It’s not often that a news story makes me cry, but the assassination of Pakistan’s sole Christian minster in majority-Muslim Pakistan on 2 March 2011 really distressed me. Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic and Pakistan’s minister for minorities, was shot multiple times by Islamic militants who surrounded his car as he left for a morning cabinet meeting from his mother's house in Islamabad. The Vatican led international condemnation of the murder. Bhatti's death removed one of the few leaders in Pakistan still openly advocating reform of laws that make insulting Islam a capital crime. He knew they were often used as tools to settle vendettas and persecute members of the religious minorities that make up less than five percent of the population. He had led a government investigation last year into the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five children sentenced to death for blasphemy after a row with fellow workers over sharing water. Bhatti determined that she was innocent and deserved pardon. His was the second killing in 2011 of a senior Pakistani official who had criticised the country's blasphemy laws.
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In all those tense months leading up to his killing, Bhatti knew exactly the price he might have to pay for promoting justice and tolerance. He regularly received death threats. Yet, when he visited Pope Benedict XVI last September he reiterated his commitment to promoting peaceful coexistence between Pakistan’s religious communities. Bishop Rufin Anthony of Isalamabad-Rawalpindi knew Bhatti well, even his daily routine: ‘He would go to see his mother and pray with her, and then he would call me and ask me every morning to pray for him’.
The bishop was particularly affected by the murder because he knew Bhatti as a child, and said he had been a devout Catholic from a very young age. The bishop described him as ‘a courageous, fearless man who had taken a very strong position in support of minorities’. Bhatti spoke at an event in Canada just two weeks before his death saying that, ‘I follow the principles of my conscience, and I am ready
to die and sacrifice my life for the principles I believe.’
Bhatti’s bravery is particularly commendable because he knew the full horror of assassination, having witnessed the killing of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto in 2007. He himself was injured by the bomb explosion on her train. He would simply say: ‘I want my life, my character, my actions to speak for me and say that I am following Jesus Christ’. He felt compelled to speak out boldly on the blasphemy laws because so many others were being silenced.
The photo gallery on one international news website on 2 March showed a bullet-riddled car with shattered windows. Bhatti’s papers on the back seat were blood-stained and people around wept. But just a click away there were other photo galleries: The Vanity Fair Oscar party, the new ‘Dancing with Stars’ cast announced. While Christians in the secular West languish in a materialistic, celebrity culture and spiritual mediocrity, Christianity remains a deadly serious matter almost everywhere else. In 2010, 23 church pastoral workers lost their lives violently, 15 of them in Latin America, the region where the memory of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero still burns brightly. These are my heroes, people whose faith is not confined to church worship but to bringing good news to their communities, particularly to the poor and vulnerable. I’d like to hear more about them in our churches and Catholic schools here.
On 4 March, around 20,000 people attended Bhatti’s funeral. ‘Shahbaz Bhatti was a man who followed God's plan in his life,’ said Bishop Rufin at the service. ‘His social and political work was always lived out in serving the common good,’ he continued ‘and I am sure that the Church, in her own time, may proclaim him a martyr’.
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