MUMBAI, India – Following the collapse on Monday of an historic Islamic boarding school in East Java, Indonesia, that left three students dead and roughly 100 injured, the local bishop has said that Catholics are mobilizing to take part in relief efforts.

“I am deeply saddened and mourn for this incident,” Bishop Agustinus Tri Budi Utomo of Surabaya, located about 15 miles from the site of the disaster.

“The Catholic Church is currently involved in taking part in a public kitchen for rescuers and victims’ families who are waiting for the discovery of the victims behind the rubble,” Utomo said, noting there’s a Catholic parish around a mile and half from the school.

Reports suggest that at least 90 students are buried in the rubble after the collapse of the building, apparently caused by the unauthorized construction of an additional two floors atop the original two-story structure.

The National Disaster Management Agency had originally said 38 people were trapped in the rubble but revised that estimate upwards on Tuesday. A magnitude 6 earthquake that struck the area in which the school is located on Tuesday briefly brought rescue efforts to a halt, by they had resumed by late in the day.

The collapsed building has assumed “a pancake type structure with layers of concrete slabs leaving only narrow voids, unstable conditions, and the possibility of survivors still trapped,” said Mohammad Syafeii, who heads the Basarnas search and rescue agency.

The students caught in the collapse were mostly boys aged 12 to 17. Female students at the school were praying in a separate location when the collapse occurred and manage to escape harm.

The Al-Khoziny Islamic Boarding School, located in the town of Sidoarjo, is a traditional Islamic institution in Indonesia known as a pesantren. Traditionally, pesantren focus exclusively on Islamic studies, such as memorizing the Quran and learning Arabic and Islamic law, but many now also offer general education.

Utomo, who said he visited the school five years ago, said Al-Khoziny is considered an historic site in Indonesian Islam, in part because at more than 100 years old it’s the oldest pesantren in East Java. It’s also significant because Hasyim Asari, a 19^th and 20^th century Islamic scholar and independence activist who’s considered a national hero in Indonesia, once studied at the school.

Asari was also the founder of Nahdhatul Ulama, which is the largest Sunni Muslim organization in the world.

Budi said that as soon as he heard about the disaster, he called a lay Catholic who’s active in interfaith movements in Sidoarjo, who began organizing local faithful to participate in the rescue efforts.

“The location is in the middle of a village, [on] a small road by the river, [creating] challenges to access,” Budi said.

“There are already a lot of people who are taking part in relief operations: government disaster management agencies, migrant workers, police, military and local government social services,” he said.

“From the Catholic Church, [we are] waiting and preparing things that will be needed to support the team that is already at the location. There are Catholic church administrators on standby at the location.”

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, and while there are pockets of extremism in the country, in general relations between Christians and Muslims are positive. In the capital city of Jakarta, for example, a 30-yard tunnel, known as the “Tunnel of Friendship,” was inaugurated in 2024 to link the Istiqlal Mosque with the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption.

Catholicism in Indonesia only represents about three percent of the overall population, but in such a vast nation with 284 million people, that still works out to about 8.3 million faithful. Pope Francis visited Indonesia in September 2024.