Persecution of Christians unabated around the world

I watched “Quo Vadis” the other night. It describes a critical but faded episode of inhumanity:

The persecution of Christians. We know about it, but the events are generally filed under “news too old to care about.”

Except, the “news too old to care about” is today’s headline. No lions, no Colosseum, just the massacre of Nigerian Catholics in a church on Pentecost Sunday, 2022.

Christians in Nigeria have been under assault for over a decade. According to Genocide Watch, more than 45,000 Christians have been assassinated in the last 13 years, making that country the most dangerous in Africa for members of the faith.

This time, they waited until the worshippers entered St.

Francis Church in Owo and then started shooting at them from both inside and outside of the building. Reports state that some of the attackers were disguised as parishioners.

Some have attributed the assault to random violence. But don’t be misled. The history of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria is a part of the fabric of the nation, something that mirrors a similar wave of persecution that has engulfed much of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Central America. A lot of it is fueled by a particularly extreme and virulent form of Islam. Some of it is rooted in hostility toward the social justice mission of many Christian churches.

But regardless of the location or reason for the violence, you cannot escape the fact that the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent Christians in recent decades is the most widespread genocide currently occurring in the world. It is also the most ignored.

As an attorney, I’ve handled a lot of asylum cases that lay bare the inhumanity that infects global society. But the most agonizing are the ones that involve religious persecution. We were successful in obtaining asylum for a Catholic youth leader from El Salvador who had a gun held to his head and threatened with death if he continued counseling boys not to join a violent gang. I’ve also represented Protestant preachers who have been kidnapped, threatened and in one case orphaned (mother and father murdered) because of their ministries in Honduras and

China. The most heart-wrenching case was that of a young Salvadoran woman who was raped by her boyfriend, a police officer, and became pregnant. When he demanded that she abort the child, she refused because of her Catholic beliefs, at which point he beat her so severely that she miscarried. His fellow police officers told her she should have gotten an abortion.

Somehow, these stories rarely make it through the dense layers of preferences that the people who run news outlets impose on the rest of us. And when you call it out, people brush you off as some religious zealot. Worse, they argue that we shouldn’t even name the ethnicity or religion of the persecutors, so as not to offend. The truth is that the vast majority of Christians persecuted for religious reasons are killed by non-Christians, including Muslims, Hindus and Chinese atheists. The statistics are quite clear on this.

And I’ll go even further. The last acceptable prejudice in America is anti-Catholicism. It’s not persecution, but the level to which it infects our current society is insidious. While I’m in no danger of being killed on the steps of my church, I’m still hearing slurs against my religion. And then we have Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer placing a target, with his fiery pro-abortion rhetoric, on the back of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It’s no surprise that the justice was almost assassinated.

Instead of cracking jokes about how misogynistic, bigoted and backwards Christians are, it might be a better idea to notice the bleeding bodies.