Persecution of Christians

Persecution of Christians
Peter Kopa, Prague, March 15, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_G8cNnZvI

We summarize an article on the subject by Robert Royal, USA. He is editor of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington D.C.

In recent days, more than a thousand Christians have been killed, raped and tortured in Syria, amid the current political turmoil. But, like some Christians throughout the world and throughout history, they are being murdered and persecuted specifically because of their faith. According to conservative estimates, some 300 million Christians worldwide are currently at risk of violent persecution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWEbom7iLtE

Previous reflections

The persecution of Christians brings us back to the historical fact of the mistreatment of man in general, whether for religious or political reasons or simply for belonging to a people at war or in a situation of subjugation and abuse. There we have the gulags, which have always existed outside Russia as well. Then there are the massacres for ideological or purely economic reasons, as in the case of Stalin and so many others. Thus, the persecution of the Christian faith can also be accompanied by other secondary motives.

But the persecution of Christians has a characteristic that turns it into heroic martyrdom, when the victim has the option of avoiding death by renouncing their faith. Christian doctrine has always emphasized martyrdom as the fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ, who clearly told us that, like his own death on the cross, persecution sows the seeds of more and more Christians. We can see that this has not wiped Christians off the face of the earth, but that they have grown unstoppably in number and quality throughout history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZauVylSOmE

Currently, there are an estimated 2.38 billion Christians in the world, according to a Pew Research report in 2023, and this figure is projected to increase to approximately 2.9 billion by 2050. As for Catholics, in 2020, the Vatican informs us that there were approximately 1.36 billion Catholics in the world. This means that Catholics represent around 57% of the global Christian population, considering that Catholics are approximately 50% of Christians according to some more recent estimates. However, the exact proportion may vary slightly depending on the sources and dates of the data.

Where is there persecution?

The totalitarianism that produced tens of millions of victims in the Soviet Union, in the Warsaw Pact nations, in Nazi Germany, in China, in Cambodia and in the civil wars of Mexico and Spain, etc. The confrontations and deaths occurred almost entirely as a result of modern atheism seeking to eradicate Christianity. And the ideology of atheist communism was the pretext most wielded by red totalitarianism.

Christians are also killed or mistreated in North Korea, China, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. But by far the greatest number of fatalities have recently come from militant Islam. The Indo-British novelist Salman Rushdie has said in this regard: “Having overcome fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.”

Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world for a Catholic priest due to the cartels and widespread crime. In Canada, dozens of churches were burned down over alleged mass graves in Catholic schools. Pope Francis even traveled to Canada to apologize. But the Canadian government has just suspended the investigation into these “mass graves,” after finding nothing. Once again, lies had been told and a media-created persecution had been launched against the Catholic Church, with the astonishing support of most of the media, because they are controlled from a single globalist vertex in the USA.

Islam persecutes Christians

https://thinktanklatam.org/ambitions-for-the-establishment-of-islam/

The threat does not only exist in the Middle East, although there it waxes and wanes according to circumstances. Western forces were able to repress ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa for a time, although affiliates of ISIS and similar organizations persist. But the ideology migrated to Central Africa, where many of the most violent persecutions of Christians are taking place right now.

In Nigeria alone, almost 5,000 Christians are murdered every year. Worse still, movements in several African nations, as well as in the Far East, are attempting to create a global Islamic caliphate. International institutions and Western governments are doing little to stop these crimes. People in the West tend to explain such acts as responses to oppression or as violations of international norms “generally defined in terms of Western political philosophy that no suicide bomber would follow”. The majority of Muslims are peaceful, so it is a shame that an Islamic minority brings their crimes down upon all of them. But this clash of religious visions is an uncomfortable reality that the pluralistic societies of the West are increasingly facing in Europe. The solution lies in achieving a respectful reciprocal openness to dialogue.