Most Oppressed and Tormented

Sandro Magister writes:

That in many regions of the world Christians are today "the most oppressed and tormented minority" is a matter of fact that has entered forcefully and in new terms into the language of the supreme authority of the Catholic Church.

In the pre-Christmas address to the Roman curia last December 20 – the yearly speech in which the pope frames the main issues facing the Church – Benedict XVI used, for the first time, the word "Christianophobia."

As the theme for the world day of peace that was celebrated last New Year's Day, the pope choose freedom of faith: a theme seen as necessary after a year so "marked by persecution, by discrimination, by terrible acts of violence and intolerance."

After the Angelus on Sunday, January 2, the pope called a "strategy of violence" that "offends God and the whole of humanity" that which takes aim at Christians.

And he will certainly return to these issues in the speech that he will give next Monday, January 10, as at the beginning of each year, to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See.

*

The recent attacks that have shocked Church authorities most were those of October 31 against the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Baghdad, and the one on December 31 against the Coptic Saints Church in Alexandria, with dozens killed and injured.

In both cases, the attacks took place when the churches were crowded with faithful attending Mass.

And in both cases, the reasons for the attack had traits in common. Typically religious, for a "pure" Islam against infidels and apostates. In claiming responsibility for the attack on the church in Baghdad, the authors of the massacre included among their reasons revenge for the presumed captivity, on the part of the Copts, of two female Egyptian converts from Christianity to Islam.

The Coptic Church has always said that these conversions never took place, and that the two women, who are married to priests, are under protection out of fear that they could be abducted.

But this accusation has been harped on constantly for four years, in a campaign similar to the one in the West to save the Iranian Sakineh from the gallows. Last December 31, immediately after the Friday preaching, from the mosque in Alexandria two hundred meters from the Coptic church that would be attacked a few hours later, a Muslim procession set out to demand the liberation of the two women.

The Christians and their churches have become the main and stated target of the Islamist cells. It is an easy and productive target, which immediately conquers the front pages of the media all over the world, with much greater visibility than the massacres among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which nonetheless continue, and with much greater effects on populations and states. In Iraq, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, in Asia, in Africa and even in Europe.

Even in Nigeria, for example, where the bloody aggression between Christians and Muslims was until recently seen by the Church as essentially "political," the judgment has changed.

On Christmas Eve, a series of explosions against churches in Jos, the capital of the Nigerian state of Plateau, killed 86 and injured hundreds. In the following days, various Christian places of worship were attacked by armed men in the area of Maiduguri, in the northeast of Nigeria, claiming more victims. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the Islamist sect Boko Haram. Last January 4, the archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Ayau Kaigama, told the Vatican agency "Fides":

"As I have explained on other occasions, the riots in and around Jos had a religious component that was mixed with other motives, ie. the frustrations of unemployed youth, the rivalry between pastoralists and farmers, and ethnic tensions between the indigenous and immigrants from other regions of the Country. The attacks at Christmas, rather, have a clear religious significance because they wanted to hit these important symbols of Christianity during the most sacred celebrations, along with Easter. Secondly, in past clashes, bladed weapons and some rifles were used. In this case, rather, explosives were used. The bombs were probably made on site, but I wonder who taught the terrorists how to produce them. So I think that recent events go beyond Nigeria."

*

The latest shocking case, which has convinced Church authorities even more to see a general anti-Christian "strategy of violence" at work in the Islamic world, was the killing, in Pakistan on January 4, of Salman Taseer, governor of Pubjab and potential future prime minister.

Taseer was Muslim. But his offense – as stated by his killer, one of his bodyguards – was that of wanting to abolish the law that punishes blasphemy in Pakistan and is exploited to sentence individual Christians to death on trumped-up charges.

There's more. Taseer fought to save from execution, on account of this law, a Pakistani Christian named Asia Bibi.

The campaign in favor of Asia Bibi has been underway for some time, in various countries. In Italy, appeals to spare her life have been issued very vigorously by the two media outlets of the episcopal conference, the newspaper "Avvenire" and the television channel TV 2000.

On Christmas Eve, Taseer had met with the archbishop of Lahore, the capital of Punjab, Lawrence John Saldanha. Who, after his murder, told the correspondent for "Avvenire":

"In Pakistan there is a clash between orthodox Islam and liberal Islam. It is a fight that has been dragging on since the birth of the country, and today it has arrived at a critical threshold. Where violence and attacks have the upper hand. Where the Taliban and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda threaten not only the religious minorities, but all citizens. We Christians, in this situation, are a 'soft target'."

*

Last October, the bishops of the Middle East held a special synod in Rome dedicated to their region, in which the Church had its first great blossoming, but from which in some places Christians are in danger of disappearing, driven into exile by the constant violence.

Each country has its own features. And so does the resistance of the Christians. In Lebanon, during the years of the civil war, the Christians fought with their own armed militias. In Egypt, the Copts protest vigorously in the streets, and clash with the police. In Nigeria, it sometimes happens that they attack mosques.

But almost everywhere the Christian resistance is peaceful. Iraq is today the most glaring example of massacres carried out against innocent and unarmed victims, killed only because they are Christian.

And to think that it was precisely from Iraq that the word "genocide" came. It was coined in 1943 by a Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, a great supporter of humanitarian causes, after studying the systematic extermination of Assyrian Christians carried out ten years before by the Muslim governors of the new Iraqi nation that had emerged from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire.

*

In short, recent events confirm the basic judgments of pope Joseph Ratzinger on Islam, on its unresolved relationship between faith and reason, from which emerges the violence against infidels and apostates.

In the same year as the lecture in Regensburg, 2006, Benedict XVI also went to Turkey. And before Christmas, in the speech to the curia, he made this revolutionary proposal to the Muslim world:

"In the dialogue with Islam that should be intensified, we must keep in mind the fact that the Muslim world today finds itself facing an extremely urgent task that is very similar to the one that was imposed upon Christians beginning in the age of the Enlightenment, and that Vatican Council II, through long and painstaking effort, resolved concretely for the Catholic Church. [...]

"On the one hand, we must oppose a dictatorship of positivist reasoning that excludes God from the life of the community and from the public order, thus depriving man of his specific criteria of judgment.

"On the other hand, it is necessary to welcome the real achievements of Enlightenment thinking – human rights, and especially the freedom of faith and its exercise, recognizing these as elements that are also essential for the authenticity of religion. Just as in the Christian community there has been lengthy inquiry into the right attitude of faith toward these convictions – an inquiry that certainly will never be concluded definitively – so also the Islamic world, with its own tradition, stands before the great task of finding the appropriate solutions in this regard.

"The content of the dialogue between Christians and Muslims at the moment is above all that of encountering each other in this effort to find the right solutions. We Christians feel ourselves to be united with all those who, precisely on the basis of their religious convictions as Muslims, struggle against violence and in favor of synergy between faith and reason, between religion and freedom. In this sense, the two dialogues of which I have spoken intersect with each other."

The current anti-Christian "strategy of violence" is the proof that when it comes to this illuminist revolution called for by Pope Benedict, the Islamic world has a very long way to go.