'austraLasia' #479
Note - the source is CWN - usually reliable, but we
might find out mroe from our own sources in due course. JBF
VIETNAM FREEDOM FIGHTER PRIEST ARRESTED YET
AGAIN
HANOI, May 17, 01 (CWNews.com/Fides/EDA) - Father
Thaddeus
Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest who in 2000 started a
campaign
for religious freedom in Vietnam, was arrested
this morning in An Truyen
parish church, in Hue
archdiocese, central Vietnam.
Father Van Ly, a
Salesian, was preparing to say Mass when,
according to EDA Eglise d'Asie news
agency, 600 security
agents surrounded the church. Some of the faithful,
already
gathered for Mass, who tried to defend the priest were
beaten and
threatened and Father Van Ly was taken away in a
police van. The news was
confirmed in a statement by Dang
Cong Dieu, chairman of the People's
Committee in Phy An
village where the church is located.
In February,
Father Van Ly traveled to the United States to
urge Congress to delay
ratification of a bilateral trade
agreement because of serious violations of
human rights,
religious freedom in particular, in Vietnam. Following
this,
the provincial government placed him under
administrative detention and
barred him from leaving his
commune. Later the government also banned him
from
religious activity.
But the priest, the chairman of the Peoples'
Committee
continued, "defied the order and continued to slander the
Party
and government policies of religious freedom."
EDA reports that the vicar
general of Hue archdiocese said
government officials had pressured the
archbishop to
interdict the priest from his religious duties, but
the
archbishop declined to do so.
In March, the Vietnamese military
daily newspaper Quan Doi
Nhan labeled the priest a "traitor of the
fatherland." In
his fight for religious freedom for his people, Father
Van
Ly has spent 10 years in prison between 1970 and 1990 and
since his
release in 1992 he is kept under strict
police
surveillance.
