A displaced young woman prays in the makeshift Catholic chapel in Sudan (CNS)
Back in 1997, American author Paul Marshall said that
anti-Christian persecution had been “all but totally ignored by the
world at large”. To be sure, the situation has changed in the 16 years
since Marshall’s classic work Their Blood Cries Out. A cluster
of advocacy groups and relief organisations has emerged, and from time
to time anti-Christian persecution has drawn coverage in major news
outlets such as the Economist, Newsweek and Commentary.
On the whole, however, the war on Christians remains the world’s
best-kept secret. As recently as 2011, Italian journalist Francesca Paci
– who writes for the Italian media market, which probably pays more
attention to Christian topics than almost any other culture on earth,
given the massive footprint of the Vatican – said about the fate of
persecuted Christians in places such as Iraq, Algeria, and India: “We
ignore too many things, and even more indefensibly, we pretend not to
see too many things.”
In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, addressed
the crisis facing Arab Christianity in the Middle East during a
conference in London. He bluntly asked: “Does anybody hear our cry? How
many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our
aid?” Those are questions that deserve answers, and understanding the
motives for the silence about the global war on Christians is a good
place to begin.
Read more at The Catholic Herald >>
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