Some Muslim scholars, such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, have interpreted the concept of a Holy War, or Jihad, as a personal striving for righteousness. Nonetheless, the incident of violent Islamic Jihads throughout history, especially against Christians, is cause for deep concern.

Christians who refused to convert to Islam were killed; those who did convert were then separated from their families, given Muslim names, and forcibly circumcised without anaesthetic, and with dirty instruments. Why, I wondered, weren't journalists reporting on this tragedy?

I pray that the Christians in Muslim lands get the same freedom as Muslims get in Christian lands, Shehadeh told us at the press conference. There are Muslim centers all over the United States but no churches in Saudi Arabia or many of the Gulf states.

In Moscow and Petrograd, priests, nuns, and lay people were arrested, including a whole community of Dominican nuns along with their mother superior, Anna Abrikosova, a convert. Their ultimate ends are largely unknown.

So far, Turkey has been able to resist the drive for international recognition of the Armenian genocide, in large part because of the nations superior resources and strategic importance. For Armenians, the sense of national identity is bound up with the genocide. As much as they are Armenian, they believe they are victims. Until their suffering has been acknowledged, they will not rest.

Why is only Christian participation in the democratic process perceived as a threat to constitutional safety?

The government in Khartoum regularly bombs clinics, schools, and food stations in the southern part of the country and in the Nuba Mountains. As a local bishop put it to me during a visit to Sudan last year, They are trying to blow out the candle of Christianity in Sudan.

The Talmud teaches that whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world. More than any other twentieth-century leader, Pius fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the fate of European Jewry was at stake. 

Asked what Catholics in the United States can do about the situation in Sudan, Bishop Macram answers quickly. "Jesus taught his disciples that this type of evil is only sent away by prayer and fasting.

Pakistans relatively small Christian community of 2 million, about 3 percent of the population (two-thirds of them Catholic), has been subjected to systematic repression and death.