Church says will not be dictated to over Alkitab

KUALA LUMPUR, April 11 – Roman Catholics were told that the Church will not follow the federal government’s deadline to settle the Alkitab row as the resolution appeared to centre on the Sarawak election this weekend.

The Church had put down a fact sheet in its newspaper, theHerald, yesterday to explain its official stand and future action as Putrajaya had been giving the impression that the 30-year-old problem had been resolved by a 10-point formula endorsed by Cabinet.

“There is no hurry for us to come up with an answer for the government’s latest offer, even though the government seem to have a dateline (Sarawak elections on April 16),” wrote Father Michael Chua, on behalf of the Church.

“We should not be dictated by the timetable set by the government but rather the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our deliberations,” stressed the ecclesiastical assistant in the Archdiocesan Ministry of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs (AMEIA) for the Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur.

Chua also pointed out in the fact sheet that there was no law or government order that required the Christian holy book to be stamped with the Home Ministry’s official seal before distribution, as Putrajaya would have the public believe.

“Please note that there is no legal jurisdiction for the stamping or imposition of conditions on the Alkitab.

“The above detentions, proscriptions and imposition of conditions have been done at the administrative level, often citing one reason or the other,” the priest said.

The spokesman for the Church urged Catholics not to interpret its silence to mean it had no will to act.

“Due to the gravity of the issue and its relation to other matters concerning religious freedom... wider consultation is required,” he explained, referring to The Herald’s two-year-old court case for the right to use the Arabic word “Allah” to mean God.

The senior cleric had previously admitted to The Malaysian Insider that many Catholics in the peninsula were ignorant that the rights of their Malay-speaking Bumiputera congregation in Sabah and Sarawak – which forms the majority of the community – had been affected by the Putrajaya’s actions over the past three decades.

Malaysia has a Christian population of about 2.8 million, and Catholics make up nearly half the number.

In Sarawak, which goes to polls on Saturday, one in two voters is a Christian.

Christian groups have been locked in a dispute with the government over the Alkitab for the past one month, after Home Ministry officials seized and stamped 35,000 books in Port Klang and Kuching.

Home Ministry secretary-general Datuk Seri Mahmood Adam said the 10-point solution proposed last week had “paved the way” for the importers, Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM) and The Gideons, to collect the books.

Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein himself had also been quoted as saying that the latest move was a “positive response” to the Cabinet’s collective decision in drawing up the 10-point solution. - Malaysian Insider