The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  “I saw how a strong faith could change things that seemed difficult, if not impossible, to change,” Bhatti said.

  Over the course of his political career, Paul Bhatti said, his brother was sometimes offered money by Islamist parties and politicians to back down, and was also faced with a growing series of death threats. At one stage, Bhatti said, he tried to talk his brother into living with him in Italy, but he wouldn’t bite.

  “It wasn’t possible to convince him,” Bhatti said. “He left his life in the hands of Jesus.”

  Nor can Shahbaz Bhatti be styled as a parochial patron for Christians alone, because he defended the rights of Hindus, Sikhs, and others, including Muslims. Paul Bhatti said that point was brought home at his brother’s funeral: “I saw this sea of people, gripped by uncontrollable emotion,” he said. “My brother was a symbol not just for Christians but for other minorities, and even for very many Muslims.”

  One of his brother’s last projects, Bhatti said, was opening a free school in an earthquake-damaged zone of northern Pakistan for children left homeless. The student body of some 250 children, he said, is entirely Muslim, and the school is still open.

  To be sure, Bhatti moved in the complex world of politics, and there’s legitimate debate about his political line. Some Pakistani Christians felt he had been co-opted by the government and was not aggressive enough in defending their rights. Yet the Catholic Church has always insisted that beatifying someone does not mean endorsing every choice he or she ever made; instead, it means that despite human failures, the light of faith somehow shone through his or her life. If ever there were a case in which the evidence for that conclusion seems like a slam dunk, many observers would say it’s Shahbaz Bhatti.

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  LATIN AMERICA

  Dayton, Ohio, is a long way from Brazil, but it happens to be the birthplace of the most famous “martyr of the Amazon,” a feisty American Catholic nun named Sr. Dorothy Stang. Her story illustrates another face of the global war on Christians. It’s one formed not by religious intolerance or a “clash of civilizations” but rather by a more prosaic brutality associated with simple greed, as well as the sometimes lethal risks associated with a courageous Christian stand in defense of justice.

  One of nine children in a strong Catholic family in Ohio, Dorothy Stang grew up during the Great Depression, with her blue-collar Catholic faith instilling a ferocious commitment to defending the needy. Early on, she dreamed of being a missionary. She joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur when she was seventeen years old, and in 1966 she was shipped off with four other young nuns to the city of Coroata in Brazil. Her first assignment was to educate local farmers who had no formal schooling. In the early 1970s, the Brazilian government decided to encourage development of the Amazon forest, offering poor farmers 250 acres of land while wealthy ranchers received 3,000 acres. Many farmers from Sr. Dorothy’s area moved to take up the offer, and she followed them, helping to build schools and to pioneer sustainable methods of agriculture. She ended up in the town of Anapu, described as the “Wild West” of the Brazilian Amazon.

  Stang’s biographer, Sr. Roseanne Murphy, set the scene this way: “The area is lawless. Ranchers pay off the police and very often the judges. If the ranchers want more land for cattle, they simply send thugs with guns and say [to the farmers], ‘This is our land.’ ”

  Observers say that thugs acting on orders from the ranchers routinely burned the houses and crops of local farmers in order to drive them off, with police and the courts generally doing nothing. Stang emerged as a great advocate for the farmers and local indigenous groups, becoming famous for moving through the free-fire zone clad in a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap. One of her favorite T-shirts bore the slogan A morte da floresta é o fim da nossa vida, Portuguese for “The death of the forest is the end of our life.” Stang would camp outside police stations and courthouses, demanding that the rights of her people be upheld. At one point, local ranchers reportedly put a $50,000 bounty on her head, and she was well aware of the threats.

  “I don’t want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest,” Stang said during the period when death threats were swirling around her. “They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.”

  Among other causes, Stang was vocal about the urgency of preserving the Amazon from creeping deforestation. According to one analysis, more than 20 percent of the rain forest has been cut down since it was opened to development, more than in the previous 350 years since European colonization began. Stang insisted that in the Amazon, environmental conservation and the defense of human rights were inextricably intertwined. In December 2004, she was given the Humanitarian of the Year award by the Brazilian Bar Association.

  In February 2005, a powerful local rancher ordered that the houses belonging to twelve stubborn local farmers be burned down near the town of Esperanza (the town’s name, ironically enough, means “hope” in Portuguese). Stang organized a meeting of the farmers to encourage them to stay put on their land and to rebuild the bamboo huts they’d been living in which had been knocked down in a previous raid. She also invited a couple of gunmen, trying to persuade them not to engage in further violence. According to their later testimony, Stang walked with them to the meeting, at one point taking a map out of her bag to show them the land that belonged to the farmers. When they asked if she had a gun, she pulled out her Bible and told them it was the only weapon she had.

  Stang read to them from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” she said, “for they shall be called children of God.”

  At that point, one of the gunmen gave the signal, and they proceeded to shoot Stang six times, leaving her dead on the muddy forest road. At the time of her death, according to a Greenpeace analysis, more than eight hundred poor people, labor leaders, and environmentalists had been murdered in the Amazon, with only nine convictions for those killings. Only ten cases had actually even gone to trial, according to statistics maintained by the Catholic Church in Brazil. Stang was seventy-three at the time of her assassination, having served in Brazil for thirty-nine years.

  Stang’s brother, David, himself served as a priest and missionary in Africa before returning to the United States. He spoke to his sister by phone the night before her death, from his home in Palmer Lake, Colorado. She told him that the next day she was “going down the road,” to confront some ranchers and loggers, adding, “I’m a little concerned.” David would later visit Brazil five times to track the progress of the criminal charges against his sister’s assassins, saying that each time he did so he felt like he was watching the eternal “dance between good and evil.”

  Stang’s murder turned out to be something of a turning point for the cause of justice in the Amazon, as not only were the two gunmen and an intermediary arrested and convicted, but so too was the landowner, Vitalmiro Bastos Moura—the first time, according to experts, that one of the intellectual authors of a land-related murder had been criminally charged and convicted. Another rancher also suspected of ordering the killing, Regivaldo Pereira Galvão, was also convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison, though the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered him released in April 2012 on the grounds that his legal appeals had not yet been exhausted.

  Stang’s story continues to inspire people around the world. In 2008, an American filmmaker named Daniel Junge released a documentary titled They Killed Sister Dorothy, with a voice-over by famed actor and political activist Martin Sheen. In 2009 composer Evan Mack produced an opera devoted to Stang’s life titled Angel of the Amazon. The Dorothy Stang Center for Social Justice and Community Engagement keeps her memory alive at her alma mater, Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. She’s widely considered a saint, even in secular circles that typically take little notice of religious figures. In 2006, for instance, National Geographic hailed Stang as a m
odel of “dedication to the ideal of family farmers who extract their sustenance in harmony with the forest.”

  David, her brother, expressed her legacy this way: “Sometimes we think of nuns as gentle women with habits on, and we say, ‘Aren’t they nice servants?’ She was not that. She wasn’t that at all. She chose to be a servant, but she wasn’t anybody’s slave.”

  LATIN AMERICA: OVERVIEW

  At first blush, Latin America seems an improbable setting for the global war on Christians. It’s the most thoroughly Christian corner of the map, home to the two largest Roman Catholic nations on earth, Brazil and Mexico, and more than 40 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Latin America also has a burgeoning evangelical and Pentecostal population. Belgian Passionist Fr. Franz Damen, a veteran staffer for the Bolivian bishops, concluded in the 1990s that conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism in Latin America during the twentieth century actually surpassed the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the sixteenth century. A study commissioned in the late 1990s by the Conference of Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM), found that eight thousand Latin Americans were deserting the Catholic Church every day, most ending up in a new Christian church of an evangelical or Pentecostal flavor.

  There’s such a deep undercurrent of popular religiosity in Latin America that, in most societies, even socialist political movements and criminal gangs feel compelled to drape themselves in religious symbolism in order to enjoy popular legitimacy. It’s also the kind of place where Christian leaders often enjoy superstar status, and can parlay that standing into political muscle. Fernando Lugo was a celebrated Catholic bishop and friend of the poor in Paraguay who traded in his miter for the sash of political office, serving as his country’s president from 2008 to 2012. (He was defrocked by the Vatican, but that didn’t diminish his electoral prospects.) If there’s any place on earth where Christians ought to be safe, in other words, one might think Latin America would be it.

  Yet the bloody history of Latin America in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first suggests a very different lesson. This is the homeland of the great martyrs of the liberation theology movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, shot to death as he celebrated Mass in 1980, as well as the six Jesuits slain at the University of Central America along with their cook and her daughter in 1989, and the four American nuns abducted, raped, and murdered by members of the National Guard in El Salvador in 1980. Latin America is also home to the single most dangerous place on earth to be a church worker, according to official Vatican statistics, which is Colombia. Since 1984, seventy Catholic priests, two bishops, eight nuns, and three seminarians have been slaughtered there, most falling victim to the nation’s notorious narcotics cartels. Scores of Pentecostal and evangelical pastors and faithful also have lost their lives.

  In general, Latin America does not produce many new Christian martyrs to a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, or who fall victim to angry Hindu or Buddhist radicals. Yet in the early twenty-first century, Latin America has become the premier zone for three other fronts in the global war on Christians:

  • Martyrs to social justice, humanitarian concerns, and the basic virtues of the faith. These are Christians killed for standing up to corrupt regimes, to ruthless corporations willing to kill to defend their economic privilege, and to criminal gangs, on the basis of their reading of the Gospel. Poverty has long been a special concern for Latin American Christianity, given that the continent is widely regarded as having the greatest income disparities between rich and poor in the world.

  • “Wrong place at the wrong time” martyrs, meaning Christians killed in essentially random circumstances, often as the victims of a robbery gone wrong or simply as innocent bystanders. Their deaths too are part of the global war, because these Christians chose to remain in dangerous or lawless situations in order to express solidarity with the ordinary people left behind. For instance, in February 2011 a prominent Honduran evangelical pastor named Carlos Roberto Marroquín, forty-one, was shot to death by two assailants as he walked his two schnauzers in the Colonia Aurora neighborhood near his house. He was the second pastor to be murdered in 2011, after the January 30 killing of Raymundo Fuentes, forty-three, of the New Jerusalem Temple, slain as he was leaving the evening service with his wife. Two days prior the daughter of an evangelical pastor also had been killed. Observers believe the pastors were not targeted because they were Christian, but were victims of robberies. Their choice to remain accessible in that environment, however, reflected a determination to live the Gospel despite obvious risks.

  • Victims of intra-Christian violence, especially tensions between Catholic traditionalists in some parts of Latin America and the continent’s rapidly expanding evangelical and Pentecostal footprint. Latin America, in that sense, offers a reminder that the enemy in the global war on Christians isn’t always external. Sometimes the threat arises from within the Christian family—the war on Christians, in other words, sometimes is a civil war.

  COLOMBIA

  Although Colombia is an economically and politically sophisticated society of forty-six million people, large areas of the country are lawless zones controlled by criminal organizations, drug cartels, revolutionaries, and paramilitary groups that often operate like medieval fiefdoms. In many cases these criminal organizations and armed groups are hostile to the presence of Christian missionaries, preachers, pastors, and activists because they’re the only respected figures in the area willing to speak out against violations of human rights, abuses of power, and the exploitation of both people and natural resources.

  In a 2010 report, the Christian NGO Justapaz, a ministry of the Mennonite Church in Colombia, counted ninety-five death threats or attempted murders against Christians in that year alone, as well as seventy-one forced displacements, seventeen homicides, two disappearances, and multiple cases of beatings, torture, kidnapping, and forced recruitment. According to the report, criminal organizations accounted for 90 percent of this violence. In some parts of rural Colombia, there are fuzzy alliances between tribal groups practicing indigenous pre-Christian forms of religion and various paramilitary factions, especially the principal rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Reports suggest that the rebels sometimes enlist these tribal groups in attacking Christian targets and leaders, taking advantage of their resentment of Christian proselytism. Under Colombian law, certain indigenous areas are autonomous and government security forces aren’t allowed to enter, which makes them natural havens for both guerrilla groups and criminal outfits. Christian churches are often the lone institutions that operate in these regions not co-opted by the guerrillas and the gangs.

  The following incidents reflect the sort of thing that has become routine in various parts of Colombia:

  • In February 2011, an evangelical pastor and two of his relatives were killed in the town of Dibulla, located in the country’s La Guajira region, by right-wing rebel groups. The murders came in apparent retaliation for the growing number of believers in the region, and to stop the spread of fasting and prayer meetings perceived as a potential focal point for organizing efforts to resist the hold of the rebels.

  • In March 2011, Pastor George Ponton of the Evangelical Christian Church of Colombia was poisoned by indigenous leaders in the Cauca department, which is widely considered the epicenter of the country’s armed conflict.

  • In September 2011, two missionaries working for the World Missionary Movement Church were killed by illegal militias.

  • On January 26, 2011, Catholic priests Fr. Rafael Reátiga Rojas and Fr. Richard Armando Piffano Laguado, both pastors of parishes in Bogotá, were shot to death on the southern outskirts of the capital. The assassin had been riding in the same car with the two priests. He shot one in the head and the other in the chest, then escaped with the help of someone waiting to drive him away. Many observers interpreted this as a warning intended to frighten and intimidate
priests to refrain from political and human rights activism.

  • On February 12, 2011, Fr. Luis Carlos Orozco Cardona, twenty-six at the time, was seriously wounded when he was shot by a young man outside his cathedral, and the priest died the next morning of complications during surgery. The motives for the slaying were unknown.

  • On May 12, 2011, Fr. Gustavo García was assassinated by an individual who attacked him to steal his cell phone. The priest was talking on his phone while waiting for a bus so that he could go look after a sick member of his congregation. A bandit attacked him with a knife and left him to die. García had been a university chaplain and a well-known figure in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

  • In September 2011, Fr. Jose Reinel Restrepo Idárraga was killed in western Colombia while riding his motorcycle from one pastoral assignment to another. The assailants stopped the priest, shot him to death, and stole the motorcycle.

  • On September 12, 2011, Fr. Gualberto Oviedo Arrieta, a Catholic pastor in the Diocese of Apartadó, was found dead in the parish rectory, his body covered with stab wounds and the signs of a beating. Nothing was stolen, and the murder took place just after the conclusion of a “Week of Peace” mobilizing local schools and other institutions to oppose the use of violence.

  • On October 16, 2011, Catholic layman Luis Eduardo García was kidnapped by a group of guerrillas and later murdered. He had been working on a project to assist people hit by a wave of cold weather. García was also known for his dedication to local farmers and the victims of natural disasters, often criticizing the indifference of both the government and the rebel groups to the suffering of ordinary people.