official WYD, and participated in the experience.

Many of the families spent the night in sugar cane fields – up to 1,000 people.” They had been running away, trying to find somewhere where they could rest. “Some of them went back to their homes desperate for something to eat but when they got home, they found everything destroyed – nothing to sit on, nothing to drink out of, not even a lightbulb.”

Christians from the Punjab town of Jaranwala, near Faisalabad, fled en masse as fanatics began throwing rocks and setting fire to buildings. The incident follows an accusation of blasphemy against a Christian cleaner accused of desecrating the Qur’an and insulting the Prophet of Islam.

Archbishop Lumon added that his community has been “cut off from the rest of the world” for the last three months, because of an “Internet and social media ban imposed by the government ever since communal violence erupted in the state.”