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

by John L. Allen

  Given the facts of the case, one could argue that Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr because he was killed as a traitor to the state, not as a religious believer. Looking at it that way, however, leaves Bonhoeffer’s own motives out of view. The relevant question is not only why the Nazis killed him but why Bonhoeffer involved himself in an undertaking that he clearly knew could lead to his death.

  Bonhoeffer struggled with the choice to try to kill another human being, writing at the time: “When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it.… Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.” In light of the circumstances of his execution, Bonhoeffer is today commemorated as a martyr by the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and several communities within the Anglican Communion.

  The Bonhoeffer example illustrates that unless we bring the motives of the one suffering into consideration, we cannot properly assess whether a given act is a case of religious persecution. Three other case studies drive that insight home.

  ERIC DE PUTTER

  The murder of a French Protestant missionary and academic named Eric de Putter in Cameroon on July 8, 2012, captures the poverty of leaving the victim’s motives out of view. A professor of Old Testament studies and a member of the French Reformed Protestant Church, de Putter was having dinner on a Sunday night with his wife, Marie-Alix, and a mutual friend at their residence in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon and the location of the Protestant University of Central Africa, where de Putter had taught for two years as a missionary volunteer. Someone knocked at the door, stabbed de Putter when he answered, and then fled. Marie-Alix called for medical help, but de Putter was dead before he reached the hospital. Police would later say that the killer was able to escape because a watchman who normally stood guard over the complex, which also housed the residence of the university rector, was absent. The couple had been scheduled to return to France in just a few days, having completed their two years of service.

  Officially the investigation into de Putter’s murder remained open at the time this book was written, but two figures already have been arrested and charged with involvement in the crime: a Ph.D. student at the Protestant University of Central Africa and the dean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology. According to police sources, the Ph.D. student ran afoul of de Putter when the French academic charged him with plagiarism. Police believe the murder of de Putter was engineered by the Ph.D. student, with the approval of the dean, in order to clear the way for the student’s thesis to be accepted.

  If that’s correct, at first blush it certainly doesn’t look like anti-Christian persecution. It seems more akin to a settling of scores in the workplace, or a particularly violent form of academic infighting. The motive would be professional advancement and the fear of disgrace, not any specifically religious opposition to de Putter’s beliefs. Indeed, since both the Ph.D. student and the dean are also Reformed Protestants, presumably they believed themselves to share the same religious convictions.

  Yet upon closer examination, there’s every reason to regard de Putter as a victim in the global war on Christians.

  First of all, even if the lone factor in the slaying was de Putter’s refusal to sign off on a plagiarized thesis, that itself is a moral position rooted in his Christian faith. De Putter’s writings clearly demonstrate that his view of the world was rooted in his reading of the Gospels. After his death, a friend posted a blog entry containing de Putter’s reworking of the beatitudes, in which he has Jesus praising the virtues of “justice, peace, purity, and truth.”

  Second, there is persistent suspicion that there’s more to the story. In the aftermath of the murder, the Protestant Federation of France issued a statement charging that the Protestant University of Central Africa was well known as “a dysfunctional institution where corruption, favoritism, and fraud in examinations had grown.” The federation suggested that de Putter had intended to make a report on the situation to church authorities responsible for the university when he returned to France, and that his murder was intended to muzzle his criticism. If so, then de Putter’s murder would be an example of how Christians themselves can be protagonists in the war on Christians.

  If there is indeed corruption at the university, it would be no surprise. Under strongman President Paul Biya, Cameroon is routinely rated by watchdog groups such as Transparency International as among the most corrupt regimes on earth. Biya earned the dubious distinction of landing on David Wallechinsky’s 2006 list of the “twenty worst living dictators.” Church leaders in Cameroon who speak out against that corruption often pay a steep price.

  The rundown of victims includes:

  • Fr. Joseph Mbassi, editor in chief of L’Effort Camerounais, the country’s Catholic newspaper, killed in October 1988 and his body mutilated

  • Fr. Bernabe Zambo, a pastor in the Bertoua archdiocese, poisoned in 1989

  • Fr. Anthony Fonteh, principal of Saint Augustine College in Nso, assassinated on campus in May 1990

  • Retired archbishop Yves Plumey of Garoua, murdered in 1991

  • Srs. Germaine Marie and Marie Leonie of the Congregations of Daughters of Our Lady of Sacred Heart, killed in August 1992

  • Jesuit Fr. Englebert Mveng, a noted theologian, killed in 1995

  • German missionary Fr. Anton Probst, murdered in 2003

  In that climate, allegations of corruption and the suggestion that a leading Christian figure may have been murdered for speaking out against it should surprise no one.

  Third and most basically, one has to ask what de Putter and his wife were doing in Cameroon in the first place. They certainly weren’t there for the money or professional advancement. De Putter’s expertise would have commanded much greater income in France or another Western location, and in terms of the sort of networking that advances an academic career, Cameroon was not an ideal setting. Instead, the couple came to Cameroon on the basis of their faith convictions, wanting to serve in a missionary setting and to be part of building the church in Africa. Both Eric and Marie-Alix de Putter were bright people with graduate-level educations, so they would have been aware of Cameroon’s reputation for corruption and lack of political freedom, and they would have known that Christians sometimes find themselves in harm’s way there. In de Putter’s case, he followed his moral compass despite knowing that in the context of Cameroon, doing so could be lethally dangerous.

  The case for seeing Eric de Putter as a contemporary martyr boils down to this: whatever may have motivated his assailant, the reason de Putter was in Yaounde that fateful night to answer the door is because of his deep Christian faith. That, and not just the rationale of his attacker, must be considered in assessing whether he counts as a victim in the global war on Christians.

  SR. LUKRECIJA MAMIĆ AND FRANCESCO BAZZANI

  These two Catholic missionaries were killed in Burundi on November 27, 2011, during an attempted robbery at a convent of the Sisters of Charity in Kiremba, in the country’s south. Mamić, a Croatian, lived at the convent, while Bazzani, an Italian layman and volunteer, had been called in that night to try to resolve a blackout, a frequent occurrence in the area. When thieves burst in, Mamić was killed right away as she tried to stop them. Bazzani and another nun, Sr. Carla Brianza, were taken as hostages. Nine miles away the attackers stopped and shot Bazzani to death, while Brianza managed to escape. The murderers were eventually arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

  Once again, a surface reading of events might conclude that this was hardly a chapter of the global war on Christians. The robbers attacked the convent because they thought it would have items worth stealing, and Mamić and Bazzani got in the way. Yet the question must be asked: What were Mamić and Bazzani doing in this part of Burundi in the first place?

  Mamić, sixty-three at the time of her death, was born in 1948 into a Croatian family
in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the seventh of eight children (of whom one became a priest and two became nuns). She went on to become a missionary and nurse with the Sisters of Charity, working in Ecuador, where she ministered to the Native American population from 1984 to 2001. She transferred to Burundi in 2002, where she lived and worked among the local indigenous people popularly known as “pygmies.” She took special care of poor and sick people in the long-neglected area, especially female victims of sexual violence and children orphaned by AIDS.

  This particular corner of Burundi had been one of the epicenters of the genocidal violence in Africa in the 1990s, and it’s also one of the corners of the planet hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. It’s a dangerous, largely lawless, and essentially forgotten corner of the world, where the Sisters of Charity and other religious groups are the only institutions that still have a functioning presence in the area.

  Mamić accepted such a dangerous mission on the basis of her religious beliefs. Sr. Lucija Baturina, mother superior of the Cyril and Methodius Province of the Sisters of Charity, said at her funeral Mass that Mamić “was always delighted by the universal dimensions of the Church, and the opening of new areas for the proclamation of the Gospel and the spread of the charism of our beloved order.” Sr. Klementina Banozi?, who served with Mamić in Ecuador, called her “a model of a life of radical Christianity,” and said that “her missionary service was her response to Jesus.” Mamić was buried in her home city of Split in Croatia on December 5, 2011, where Archbishop Marin Bariši? declared her “the pride of the Church among the Croats and the Croatian homeland.”

  Bazzani, who was fifty-nine at the time of his death, had arrived in Burundi in January 2010 along with his girlfriend, a fifty-two-year-old Italian named Lucilla Volta. He was a lifelong Catholic from Verona, Italy, where he had become part of a group called the Association for Missionary Cooperation, which trained laypeople to take up short-term positions around the world supporting the church’s missionary efforts. The association had a thirty-year-long relationship with the Sisters of Charity and their medical complex in Burundi, and Bazzani and four other volunteers from the Verona area had agreed to serve there. Bazzani made his career in Italy as a dental technician, but friends recalled that when he reached his fifties he wanted to do more. He wanted to serve God and to serve humanity, and they said the idea of going to the fifth-poorest country in the world to deliver health care and God’s word struck Bazzani as just the ticket. He took courses in French so that he could better converse with the locals.

  “Francesco coordinated our personnel, and in concrete he was our ears, our eyes and our mouth at Kiremba,” said Giovanni Goppi, president of the Association for Missionary Cooperation, at the time of Bazzani’s death. “He was very open, generous, an extraordinary man. He never tired of doing things, of giving someone a hand. He worked basically for free, and he would volunteer for anything. All he ever received was reimbursement for his expenses in order to live in that forgotten land.”

  Both Mamić and Bazzani were well-educated professionals who certainly knew there were safer and more comfortable places to live and work. In addition to being one of the five most impoverished places on earth, Burundi is ranked by the 2012 DHL Global Connectedness Index as the least globalized of 140 surveyed countries. It has the lowest per capita GDP of any nation and one of the world’s lowest life expectancy rates, largely due to warfare, corruption, poor access to education, and the effects of HIV/AIDS. Despite those hardships, Mamić and Bazzani chose to serve there because their faith compelled them to do so.

  Given all that, it’s inarguable that these two Christians died in what the Center for the Study of Global Christianity calls a “situation of witness.” They are a classic illustration of the point that in assessing whether someone has experienced anti-Christian violence, the motives of the victim, not just the perpetrator, are critical to proper assessment.

  THE BURUNDI SEMINARIANS

  Another group of victims from Burundi offers a final example of the inadequacy of putting the emphasis exclusively on the motives of the killers in trying to judge whether a particular act counts as “anti-Christian.”

  Thirty-six Catholic seminarians, all between the ages of fifteen and twenty, along with eight members of the seminary’s staff, were killed by a Hutu rebel group on April 30, 1997, when a group belonging to the so-called National Council for the Defense of Democracy stormed into the seminary and rousted the young men out of their beds. Armed with rifles, grenades, pistols, and knives, they ordered the seminarians to separate into two groups, Hutus and Tutsis, and it was obvious to everyone that the Tutsis were to be killed. The seminarians refused to split up, and as a result, all forty were murdered, Hutu and Tutsi alike dying together.

  The facility in Buta was what Catholics traditionally call a “minor” seminary, meaning it offered basic education and religious formation to younger men, roughly high school age, preparing to enter the major seminary, where they would begin their formal training for the priesthood. Eight of the killed seminarians came from Rwanda, six were from Congo, and one was from Nigeria, while most of the others came from Burundi.

  One can certainly admire the courage of these young men, yet it’s understandable why some observers might be reluctant to see them as victims of anti-Christian violence. There’s no evidence that these Hutu militants attacked the seminary because it was a religious institution, and in fact most of the rebels probably saw themselves as good Christians. Instead, these seminarians were among the fatalities in a bloody cycle of ethnic violence sweeping across their part of Africa at the time. They died because their executioners became frustrated, not because the invaders had any specific intention of killing future Catholic clergymen.

  According to a survivor named Jolique Rusimbamigera, the leader of the Hutu rebel group issued the kill order with these words: “Shoot these idiots who won’t separate!” (Rusimbamigera, by the way, would later be one of the participants in an ecumenical service to the martyrs of the twentieth century presided over by Pope John Paul II in the Roman Colosseum on May 7, 2000, along with representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church and a number of other Christian churches.)

  Concluding that this was not a chapter in the global war on Christians, however, doesn’t do justice to the reasons that Christians shaped by the environment of this particular place refused an order to separate themselves along ethnic lines.

  According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the Buta seminary, located in southern Burundi, had long been a refuge from the violence that had pitted Hutus and Tutsis against one another, which had waxed and waned since 1972. The seminary had made a special point of resisting the tug of ethnic animosity, explicitly organizing its life around the doctrine of Christian fraternity—the idea that the common brotherhood born of baptism was more important than ethnic origin or any other source of identity. Just prior to their massacre, the seminarians had gone through an Easter retreat dedicated to precisely this theme.

  Fr. Nicolas Niyungeko, rector of the Sanctuary of Buta in the Diocese of Bururi, wrote of the seminarians:

  At the end of the retreat, this class was enlivened by a new kind of spirit, which seemed to be a preparation for the holy death of these innocents. Full of rejoicing and joy, the word in their mouths was “God is good and we have met Him.” They spoke of heaven as if they had just come from it, and of the priesthood as if they had just been ordained.… One realized that something very strong had happened in their heart, without knowing exactly what it was. From that day on, they prayed, they sang, they danced to church, happy to discover, as it were, the treasure of heaven.

  The following day, when the murderers surprised them in bed, the seminarians were ordered to separate into two groups, the Hutus on one hand, the Tutsi on the other. They wanted to kill some of them, but the seminarians refused, preferring to die together. Their evil scheme having failed, the killers rushed on the children and slaughtered them with rifles and grenades. At th
at point some of the seminarians were heard singing psalms of praise and others were saying “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.” Others, instead of fighting or trying to run away, preferred helping their distressed brothers, knowing exactly what was going to happen to them.

  Their death was like a soft and light path from their dormitory to another resting place, without pain, without noise, nor fear. They died like Martyrs of the Fraternity, thus honoring the Church of Burundi, where many sons and daughters were led astray by hatred and ethnic vengeance.

  Forty days after the massacre, the small seminary dedicated its church to Mary, Queen of Peace, and it has since, according to Fr. Niyungeko, “become a place of pilgrimage where Burundians come to pray for the reconciliation of their people, for peace, conversion, and hope for all. May their testimony of faith, unity, and fraternity send a message for humankind and their blood become a seed for peace in our country and in the world.” When asked for a comment on the armed men who slaughtered his seminary brothers, the survivor, Rusimbamigera, replied: “I pray that the sacrifice of the murdered students and our suffering will lead the soldiers who caused this suffering to their own conversion.”

  Given that background, one has to conclude that if the death of these forty young men does not count as a Christian act, and that their deaths were the direct result of their Christian beliefs, then it’s hard to know what would.

  WHY THIS MYTH IS TOXIC

  As with the other myths we’ve examined, the most basic problem with the “only if the motives are religious” way of seeing the global war on Christians is that it’s inaccurate. It’s a model borrowed from a secular justice system, premised on the idea that to establish the degree of criminal liability for an act, the focus has to be on the motive of the perpetrator. For instance, to ascertain if a particular act falls under a hate-crimes statute, one has to examine the motives of the person committing the crime. Did the perpetrator target a particular individual on the basis of race, politics, or religion? Or was this simply a question of robbery or rage unrelated to the victim’s identity or beliefs?