Freedom of religious belief and practice is a universal human right, and every violation should be reported by the media because if a government is unwilling to protect basic freedom of conscience when it comes to religious faith, then it is unlikely to tolerate political free-thinking as well.
“Christians are the religious group most discriminated against as there may well be more than 200 million of them, of different confessions, who are in situations of difficulty because of legal and cultural strictures that lead to their discrimination,” said Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations. The Archbishop told the UN General Assembly that in recent months Christian communities in some African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries have been attacked, leaving many injured and others killed.
One of the most atrocious episodes of religious intolerance occurred last August in a village near the town of Nzara in South Sudan. Marauding bands of guerrillas ‘crucified’ seven Christians during a series of raids, with one man tied to a tree and mutilated while six other victims were nailed to pieces of wood and killed.
The Sudan, however, is not the only country where Christians are persecuted and killed. On October 3, in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, a 55-year-old Christian male nurse, Imad Elia Abdul Karim, who was married with two children, was kidnapped in front of his own home. On the following day the police found his body in the same suburb where, three months previously, Aziz Rozko Hanna, an important Christian official of the city and two other women had also been killed.
All of this has come after a persecution and harassment that has led over half of the Christians in Iraq to leave the country in the last few years. The situation has deteriorated to the point that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Baghdad, Jean Benjamin Sleiman, said in May, “I fear the extinction of Christianity in Iraq and the Middle East”.
Another sad episode are the so-called ‘Blasphemy Laws’ in Pakistan, a country where 97 percent of its 180 million people is Muslim. These laws are keeping the tiny Christian minority in that country in a perpetual state of anxiety. Norms punishing blasphemy in the country are extremely strict yet vague at the same time, and many see the laws as serving the sole purpose of masking widespread discrimination against Christians at the social, economic, legal and cultural level.
Violence against Christians erupts periodically in Pakistan. On July 30 of last year thousands of Islamic fundamentalists fell upon the village of Koriyan and torched 51 Christian homes as retaliation to alleged blasphemy. Two days later, on August 1, at least 3,000 extremists targeted the Christian community of Gojra, and burned seven people alive (among whom were two children and three women) and wounded another 19.
Last month a book was published in France which was finally able to shake people’s conscience, Ces Chrétiens Qu’on Assassine (Christians Being Murdered), written by René Guitton, a relentless traveller with a degree in journalism who studied theology and exegesis. In his book, which has been defined as “the black book of Christian phobia,” Guitton decries the apathy and indifference toward the phenomenon of Christians being persecuted. “The silence we are witnessing brings to mind former sad episodes of silence, and in perhaps two or three decades we may be hearing the same embarrassed statements of repentance and regret we heard in the past at not having highlighted abuses when they were occurring.”
In his well-documented publication the French journalist points the finger at the apathy of the West with regard to these anti-Christian pogroms. “Persecution against Christians is not classified as a breach of human rights, and the reason for this is simple: Christians, at least in the West, have a hard time associating the idea of Christianity with a minority. In the West defending Christianity would mean defending a majority. The West, which is increasingly de-Christianised, is incapable of imagining that Christians can and do experience persecution precisely because of their Christianity.”
Dear readers, let us pray for the persecuted Church, for her oppressors, for those nations that foster persecution, and for those who choose to ignore these facts. Called by the Holy Spirit to unity with the persecuted, let us enter into their suffering, repent our ignorance, and refuse to be silent by reaching out to them in their isolation.
Updated on October 06 2016