Christians can be Pakistanis too – Bishop Coutts

(November 27, 2009) According to the chief of the charity arm of Pakistan’s Catholic Church, one of the biggest challenges for Pakistani Christians is to be seen as Pakistanis and not as an offshoot of Western culture. “Christianity, along with democracy, tends to be seen as a purely Western force, with all the colonial overtones that it entails,” observed Bishop Joseph Coutts of Faisalabad, director of Caritas Pakistan. Speaking to UCANews he explained that the basic challenge before Catholicism, and Christianity in general is how to be seen as a world faith and not as some tool of Western colonial power. Christianity was never meant to be purely a religion of certain cultures or continents, although history has sometimes made it seem this way. In a country that is grappling with a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism, including anti-Christian violence, Bishop Coutts regrets an erosion of the vision of the nation’s founding father, Muhammad Jinnah, wanted a liberal, democratic and progressive nation. Bishop Coutts warned that there is a shift from the view that "we are Pakistanis" to "we are Muslims."