Although I had read many books on this subject during my youth, it was not until I was thirty years old that I met anyone who had seen first-hand the evidence of how brutal that persecution really was.

Persecution that's the name for it. Tolerance might be the highest virtue in our popular culture, but it doesn't often extend to Christians these days. Christians are increasingly being driven from public life, denied their First Amendment rights, and even actively discriminated against for their beliefs. So argues David Limbaugh in his new book.

One of my claims to fame is that I am a graduate of the fire breathing, fundamentalist Bob Jones University. This is the college deep in the Bible belt that gave Ian Paisley his honorary doctorate and still makes headlines for its anti-Catholic bigotry.

It is a dramatic sign of the rampaging secularization of North American and European life during the past half-century that a book like "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice" by Philip Jenkins, has come about.

The American media, usually painstaking in their efforts to offend members of no racial, religious or gender category, consistently make one major exception the Roman Catholic Church. So argues Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religion at Penn State and an Episcopalian, in his new book "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice".

It is my experience, as a lawyer, that many people are threatened in schools. Many feel that their beliefs and convictions are under attack from within the very bodies that currently hold sway within the schools themselves.

Canada has become rather impatient with public manifestations of religious belief. Having decided we are a secular society, we assume that all institutions should follow secular rules, even if those rules keep changing. When religious beliefs collide with individual rights, we tend to come down on the non-religious side, if necessary using the courts to impose our vision of Canadian life.

I approached this essay by reading Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" (2002) in conjunction with its polar opposite, Eugenio Zolli's "Why I Became a Catholic" (1953).

On Oct. 21, an event of enormous importance, certainly symbolically, occurred at the White House. The president, I am thrilled to report, signed the Sudan Peace Act into law.

The story of Romanian persecution and martyrdom is virtually without equal in the 20th or any other century. As LOsservatore Romano wrote in 1948, when the persecution was only starting: No similar story of moral violence, of persecution, of the Via Crucis of liberty, of personality, and of human dignity can be read in all the pages of history.