Angeline is just one of millions of children who are scared and intimidated to run and tell that they had been raped, abused or sexually assaulted. “Telling was the hardest thing, I was frightened,” she said. “He threatened to kill my mother and burn our house down if I told, I had no one to trust, no one who could protect me from my abuser, he was my father.” 
 

JAKARTA (UCAN): More than 200 people, including religious leaders including Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo of Jakarta, as well as politicians, attended the August 1 launch of the Said Aqil Siroj Institute in Jakarta, Indonesia.
 

LAHORE (UCAN): Catholics in Pakistan are reeling after the Irish government denied them visas to attend the upcoming August 21 to 26 World Meeting of Families in Dublin.
 
About 10,000 families applied from all over the country. All were refused visas.
 

Cotabato (UCAN): “There can never be peace if we continue this kind of attitude of fomenting fear among our people,” Archbishop Martin Jumoad of Ozamiz, in Mindanao, said after security forces were placed on full alert in the southern Philippine region after a deadly suicide car-bomb attack in Basilan province —blamed on the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group—killed 10 people on July 31.
 
The archbishop, who was the bishop of Basilan for 14 years, said the attack makes the achievement of peace on the island elusive.
 

New Delhi (UCAN): “Some people are trying to divide the country in the name of religion, caste and creed. But we can’t sit here as mute spectators,” Mamta Banerjee, chief of Trinamool (grassroots) Congress party, told a gathering of 1,000 people in New Delhi, India, on July 31.
 
The assembly was organised on the theme, Love your neighbour, by the Indian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, and called on the country’s to stop being divisive and using religion as a way of attracting votes.
 

Jeju (UCAN): Pope Francis lent his support to some 500 Yemeni refugees on the southern tourist island of Jeju, South Korea, sending €10,000 ($92,000) from the papal charities though Archbishop Alfred Xuereb, the apostolic nuncio to Korea.
 
The archbishop visited the Diocese of Cheju (Jeju) from July 28 to 29 to show the pope’s solidarity with the Yemeni refugees. He said that that the diocese’s care and efforts coincide with the wishes of Pope Francis. 
 

JAKARTA (UCAN/CNS): At least 105 people were confirmed dead as at the time of going to press, after a magnitude seven earthquake struck Indonesia’s Lombok Island on August 5 a week after it was struck a magnitude 6.4 quake that killed more than a dozen people (Sunday Examiner, August 5).
 

SANTIAGO (CNS): Bishop Santiago Silva of the Military Diocese of Chile, president of the Chilean Bishops’ Conference, apologised to abuse survivors for the bishops’ failure to “react in time to the painful sexual abuse and abuse of power and authority” as the conference concluded its 116th Extraordinary Plenary Assembly on August 3 in Punta de Tralca on the Pacific Coast.