The case generated controversy, in part because the investigation revealed that Puşcoiu had previously been questioned by police for brandishing a knife at the bread company in Focsani where he worked, but he had been released and no charges had ever been filed. Puşcoiu apparently left Romania briefly after that incident to travel to Italy, spending time visiting churches and developing his own idiosyncratic reading of the Bible. Prosecutors described him as “mentally unbalanced” and “obsessed” with what he believed to be the hidden meaning of various texts from Scripture.
In the aftermath of the attack, the Patriarchate of the Romanian Orthodox Church issued a statement calling on security services to do a better job of protecting churches. The statement deplored that the attack came in a church, “where priests preach peace and love of neighbor, and now a peaceful and venerable prelate was brutally murdered in a horrible crime that shows the alarming state of degradation, violence and insecurity which characterizes society today.”
In the wake of his death, Marin was recalled as a humble pastor who remained close to the people he served. He was the father-in-law of a well-known trade union leader named Vasile Marica. Media reports indicate that the community in Foscani was in shock after the attack, given that Marin had been seen as a “kind and gentle” figure with no reputation for generating controversy or taking high-profile positions on political or cultural questions. Observers believe that Marin was killed not for personal reasons but as a symbol of a religious system that his attacker had come to loathe.
Religion famously has the capacity to stir deep passions, for both good and ill. The death of Fr. Tudor Marin is a grisly reminder that even in the twenty-first century, and even in an overwhelmingly Christian society such as Romania, the mere fact of being an ordinary Christian can occasionally be enough to court danger.
PART TWO
Myths About the Global War on Christians
U.S. senator Hiram Warren Johnson is credited with coining the phrase “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” in 1918. Some dispute the attribution, but whoever said it, the experience of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries illustrates its accuracy. From persistently inflated body counts given during the war in Vietnam to the fabled “weapons of mass destruction” that were nowhere to be found in Iraq, misinformation is as much a weapon of modern combat as tanks and guns.
So too with the global war on Christians, where several chronic misperceptions and erroneous ways of framing the situation get in the way of clear-eyed perception. The chapters in this section tackle five such common myths:
• Christians are vulnerable only where they’re a minority, rather than being exposed to danger virtually anywhere, including societies in which they represent the overwhelming majority.
• “No one saw it coming,” an assumption that means acts of anti-Christian violence are forever styled as random and unpreventable, rather than the predictable result of a mounting pattern of hatred.
• “It’s all about Islam,” fueling notions that the war on Christians is exclusively a product of Muslim radicalism, rather than being driven by a bewildering cocktail of social forces.
• “It’s only persecution if the motives are religious,” rather than seeing Christians as martyrs every time they put their safety at risk on the basis of their faith.
• The war on Christians is a left-wing or right-wing issue, as opposed to the transcendent human rights concern of the early twenty-first century, regardless of ideology or political affiliation.
In various forms, these myths can be found running through much of the public discussion about anti-Christian harassment and violence. In some cases, different constituencies have powerful motives for keeping these myths alive, hoping to exploit the global war on Christians as a wedge issue or to galvanize Christian activism in favor of a pet cause. In other instances, these myths are the result of naive assumptions and partial impressions, which linger because neither the secular media nor the Christian intelligentsia has bothered to examine them critically. In an environment in which press coverage of the war on Christians is often episodic and ill-informed, and in which most Christian conversation is obsessively focused on domestic issues, it’s not surprising that these myths have had a long shelf life.
If truth is the first casualty of war, clear perception is the beginning of peace. The reports collected in the previous chapters have already provided the raw material to debunk these myths. The business of this section is to bring it all together so that by the end, to quote St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, we can see the global war on Christians “not through a glass darkly, but face-to-face.”
7
THE MYTH THAT CHRISTIANS ARE AT RISK ONLY WHERE THEY’RE A MINORITY
On those rare occasions when the war on Christians registers on the public radar screen, there’s a tendency to regard it as a problem largely confined to regions where Christians are encircled by some larger force. The Middle East comes to mind, especially because saturation coverage of Islamic radicalism makes the idea easy to accept. Likewise, most people don’t have a hard time imagining Christians as victims in China or North Korea, because it’s commonly understood that there Christians represent a subculture up against hostile regimes with checkered human rights records. India too seems a plausible setting for anti-Christian hostility, given its overwhelmingly Hindu majority and growing public awareness of the dangers of Hindu radicalism.
To be sure, there’s a surface plausibility to this way of thinking about anti-Christian persecution. In the 2012 edition of the annual rundown issued by Open Doors of the top fifty nations in which Christians are at risk, only four are societies in which Christians are a majority (Eritrea, Cuba, Belarus, and Colombia). It’s also understandably difficult for people to get their minds around the idea that a war on Christians could take root in overwhelmingly Christian settings, where churches still wield massive social influence, Christian leaders are often culture-shaping celebrities, and Christian institutions command massive financial and human resources. In those environments, it’s tempting to presume that Christians ought to be basically safe.
Tempting, that is, but thoroughly false.
First of all, even if it were true that Christians are exposed to persecution only where they constitute a demographic minority, it would not diminish the seriousness of the issue. According to a recent Pew Forum analysis, 10 percent of the world’s Christians live in societies in which they’re a minority. Given that there are more than two billion Christians on the planet, this translates into more than two hundred million people living in risk-filled circumstances. Any scourge that imperils that many people, whatever the cause, would merit concern. For instance, one leading estimate of the number of people around the world at risk of displacement due to climate change is also two hundred million, and there’s certainly no shortage of anxiety about that issue.
Even a moment’s reflection, however, is enough to demonstrate that it’s not just places where Christians are a minority that form the front lines of this war, and it never has been. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates that seventy million Christians have been martyred since the time of Christ, with forty-five million of those deaths coming in the twentieth century alone. By far the largest concentration of martyrs was in the Soviet Union, with as many as twenty-five million killed inside Russia and an additional eight million in Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine are profoundly Christian societies, even during the period in which they were governed by officially atheistic regimes.
Many of the most celebrated martyrs of the late twentieth century came in Latin America, among Christians who resisted the police states of the region. As we saw in chapter 1, the popular estimate that on average one hundred thousand Christians were killed every year over the past decade is heavily influenced by the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Christians have been slaughtered indiscriminately in what experts at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity descr
ibe as a “situation of witness.” The Democratic Republic of Congo too is a preponderantly Christian nation.
The basic insight is that anywhere Christians profess their faith openly, anywhere they take controversial stands in favor of social justice and human rights on the basis of their convictions—anywhere, for that matter, where they’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—they are exposed to danger. Indeed, martyrdom is at least as likely where Christians are in the majority, for the simple reason that it’s more probable that the activists and voices of conscience who stir opposition will be Christians.
SNAPSHOTS OF “MAJORITY MARTYRS”
Previous chapters have already brought numerous examples of what we might call “majority martyrs,” meaning Christians who suffer violence in places where Christians are a social majority. They include American Sr. Dorothy Stang, the great “martyr of the Amazon” in Brazil, and Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, a leader in the Scalabrinian lay movement and a popular blogger, beheaded in Mexico in 2011 for exposing the activities of a drug cartel. As we have also seen, sometimes Christians face lethal threats from their fellow Christians, such as Lorenzo López, a twenty-year-old evangelical from San Juan Chamula in Mexico, killed by a band of militant traditionalist Catholics who see evangelicals as a threat to the country’s Catholic identity. Brazil and Mexico are the two largest Catholic countries on earth, illustrating that simply being in the majority is no guarantee against harm.
The Vatican-sponsored missionary news agency Fides issues an annual list of Catholic pastoral workers who lost their lives around the world. (The term “pastoral worker” refers to clergy and laity who work for the church, not ordinary faithful.) For the year 2011, Fides recorded twenty-six such deaths. What’s striking is that only one died in a country where Christians are a minority: Rabindra Parichha, a lay catechist who was murdered in Orissa in eastern India. All the remaining casualties died in places where Christians form a majority, and most went to their deaths in places where Christianity is the traditionally dominant local religion.
The following are a few representative examples of “majority martyrs,” meaning Christians who died in places where Christianity is the dominant religious tradition and where one might think the global war on Christians wouldn’t reach.
Sr. Angelina
The story of Sr. Angelina, a Catholic nun and member of the Augustinian order (her last name is not given in any of the reports of her death), neatly illustrates the fallacy of the “only where a minority” myth.
A native and resident of South Sudan, she was killed on January 17, 2011, while traveling in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo to bring medical aide to Sudanese refugees. Both South Sudan and the DRC have Christian majorities, and the Catholic Church enjoys strong social prestige. Moreover, Sr. Angelina, a member of the St. Augustine Institute, was attacked and killed by the Uganda-based Lord’s Resistance Army, which is both a rebel force and also a sort of new religious movement, blending Christianity with African mysticism and tribal beliefs. In recent years, the LRA has waged a campaign of terror, killing and kidnapping innocent victims in South Sudan. Since 1988, the LRA is believed to have abducted more than thirty thousand children. Boys are forced to become child soldiers, while the girls are abused as sex slaves. Sr. Angelina was thirty-seven at the time of her death at the hands of the LRA militants, who apparently wanted to steal her supplies.
The fact that a self-styled Christian militia exercises this reign of terror in a zone where the local population is largely Christian, and where the churches enjoy enormous respect, forcefully demonstrates that even places where Christians dominate the social landscape are not exempt from the global war.
Fr. Fausto Tentorio
Fr. Fausto Tentorio is another “majority martyr,” a Catholic priest and member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions who was slain in the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines in October 2011. Tentorio, an Italian missionary priest known by the locals as “Pops,” had been serving on the island of Mindanao, the only area of the country with a significant Muslim presence. However, there’s no evidence that his death had anything to do with Muslim-Christian tensions. Instead, many locals believe that the gunman arrested in the case had links to a right-wing militia known as the Bagani Forces, who had targeted Tentorio for his staunch support of anti-mining movements on behalf of the local indigenous population, accusing him of being a supporter of the Communist-affiliated New People’s Army.
Tentorio was shot and killed inside the compound of the Mother of Perpetual Help parish church in Arakan, on Mindanao, at around 7:30 a.m. on Monday, October 17, 2011. It was not an ending that came as a complete surprise, given that the missionary priest had faced death threats before over the course of the thirty-two years he spent in the Philippines. In 2003, he had been menaced by the same local militia that many people suspected of orchestrating his death eight years later. Here’s his own account of that 2003 experience, drawn from his diary: “On the morning of October 6, 2003, I left the parish of Arakan, Cotabato, at 8:00 together with four of our staff to visit some villages of indigenous people in the area of Kitao-tao, Bukidnon about 30 kilometers away.” Tentorio wrote that concerned citizens told him that the Bagani group would cut off his head, roast his ears, and eat them. The people hid him in a hut as the Bagani group began searching for him and another man, Isidro Indao, vice chairman of a group that the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions had organized and supported for many years. Tentorio later escaped after the residents diverted the attention of the Bagani group by inviting them to slaughter and roast a pig at another village.
Tentorio was born on January 7, 1952, in Santa Maria di Rovagnate, and raised in Santa Maria Hoè in Lecco, Italy. He was ordained in 1977 and left for the Philippines the following year. He worked with Christian, Muslim, and indigenous B’laan communities in Columbio, Sultan Kudarat, before transferring to the mission in Arakan. He was actually the third priest of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions to be killed in the Philippines, after Fr. Tullio Favali in 1985 and Fr. Salvatore Carzedda in 1992. Like Tentorio, Favali had been accused of being a Communist sympathizer because of his stances in favor of the local poor and against the large-scale corporate interests in the area.
The Philippines is the third-largest Catholic country in the world, and also home to burgeoning evangelical and Pentecostal movements. It’s among the most profoundly and tangibly Christian societies on the planet, a place where national leaders are expected to profess Christian beliefs as part of their public discourse, and where clergy often carry more weight in moving opinion than politicians and judges. Obviously, that pervasive Christian ethos was not enough to keep Tentorio and his two confreres safe.
Pastor Julius Mukonzi
Julius Mukonzi of Kenya is an African example of the “majority martyr.” He was a popular Protestant police chaplain who belonged to the Utawala Interdenominational Church in Garissa, located in the country’s northeast. The church, which is inside a police compound, serves police officers stationed at the compound as well as their families. On November 4, 2012, Mukonzi was delivering a sermon when a grenade was tossed onto the roof of the church; it went off directly above his head, killing him. At least eleven of the estimated forty worshippers inside the church were injured in the attack, most of them fellow police officers. Three were later airlifted to Nairobi for specialized treatment. Other churches ended their services early as news of the attack spread, and church leaders called for an inquiry into an increase in anti-Christian violence. Although no group has claimed responsibility, authorities believe it was carried out by the Muslim extremist group Al-Shabab. According to media reports, Al-Shabab had staged several similar attacks in the past year, including a grenade attack on a Nairobi church in September that killed a nine-year-old boy and an attack in Garissa on July 1 that killed eighteen people.
The vast majority of Kenya’s forty-three million people, roughly 83 percent of the population, is Ch
ristian. Kenya is among the most Christian societies in Africa, and increasingly it’s one of the Christian powerhouses across the developing world. Nairobi is home to several of the best-regarded Christian seminaries on the continent, and Kenya also has the most developed Christian media outlets anywhere in Africa. Yet as the story of Julius Mukonzi illustrates, those things alone are not always sufficient to keep Christians safe.
Archbishop Isaías Duarte Cancino
Archbishop Isaías Duarte Cancino of Colombia was assassinated in 2002. Colombia is the seventh-largest Catholic country in the world, the kind of place where Catholic clergy are often media rock stars and political heavy hitters, and where very little happens without the church being involved. It’s also the birthplace of the G12 model for missionary work pioneered by the International Charismatic Mission, based on each church member assembling a group of twelve other believers, which is spreading like wildfire all across Latin America. Yet this pervasive religious climate has hardly been sufficient to insulate Christians from violence—even senior clergy are exposed, as the story of Archbishop Duarte makes clear.
Sixty-three at the time of his death, Duarte was an outspoken critic of the political and drug-related violence in Colombia. On March 16, 2002, two young gunmen shot him to death as he emerged from the church of the Good Shepherd in Aguablanca, one of the poorest districts of his Cali archdiocese. He had just been conducting a wedding ceremony for more than a hundred couples. Cali, in southwestern Colombia, is home to two million people and some of the country’s most powerful drug-trafficking organizations. In February, Duarte had publicly accused drug bosses of pouring money into the campaign coffers of local candidates in Colombia’s congressional elections, which had taken place on March 10, just six days before his assassination.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 20
