The persecution of Christians

Bishop Liang died at the age of 87 after 28 years in prison and many years in forced isolation. The communist government withheld news of his death for several days.

The countless Christians recently killed or imprisoned in China join the ranks of martyrs from the first Roman imperial persecutions and their restoration under Julian the Apostate in the fourth century. In that same century, 16,000 Christians were killed in one slaughter in Persia, and the sanguineous trail continued under the Goths and Vandals. The enmity of the Iconoclastic emperors lasted about 120 years, into the eighth century, when the Islamic purges began their unending course. More modern European history is replete with adversity, and there have been no sufferings of the Church worse and also more heroic than those inflicted in recent times by atheist liberals, Nazis, and Communists. Young martyrs, like the Mexican priest Miguel Pro in 1927 and the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984, witness that the past century has mounted history's biggest attack on the Church. The organization Aid to the Church in Need says that Christians are "the most persecuted group in the world today." Its director Neville Kyrke-Smith says that many public voices quick to cite other human-rights abuses ignore oppression of Christians because "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."

The facts are there, and they include the supine surrender of the comfortably established in our society to intimidation by those whose modus vivendi is to threaten. Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have recently succumbed to radical Muslim pressure and censored themselves. At the same time, ridicule of Christianity is flaunted in public institutions as free speech at work. Our own government is increasingly dismissive of the Church, and a prominent foe of Catholicism, who wanted to remove the Church's tax-exempt status, has been nominated to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

In his New Year audience granted to diplomats, Pope Benedict XVI denounced "hostility, if not scorn, directed towards religion and towards Christianity in particular." It is not the nature of Christianity to get its way by terrorism and dismantling the fabric of democratic freedom. Pope Benedict is in the moral succession of the martyred fourth pope, Clement I, who prayed, "Free us Lord, from those who hate us without cause. Give peace and harmony to us and to all the inhabitants of the Earth, as you gave them to our fathers who called on you with trust and faith."