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“Nigeria is the most deadly place in the world to be a Christian,” says Jeff King, the president of International Christian Concern (ICC), a group that tracks religious-freedom violations. According to ICC, at least 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since the start of the 21st century.
Robert Royal, the author of The Martyrs of the New Millenium, provides equally stunning figures: “from 2019 to 2023, 33,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists…”
”It is genocide,” laments Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi. “They want to Islamize the country.” He describes Catholicism in Nigeria as “a Church under Islamic extermination.” From across the border in Benin, Bishop Martin Adjou Moumouni of N’Dali reports: “Nigerian jihadists have long been spreading terror in our diocese.”
The picture is reasonably clear, is it not? Our Christian brethren in Nigeria are under attack. From time to time a secular reporter will downplay the religious element of the bloodshed, saying that the conflicts in Nigeria reflect old tribal animosities, between herders (mostly Muslim) and farmers (mostly Christian). Those disputes are factors, certainly. But the victims of the bloodshed are overwhelmingly Christian. And in the region where the killings are most common, Christians have no doubt that they are targeted precisely because they are Christian.
So it was a shock last week that at a conference in Rome—on the topic of religious freedom, no less—Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters that the violence in Nigeria is “not a religious conflict, but rather more a social one—for example, disputes between herders and farmers.”
Continued below.
www.catholicculture.org
Robert Royal, the author of The Martyrs of the New Millenium, provides equally stunning figures: “from 2019 to 2023, 33,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists…”
”It is genocide,” laments Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi. “They want to Islamize the country.” He describes Catholicism in Nigeria as “a Church under Islamic extermination.” From across the border in Benin, Bishop Martin Adjou Moumouni of N’Dali reports: “Nigerian jihadists have long been spreading terror in our diocese.”
The picture is reasonably clear, is it not? Our Christian brethren in Nigeria are under attack. From time to time a secular reporter will downplay the religious element of the bloodshed, saying that the conflicts in Nigeria reflect old tribal animosities, between herders (mostly Muslim) and farmers (mostly Christian). Those disputes are factors, certainly. But the victims of the bloodshed are overwhelmingly Christian. And in the region where the killings are most common, Christians have no doubt that they are targeted precisely because they are Christian.
So it was a shock last week that at a conference in Rome—on the topic of religious freedom, no less—Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters that the violence in Nigeria is “not a religious conflict, but rather more a social one—for example, disputes between herders and farmers.”
Continued below.
The Vatican’s timid defense of persecuted Christians
The tendency to waffle—to speak softly, even when the time calls for a strong voice—is baked into the structure of the Vatican bureaucracy.
www.catholicculture.org
