Beleaguered Christians Have No One to Defend Them…. And Their Enemies Know it

07-06-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

A prayer chamber destroyed at St Mary Tahira in Qaraqosh, Iraq, where Islamic State militants took over it and used the courtyard as a firing range.

Today, persecution of Christians is as brutal and vicious as that experienced by Christians in the early church. “If one member suffers, all suffer together” 1 Corinthians 12:26 St. Paul tells us. On May 24, 2025, Fulani militants attacked the villages of Tse-Ubiam and Tyolaha in Benue State, killing ten people.

The violence escalated over the following days, with attacks on Aondona, Ahume, and Yelewata, leaving over 40 people dead by Tuesday of that week. These attacks were reportedly in retaliation against a local bishop who had testified before the U.S. Congress about the ongoing violence in the region. In mid-June 2025, another wave of violence occurred, with around 200 Christians reportedly killed by Fulani jihadist herdsmen in Yelwata, also in Benue State.

The militants stormed the predominantly Catholic farming community, setting fire to homes and attacking the town square while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Eyewitnesses described how the attackers “surrounded Yelwata … and began slaughtering people—mostly women, children, and displaced families who thought they had found safety here.” St. Joseph’s Church, which was sheltering displaced families, was targeted but defended by police.

John O’Sullivan in the UK Catholic Herald reports: Christianity is the largest faith in a world of thriving religions. It’s hard sometimes to feel that since the mental picture that grips most Westerners, including many Christians, is one of a dying faith in a disenchanted secular universe in which God is not so much dead as retired on a modest pension. Reality is very different. In 2015 the four largest (conventional) world religions were in descending order Christianity (31.2 per cent of the global population), Islam (24.1 per cent), Hinduism (16 per cent), and Buddhism (7 per cent). If we admit “without religion” as a category, that comes in third today with 16 per cent, a shade ahead of Hinduism….

They (Christians) are not, of course, the only believers who face persecution. The murder of Jews in France; the attempted genocide of Yazidis in Iraq and Syria; the repression of Zoroastrians (among others) in Iran; the mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand; these and other examples show that religious persecution is rampant, widespread, and largely unashamed throughout the world. Still, Christians in particular come under attack from three directions.

First, in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, Christians (along with Jews) are the victims of a rising tide of Islamist and jihadist fervour. This is a political perversion of Islam and believed by a minority among Muslims, but it is a large social phenomenon that influences and overwhelms governments. Thus, sometimes governments persecute Christians directly as in Sudan; sometimes they try to restrain and punish mob attacks on Christians, as recently in Pakistan; sometimes they turn a blind eye to such crimes as religious murder and the burnings of churches (in which, indeed, police and soldiers take part) as in Egypt; and often they veer back and forth between these different responses depending on pressures from foreign governments and NGOs. The end result is that some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are being driven from Iraq and Syria, and that the Copts in Egypt – five per cent of the population – live a half-life in the shadows between official protection, Islamist violence and emigration.

The second source of anti-Christian persecution is militantly atheist governments suspicious of all social activity not directly under their control. North Korea is the most extravagant and horrifying example of such oppressive totalitarian regimes. But China – which has exploited the internet to create the first panopticon state – is the most subtle, persistent and effective one. Where necessary, it imprisons religions wholesale as with Uighur Muslims. Where possible, as apparently with the Vatican, it regulates religions into compliance….Today, however, persecuted Christian communities outside Europe can expect little help from Europe and, more surprisingly, little sanctuary either. An astonishingly small percentage of Syrian refugees granted asylum in Europe are Christian – namely, 0.2 per cent. And when it is suggested – as it was by then Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Australia – that a special category should be created for them, this was opposed as discriminatory and ran into the sands of bureaucracy. This is a classic case of an abstract principle of non-discrimination being employed in such a way as to ensure (or at least not to correct) an actual practice of discrimination that harms real people…

America is a partial exception to this liberal policy of cautious indifference because of the strong involvement in its political life of religious communities with ethnic links to the persecuted. Its International Religious Freedom Act has given the US a specific responsibility to promote religious liberty throughout the world. It succeeded in getting Vietnam to abandon a policy of forced renunciation of religion. And at the very least its regular reports keep up the pressure on governments to live up to their commitments to religious liberty.

Within Europe, Poland and Hungary are exceptions too. Hungary has pioneered a policy of giving generous and active help to enable Christian communities in the Middle East to rebuild both their churches and their lives in more secure conditions. It sees this as one aspect of Hungary’s wider responsibilities as a nation which wants to invigorate as well as protect its distinctively Christian culture. But this puts the country at odds with Europe’s post-Christian drift. If one member suffers, all suffer together” 1 Corinthians 12:26 St. Paul tells us. Pray daily for the persecuted Church, the spread of the Gospel, and the conversion of those who persecute and kill. Here are some excerpts from the Roman Martyrology (the lists of the martyrs and confessors of the Faith) for June 27:

• St. Cyril, bishop and doctor of the Church, who elected to the See of Alexandria in Egypt, through singular effort on behalf of the integrity of the Catholic Faith set out in order the teachings at the Council of Ephesus concerning Christ as being one and the same person and the divine maternity of the Virgin Mary
• At Carthage St. Guddenis, Martyr, In Carthage, aka Saint Gondena, a virgin, who by order of the proconsul Rufinus was four times and at various times stretched out on the rack for the faith of Jesus Christ, horribly torn with iron nails, then locked up for a long time in a filthy dungeon, and finally killed by the sword.
• At Cordoba in Spanish Baetica, St. Zoilius, martyr Note: The Roman province of Baetica was created by the emperor Augustus from part of a large republican province, Hispania Ulterior, around 16 BC. (The rest of the territory formed the Roman province of Lusitania.) It comprised most of the contemporary Spanish region of Andalusia and the south of Extremadura.
• At Constantinople, St. Samson, priest, receiver of the poor, When the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great became ill he sent for Sampson to cure him.
• In France, St. Johne the priest, originally from Britain, because of his love for God, removed himself from human sight, and lived in a small oratory near the church
• In Lombardy, St. Arialdus, deacon and martyr, strongly opposed depraved and immoral clergy, and because of his zeal with respect to the house of God was cruelly assassinated by two clerics.
• In Vietnam in the city of Nam Dinh St Thomas Toan, martyr, who a catechist and caretaker of the mission of Trung Linh was with savage punishment cast into prison and there suffered and died from hunger and thirst under the emperor Minh Mang
• In Fribourg in Switzerland blessed Margaret Bays, virgin, who a dressmaker in the family gave herself to love of neighbor never neglecting her prayer
• In France blessed Louise Therese Montaignac de Chauvance, virgin, who founded the Pious Union of Oblates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus And elsewhere many other Martyrs, Confessors, and holy Virgins