ASIA/PAKISTAN - "Bringing hope to the poor": the Jubilee of Hope among brick kiln workers

Lahore (Agenzia Fides) - A place of suffering and death can become a place of life and hope. In this spirit, the Jubilee Year 2025 began for the people of Kot Radha Kishan, in the Pakistani province of Punjab, a place where clay is mined and bricks are baked by hand. Capuchin Fathers from the nearby town of Bhai Pheru, together with young Catholics, visited the brick kiln in Kot Radha Kishan, where in 2014 two Christian couples, Shama and Shazad Bibi, were lynched and burned alive because they were wrongly accused of blasphemy.
"We wanted to share hope with the needy and marginalized of society," said Father Qaiser Feroz (ofm Cap) to Fides. "This is how we wanted to start the Jubilee of Hope in Pakistan: by sharing solidarity and closeness with the very poor families of the brick kiln workers in the village of Chak 69 in Kot Radha Kishan. Right where the Christian couple was murdered, goodness is now sprouting." Capuchin Fathers and volunteers distributed food parcels as a gesture of hope and love and sought dialogue with the brick kiln workers to encourage them and pray together. The families expressed joy and gratitude. Addressing the workers, who often work in semi-slavery or "debt slavery," Father Feroz said: "Christ is our hope and yours: He is always with you, you are never alone in this struggle of everyday life." The Capuchin, parish priest in Bhai Pheru in the Kasur district, is also director of the Social Communications Commission of the Pakistani Bishops' Conference. He was accompanied by other religious, a deacon and young people from his parish who wanted to "bring hope to the poor and marginalized" at the beginning of the Holy Year.
At that place, recalls Arif, a Christian from Kot Radha Kishan, "the two spouses were targeted by a mob on false charges and neither the owner of the furnace nor the police could prevent the lynching. The owner of the furnace could not cope with the shock a few days after the incident and died. The brutal act was instigated by an imam who accused the couple of desecrating the Koran over the mosque's loudspeaker. The entire community was shocked and frightened for a long time. Now we hope that these wounds will be healed and a seed of hope will blossom again."
In Pakistan, in the Jubilee Year of 2025, Catholic communities, particularly in the province of Punjab, have made it a pastoral priority to help families caught in the web of "slave labor" (as Pope Francis called it) widespread in the clay factories of Pakistani Punjab. The families affected often include young people, but also the elderly, women and children: all of them are trapped by the practice of "peshgi", an advance on wages that the worker receives from the employer for his own use and which becomes a debt. This debt accumulates and, due to the interest, creates a system of permanent dependency that becomes a modern, legalized form of slavery. The phenomenon is widespread in Pakistan, a country ranked sixth on the index compiled by "Global Slavery", where 2.3 million slaves were counted in the country, representing 1.13% of the total Pakistani population.
Often, Christian and Hindu families in particular, who are among the poorest sections of the Pakistani population, are victims of the system and become "debt slaves" who have to spend their entire lives at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. For example, one of these families takes a loan from an employer for medical treatment. Years of work without rights are required to repay the sum owed: the worker is unable to pay the debt, which is sometimes not even extinguished by his death, but is passed on to the next generation, creating generations of slaves. (PA) (Agenzia Fides, 10/1/2025)

Share:

work

---

---

slavery

---

---

jubilee

---

---

human rights

---

---