Persecuted and forgotten
An analytical report on persecution of Christians in many countries around the world was released today by Aid to the Church in Need. The document, entitled Persecuted and Forgotten? A report on Christians oppressed for their faith, 2007/2008, indicates that, in 17 of the 30 countries, Christian persecution has intensified during the past year. In four countries—Algeria, Eritrea, Iraq, and Pakistan—the continued survival of the church appears to be at risk.
Aid to the Church in Need’s United Kingdom director, Neville Kyrke-Smith, affirmed the gravity of anti-Christian persecution.
“What the [report summary] demonstrates is that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world today,” he said. “People are aware of an enormous number of human rights abuses throughout the globe, but they are not always aware of the denial of human rights to millions of Christians.
“The situation is worsening because it largely escapes media attention. We are suffering from a sort of ‘religious correctness’ which means that talking about the persecution of Christians is not acceptable to the secular media today, and sometimes they don’t even believe the facts.“
Bernardo Cervellera of Asia News suggests that economic prosperity and concern for religious liberty are often in conflict and, as much of the world economy slides into recession, religious freedom will become an even lower priority.
There is less and less interest on the part of world governments toward this topic. The inability to boycott even one day of the Beijing Olympics, in the name of “strategic partnership” and economic contracts; the halting and impotent vacillation toward the Burmese regime; the silence over the violence in India all demonstrate that countries are increasingly interested in nothing but economic matters. Globalization has made worldwide civil society more unified, but it has made governments more dependent upon the economy. And we maintain that with the worldwide recession we are witnessing, the discrepancy between public opinion and government policy will become even wider.
In his foreword to the report, Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Mosul B. Georges Casmoussa wryly notes, “Nothing, it seems, escapes the media’s attention” except those who suffer for their faith.
The full text of Persecuted and Forgotten? can be downloaded here, and a summary here.
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