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

by John L. Allen

  Duarte had been in the thick of political controversy for several years. In 1999 he excommunicated leading members of Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, after they had kidnapped more than 150 people attending Mass in a Cali church. His implacable opposition to the guerrillas earned him praise from some of the right-wing paramilitary death squads that sprang up all over Colombia to challenge the guerrillas. Yet Duarte was equally hard on those groups too, frequently speaking out against the practice of paramilitary killings.

  “A rebel who kidnaps and kills, eliminates entire populations and mocks the whole process of peace lacks the virtues proper to a human being and becomes the most miserable of men,” Duarte wrote in 2000. “We ask God that the guerrilla fighters in Colombia may feel deep sorrow in their souls for the evil they commit when they kill an innocent, defenseless brother or sister, and that they may understand that theirs is not a just war, but merely a repeating of savage acts of the saddest times of human history.”

  The archbishop’s death brought tributes from all over the world, including Pope John Paul II. “He paid the highest price for his energetic defense of human life, his firm opposition to all types of violence and his dedication to social development according to the Gospel,” the late pope said.

  A decade later, a Colombian court tried the founder of FARC and three other senior figures in absentia for involvement in Duarte’s death, sentencing each to twenty-five years in prison and ordering them to pay a massive fine to the murdered prelate’s family. In reaching its verdict, the court declared, “There is no doubt that the murder of Isaías Duarte Cancino was related to his religious status and position. As archbishop of Cali, he protested the reprehensible acts constantly carried out by guerrillas in this country.”

  As noted in the chapter on Latin America, Duarte was merely one of at least a hundred priests, bishops, deacons, nuns, and religious brothers to be killed amid the violence in Colombia since 1984. In some ways, Colombia is exhibit A in the case that Christians are at risk not only where they’re a minority, but absolutely everywhere.

  MARTYRS OF CHARITY

  As Notre Dame’s Daniel Philpott observed in a November 2012 essay in America magazine, “What is most distinctive about today’s martyrs is their witness to justice and reconciliation.” The emergence of a new class of “martyrs of charity,” meaning activists who defy an unjust status quo in whichever settings they find themselves, also helps explain why Christians are vulnerable everywhere. Those who benefit from systems of injustice typically don’t appreciate the challenge, and Christian beneficiaries are no exception.

  In earlier eras, Christians were put to death for specifically religious reasons, such as refusal to sacrifice to pagan gods. That still happens occasionally, but today’s martyrs more often find themselves persecuted for other reasons, often related to social and political positions taken on the basis of their reading of the Gospel. Christians around the world, as Philpott observes, are in the front lines of promoting “religious freedom, unity among the Christian churches, friendship among world religions and the transforming power of forgiveness in politics.” To that list could be added other signature Christian causes such as opposition to war, solidarity with the poor, and the robust defense of a “culture of life,” implying opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research. In addition, there are core virtues such as honesty, integrity, selflessness, and compassion, the practice of which also has a proven capacity to make some people angry.

  Recognizing that these commitments are often the subtext to anti-Christian violence in the modern world, the late Pope John Paul II stretched the concept of martyrdom to include not only those killed in hatred of the faith but also those who died in hatred of the church. Many theologians today are increasingly willing to include also those killed out of hatred for the virtues inspired by the faith.

  One classic example is St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan priest who died under the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941 after volunteering to take the place of a stranger. This was not a death in odium fidei, because Kolbe wasn’t put to death on the basis of his religious convictions. Yet when Pope John Paul II canonized Kolbe in 1982, the formal act of declaring someone a saint, he termed the Polish priest a “martyr of charity.”

  Don Pino Puglisi, from Sicily, is a more contemporary example. Puglisi served in the tough Palermo neighborhood of Brancaccio, and openly challenged the Sicilian Mafia, which controlled its streets. He was shot dead by a Mafia gunman in 1993, on his fifty-sixth birthday. By all accounts, Puglisi was a funny, spitfire pastor who convinced youth in Brancaccio that there are ways forward in life other than the mob, and who helped shape a civil society that challenged its political hold. He is often touted as the “Oscar Romero of Sicily,” meaning a man whose life made a difference and whose death changed history.

  Francesco Deliziosi is a Catholic layman in Palermo who had Puglisi as a religion teacher in high school and as a spiritual director for fifteen years, and who served as a volunteer in Puglisi’s parish from 1990 until the pastor was gunned down. Deliziosi then began a research project on Puglisi, which became the basis for the historical materials in the diocesan phase of the canonization process. According to Deliziosi, Puglisi’s anti-Mafia activism took shape during the 1960s in the tiny town of Godrana, in the hills roughly twenty-five miles outside Palermo. When he arrived as pastor, there had been fifteen recent murders, all related to a feud between two rival clans. Puglisi started going door-to-door, reading the Gospel with people and talking about forgiveness. He encouraged small groups to meet together to pray and read the Bible, at first once a month, then every fifteen days.

  Eventually one of the women who had been hosting a group said to Puglisi that she did not feel she could carry on until she had forgiven the mother of her son’s assassin. After much time, effort, and prayer, Puglisi arranged a reconciliation between the two women, which endured despite strong disapproval from many in the village. By itself this outcome did not cancel the feud, but it was a start.

  “Peace,” Puglisi said, “is like bread—it must be shared or it loses its flavor.”

  In 1992, a year before Puglisi’s own death, two famous anti-Mafia judges were assassinated in Sicily, Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone. Puglisi happened to be with some schoolchildren from his parish when he learned of Borsellino’s death. As Deliziosi tells the story, Puglisi was deeply upset, but after a moment he turned to the children and said: “We must be able to forgive the authors of this tragedy and to invite them to conversion.”

  The kids were incredulous. Puglisis then asked them, “If Judge Borsellino had been in your family, would you forgive his killers?” The youth, raised on the centuries-old Sicilian tradition of the vendetta, said no.

  “Then we have a long road yet to follow,” he said. “It is the road of Christian forgiveness, seeking justice and not revenge.”

  A plaque on the wall of Puglisi’s old parish in Brancaccio captures his spirit: “To the perpetual memory of the pastor, P. Giuseppe Puglisi. Priest of the Lord, missionary of the Gospel, former of consciences in truth. Promoter of social solidarity and ecclesial service in charity. Killed for his faithfulness to Christ and to humanity on September 15, 1993.” On June 28, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI granted permission for Puglisi to be classified as a martyr, which means that he can be beatified, the final step before sainthood, without a miracle being certified as due to his intercession.

  As a footnote, both Kolbe and Puglisi are also examples of “majority martyrs,” in the sense that they were killed for choices made on the basis of their faith despite living and working in overwhelmingly Christian cultures. With regard to Puglisi, one might well say that if a Catholic priest isn’t safe even in Italy, no further proof of the vacuity of the “minority only” myth should be required.

  WHY THIS MYTH IS TOXIC

  In addition to being inaccurate, the “minority only” myth is dangerous.
It obscures large swaths of the planet from view in thinking about the threats that Christians face, and suggests a false sense of invulnerability for Christians in societies where they represent a majority. It also aids and abets the reluctance of government officials and other leaders in majority-Christian societies to honestly confront the cancers that may be growing in those places. One can imagine Sicilian authorities, for instance, scoffing at the idea of anti-Christian persecution in their own backyard, citing Sicily’s overwhelmingly Catholic population. Yet the story of Don Puglisi is the most eloquent refutation possible to such denial.

  The myth that Christians are only at risk in certain prescribed places also overlooks the profound suffering faced by Christians in many heavily Christian locations, and often prevents the compelling stories of some of the most heroic martyrs of our time from being adequately told.

  For instance, Conchita Francisco was a sixty-two-year-old devout Catholic school principal in the remote province of Tawi Tawi in the southern Philippines who was shot to death in November 2012 as she was leaving Mass. Police were still looking for the gunman at the time of this writing, but many locals suspected the involvement of Abu Sayyaf, an armed Islamic group in the Mindanao region (the group’s name means “bearer of the sword”). It would be tragic if either Christians or advocates of religious freedom failed to invest the same energy in Francisco’s case, or in preserving her memory, as they would for a Christian targeted in Saudi Arabia or China, simply because the Philippines is a majority-Christian nation.

  Debunking this bit of mythology is not only a service to the truth but an important preliminary in turning the tide on the global war. This is a war that can find its victims absolutely anywhere.

  8

  THE MYTH THAT NO ONE SAW IT COMING

  In the movie Casablanca, there’s a famous scene in which Captain Louis Renault, played memorably by Claude Rains, declares himself shocked to discover gambling at Rick’s nightclub. Immediately after that declaration, of course, an employee of the nightclub hands the captain his winnings from the casino, for which he unashamedly expresses thanks. The scene has become a standard metaphor for the hypocrisy of officials who express surprise and dismay only when a scandal is uncovered, but otherwise condone the behavior, or, as in the case of Captain Renault, actively participate in it.

  When it comes to the global war on Christians, there’s often what we might call a “Casablanca defense” popular among politicians, police, prosecutors, and other responsible parties, which tends to be invoked on those infrequent occasions when a particular outrage, such as the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti in Pakistan, places these officials in an uncomfortable spotlight. In those circumstances, these officials typically profess dismay, declaring themselves stunned that such a thing could have happened. They heap praise on the victim and vow swift justice for the perpetrators, but also absolve themselves of responsibility by suggesting that no one could have anticipated such a thing. In addition, they often suggest the perpetrator was an unbalanced or mentally disturbed person, as a way of denying that the act was part of any broader pattern or climate.

  More often than not, this “Casablanca defense” is a bald lie. In a strong majority of cases, the act in question did not drop from a clear blue sky. Instead, the warning signs of trouble were usually abundantly clear, even if no one could have predicted the precise time or place when another round of violence might strike. Rather, the act usually speaks to a deeper climate of anti-Christian hostility, for which its leadership often must bear some measure of responsibility—if not for stoking it, at least for standing idly by while it gains force and places innocent people in harm’s way. Seeing past the “no one saw it coming” myth is thus an important step toward creating a global culture of accountability.

  (By the way, the next time a Christian is victimized in Morocco, the setting for the movie Casablanca, no one should let bureaucrats there get away with invoking the “Casablanca defense.” Among other signs of hostility, there’s a Moroccan convert to Christianity named Jamaa Ait Bakrim who, as of this writing, had served seven years in prison for the crime of proselytizing. Two years ago, the country deported dozens of foreign Christian workers and foster parents.)

  THE TURKISH EXAMPLE

  Reaction to the brutal June 3, 2010, murder in Turkey of Catholic bishop Luigi Padovese, who had served as the Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, offers a classic example of the Casablanca defense in action. The bishop’s longtime driver stabbed Padovese repeatedly, slitting his throat so deeply that his head was almost detached from his body. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Governor Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz of Hatay province insisted that the driver was mentally unhinged, suggesting that the attack was tragic but basically unpredictable and random. According to Celalettin, the incident was “a personal matter” that had no religious or political motive. He promised a “very thorough” investigation, although three years later most Turkish observers believe the inquest was fairly perfunctory.

  Turkey’s minister for culture and tourism, Ertugrul Günay, issued a message of condolences on behalf of the government. The Foreign Ministry expressed regret to the international media, while also emphasizing the murderer’s “psychological problems.” The state-run media outlet NTV Turkey announced erroneously that the murderer was not a Muslim but a convert to Catholicism, seen as an effort to deflect any connection between the murder and Islamic radicalism. One police source leaked allegations that the driver had been “forced to suffer abuse” in a homosexual relationship with Padovese, a suggestion that was later retracted following vigorous denials by sources close to both men.

  In framing things as unpredictable and not connected to any larger narrative, the Turkish government was not alone. Padovese’s murder came just one day before Pope Benedict XVI’s June 4–6, 2010, trip to Cyprus. (Padovese had been scheduled to take part in the trip). At the time, it was Benedict’s third voyage to the Middle East, and the pontiff was set to present the working document for an upcoming synod dedicated to the Middle East. After a firestorm of protest broke out in 2006 following a speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which Benedict XVI appeared to link Muhammad with violence, the pope had worked hard to put relations with Islam back on track, and he seemed determined not to allow the Padovese murder to cast a shadow over his outing to Cyprus. Aboard the papal plane en route to Nicosia, he told reporters that while he still had “very little information” about the killing, he was convinced that “we must not attribute the fact [of Bishop Padovese’s murder] to Turkey … What is certain is that it was not a religious or political assassination.”

  While Benedict undoubtedly had his reasons, his statement left many Turkish Christians perplexed. Looking back with the benefit of three years’ hindsight, it seems far less clear today that “religious or political” motives can be ruled out—at least as background to the murder, if not its direct cause.

  The archbishop of Smyrna, Ruggero Franceschini—Padovese’s successor as head of the country’s Catholic Church—rejected the official explanation of his colleague’s murder and maintained that the pope had received “bad counsel” prior to his denial of political or religious motives, insisting that he refused to acquiesce in the “usual hastily concocted, pious lie” about the murderer’s insanity.

  “I believe that with this murder, which has an explicitly religious element, we are faced with something that goes beyond government,” Franceschini said at the time. “It points towards nostalgic, perhaps anarchist groups who want to destabilize the government. The very modalities of the murder aim to manipulate public opinion.”

  In the section on Turkey in chapter 5, we saw that the Padovese murder was the culmination of a growing pattern of anti-Christian violence. The drumbeat included the shooting death of Fr. Andrea Santoro in 2006, attacks on three other prominent Catholic priests also in 2006, the assassination of Protestant human rights activist Hrant Dink in 2007, the gruesome murders of three Protestant missionaries in 2007, and the 2009 r
evelation of a “Cage Plan” hatched by ultranationalists intended to destabilize Turkey by attacking non-Muslim targets. At the time, a leader of the Turkish Protestant community, Rev. Behnan Konutgan, recorded other cases of violence against church property and the physical harassment of church members, suggesting that the assault on Padovese was eminently predictable, while a noted Turkish sociologist of religion, Ali Carkoglu, argued that no non-Muslim religious gathering in Turkey is risk free.

  Moreover, as the previous section also indicated, the specific attacks on Christians listed above unfolded in a broader context of coarsening public attitudes toward Turkey’s Christian minority. As momentum toward possible membership in the European Union appeared to gather steam, a growing backlash among Turkish nationalists and Islamist currents became palpable, often expressing itself in public eruptions of anti-Christian hostility. In turn, that animus reflects something deep and ugly in Turkish history and culture.

  The oldest Christians retain living memory of the state-sponsored mass deportations and massacres that culminated in the World War I Armenian genocide. More recently, Christian churches have experienced grave setbacks in addition to the abovementioned murders. Those difficulties include a four-year state prosecution of two Turkish evangelical Protestant converts from Islam on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” Although these charges were dropped for lack of evidence in October 2010, the converts were forced to pay fines of $3,170 each or go to prison for seven months for “collecting information on citizens.” Also in 2010, Turkish authorities under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party to conduct Islamic prayers at the ancient Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Virgin at Ani.