Today’s Global Witness of Christian Martyrs

Within just one week, two massacres of Christians took place that went almost unnoticed. In Jordan, nine Christians were killed and dozens more wounded during a funeral procession at St. George’s Orthodox Church. And in Ethiopia, sixty Christians were murdered in two separate incidents by gunmen who went house to house, hunting them down and burning twenty of their homes along the way. Major news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post did publish brief reports. And they provided some context about the militants behind the Jordanian attack, whom authorities linked to extremist groups in Syria, and about the political conflicts in Ethiopia that may have fueled the slaughter. But they and others barely noted the religious motivations in both cases, which might seem obvious given the targets selected. Nor did they make any effort to connect the dots between these and the many similar events occurring in the Middle East and Africa, indeed in many parts of the world.

One organization that does examine those connections—and tries to do something about what can only be called modern Christian martyrdom—is Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), which just published a report on global violence against Christians from 2024 to 2026. The findings are no surprise for anyone who follows these matters. Unfortunately, too few people do, which is why the report is greatly needed. Drawing on sources such as the Pew Research Center and ACN’s own people in the field, the report finds that around 220 million Christians are directly exposed to persecution, and that Christians faced harassment—from verbal abuse to killings—in 165 countries in 2023, up from 160 in 2021. Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva, put it like this: “Christians are subjected to physical violence, subjugation, false detention, the expropriation of their property, enslavement, forced exile and even murder because of their religious beliefs.”

ACN’s report focuses on eighteen countries that are representative of the kinds of persecution that Christians face at present. The perpetrators can be roughly sorted into three categories: criminal networks, totalitarian regimes, and Islamist movements. These are not entirely watertight categories. For instance, Nicaragua presents a kind of hybrid of a criminal network and a nominally communist regime. 

The Ortega family, which has plagued the Nicaraguans, on and off, since the 1980s, professes a kind of state socialism and practices anti-Christian repression, with family members occupying various high government posts. The Catholic Church has been the only real opposition to their misrule and has suffered as a result. This year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that the Ortega regime has “sustained its total crackdown on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) by arresting, imprisoning, and exiling religious leaders and adherents, arbitrarily cancelling the legal status of religious organizations, and consolidating its power to harass and intimidate worshipers.”

In concrete terms, that has resulted in nearly 140 priests, ninety religious sisters, and dozens of seminarians and other religious being forced into exile, several to Rome. The president of the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference, Carlos Enrique Herrera, was expelled to Guatemala in 2024 after protesting the local authorities’ deliberate disruption of Masses. The corrupt tyranny of the Ortega family has imprisoned other bishops, intimidated clergy, closed charities, and prohibited priests from making hospital visits. Even Easter processions were banned, as were ordinations of priests and deacons in four dioceses. The excuse for such measures is often to restrain “traitors to the homeland,” but the reality is that all this happens because the Church represents resistance to the abuses of the regime.

Aid to the Church in Need was founded after World War II to deal with some of the difficulties in Europe—especially the plight of the Church behind the Iron Curtain. And the kind of totalitarianism it dealt with during those decades has not entirely gone away. The recent report looks at three places where old-style communist oppression continues: North Korea, China, and Vietnam. 

North Korea is consistently ranked as one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, and the absolute worst in its treatment of religious believers. Repression is so severe that it’s difficult even to know what’s happening there, though the details that have leaked out from the few people who have escaped paint a picture of horrors in the prisons. Protestant Christians are regarded as “collaborators of imperialistic forces and enemies of the nation and revolution,” and believers more generally, who are thought to make up a large part of the prison population, are subject to a draconian “Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Law.” Prior to the Korean War, something like three thousand churches existed in what is now North Korea. They have all been suppressed.

China and Vietnam take more subtle approaches; China in particular is careful not to provoke international reactions with the kinds of wholesale slaughters committed during the Cultural Revolution. But at least ten Catholic bishops have been detained, “disappeared,” or forced from their posts. This is all the more distressing because under the “secret accord” with the Vatican—“secret” in the sense that it exists and was approved during the papacy of Pope Francis, but hasn’t been published—there is supposed to be, in theory, cooperation between Rome and Beijing about the appointment of bishops and other matters. But in practice, bishops have been appointed by the regime unilaterally, and dioceses have been reorganized without the participation of the Vatican. Bishops and priests in the “underground”—as in, the independent Church loyal to Rome—have even been encouraged by the Vatican to cooperate with the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the official Catholic Church in China, but this seems to be a cooperation in suicide. 

We know that all religious groups in China are being “Sinicized” by direct order of President Xi: not merely shaped by Chinese culture, but cut off from all outside allegiances and subservient to the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party. As Pope Benedict XVI pointed out during his own papacy, for Catholics, this is an ecclesiological non-starter because there can be no authentic Catholic Church without unity with Rome. 

Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “Religious leaders and community members who refuse to submit to the CCP’s intrusive system of control face harassment, fines, detention, political re-education, forced labor, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, and other abuse.” In a notorious case, the Catholic businessman and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai has languished in prison since 2020 on trumped-up charges. 

All this is straight from the usual communist playbook, which always represses religion because it’s an alternative source of values—anathema to totalitarian regimes.

The third source of anti-Christian persecution has gained global prominence since 9/11, but it had been simmering below the surface for decades before. Salman Rushdie, a novelist of Indian-Muslim birth who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom and America for much of his career, became a cause célèbre internationally after he published The Satanic Verses, a 1988 magical-realist novel that portrayed Muhammad as accepting, and then retracting, Satan-inspired verses praising pagan divinities. A fatwa authorizing Rushdie’s murder was issued by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Rushdie had to go into hiding, protected for years by British authorities. The novel was banned in about twenty countries, threats were made against him personally and against the publishers of his work, and terrorist attacks were carried out in various places in retaliation for his insults to Islam. The animus against him was so great that, thirty-four years later, in 2022, he was stabbed in New York by a Muslim carrying out the fatwa, resulting in the loss of an eye. In 2006, he and others declared in a manifesto, “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.”

Of the eighteen countries studied in the ACN report, roughly half are Muslim-majority, and in eleven, Islamism poses the main threat to Christians. Other credible surveys of global religious repression confirm that this reflects reality. Open Doors, for example, reports that after North Korea, the most repressive regimes, in descending order, are Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, and Iran. And the sad list goes on. 

Among the Islamist threats, surprisingly few come from the Middle East. Syria and Iran are on the list, but the region’s worst movements—ISIS and its affiliates—were largely defeated by 2019. Islamist ideology was not suppressed, however, and has migrated to sub-Saharan Africa and, to a lesser degree, Southeast Asia. 

Nigeria has become the most visible example of what has happened. In 2023, Open Doors counted over 4,000 Christians killed in Nigeria. From 2019 to 2023, almost 17,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists belonging to Boko Haram, Fulani militants (formerly mostly Muslim “herdsmen” involved in land disputes with Christians), and the Islamic State West Africa Province, among others. Over an even longer period, from 2009 to 2021, the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law—a Nigerian watchdog group—documented 43,000 Christians killed, 18,500 Christians “disappeared,” 17,500 churches attacked, two thousand Christian schools destroyed, and much else.

Even journalistic outlets that normally don’t pay much attention to attacks on Christians have had to notice the repeated slaughters of Christians in Nigeria, the kidnappings of entire schools, the murders of priests, the holding of others for ransom. Even Nigerian Muslims who are not considered sufficiently devout have been victims of their more radical co-religionists. And this fact should put aside all doubt that there is a religious motivation to much of the mayhem. Sadly, many outside observers, even at times the Vatican itself, have tried to play down the religious dimension, blaming conflict on economic factors and even “climate change.” But all this, as in several other African nations, has been in service of recreating, as the perpetrators themselves assert, an Islamic caliphate.

The ACN report documents these and other unfortunate features of our time, not out of a partisan effort to portray Christians uniquely as victims. It makes clear that many other faiths are under attack because religion is an irritant to governments (Buddhists and Uighurs in China, for instance), and that other religions clash among themselves (Hindus and Muslims in both Pakistan and India). But it is simply the truth, as ACN rightly says, that in the past two years, “Christians suffered harassment in more countries than any other group, with the gap between Christians and other faiths widening when the harassment of religious groups was already at an all-time high.”

This makes clear two imperatives. First, all people of good will should pay attention, becoming better informed about the ongoing violence against Christians in our day. Second, we all have a duty to do something about that violence through every means available: national, international, cultural, journalistic. Anything less makes us passive enablers of one of the great evils of our time.