Christianity is, by an order of magnitude, the most persecuted religion in the world today. Between 360 million and 380 million Christians face high degrees of hostility. Conservative estimates are that more than five thousand Christians are killed annually for their faith, especially in places such as Nigeria and Burkina Faso. But the killing, torture, and imprisonment are taking place across the globe. In many Western countries, a less lethal but still severe form of persecution is visited upon Christians by ideological secularists, who see Christianity as their principal intellectual and cultural opponent. In many ways, contemporary attacks on Christianity are a continuation of the anti-Christian violence of the twentieth century, which produced more Christian martyrs than all of the previous centuries combined. However, the source of the animosity has shifted considerably. Whereas in the last century, hostility to Christianity came primarily from depraved totalitarianisms, largely secularist and materialist in orientation, today’s opposition comes, to a considerable degree, from militant forms of Islam in the Middle East, in Asia, and especially in Africa.

          In chapter 2 (of What Do Their Deaths Demand?), I will explore some of the theological reasons why Christianity has been so put upon throughout its history, but in this opening chapter, I want to tell some stories. I realize that statistics, however impressive, can be rather mind-numbing and antiseptically abstract. I want you to know about real people all over the planet who have been attacked for their Christian faith. Saint John Henry Newman distinguished between what he called “notional assent” and “real assent.” The former is the intellectual consent we give to propositions, and the latter is the visceral affirmation that we give to matters concretely observed and deeply felt. A good example of this difference is the somewhat bland conviction many in nineteenth-century America had that slavery is morally objectionable (notional assent) and the passionate conviction that something had to be done about it (real assent). Many have argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which brought before the imagination of many Americans the horror of slavery, actually led to real change. Though it might be legendary, the tale is told that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he said, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?” I have no interest in starting a war! But I do want to help people experience the truth of Christian persecution so vividly that they are moved to do something about it. I do indeed want to shake people—especially my fellow Christians—out of complacency in the face of an unconscionable violation of human rights.

          I will confess that the horror of anti-Christian persecution in its peculiarly contemporary form first came on my radar with the reports of the Libyan martyrs of 2015. Perhaps many now in the West know the story in its basic outlines, but it is worthwhile to rehearse it in some detail. In late 2014 and early 2015, the militant Islamic group ISIS kidnapped twenty-one construction workers—most of them from Egypt and members of the Coptic Orthodox Church—who were living in the Libyan beach town of Sirte. On February 15, 2015, the media service of the Islamic State published an appalling video. Bearing the description “a message signed in blood to the nation of the cross,” it showed the twenty-one captives, all dressed in orange jumpsuits, being paraded out to a beach and then forced to their knees. It subsequently showed the grisly beheading of the men.

          An account of the ordeal by the German journalist Martin Mosebach is worth citing at length: “The camera lingers on individual faces. On the left you can clearly see twenty-three-year-old Kiryollos with his questioning, almost absent-looking expression. Then comes the face of twenty-two-year-old Gaber, whose brow is furrowed and whose eyes stay closed as his lips move in whispered prayer. . . . Then, in a synchronized wave, the captors push their bound prisoners forward, faces down in the sand. They loom over them, kneel atop their backs, grab their hair, pull their heads up, unsheathe their knives, and hold the blades to their throats.” An edited audio clip accompanying the video allows us to hear the agonized shouts and cries of the men as they are being killed. It also reveals many of them shouting in Arabic “Ya Rabb Jesua” (Lord Jesus), indicating that they were professing their faith in the face of death. At the conclusion of the video, the organizer of the murder speaks directly to the camera: “And we will conquer Rome by Allah’s permission, the promise of our Prophet, peace be upon him.” As he speaks, one can see the blood of the martyrs pooling on the ground behind him.

          Just six days after their deaths, Pope Tawadros II, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, canonized the twenty-one victims and declared them martyrs. And in May of 2023, in an extraordinary move, Pope Francis added these non-Catholic men to The Roman Martyrology. Here, in part, is what he said on the occasion: “These martyrs were baptized not only in water and the Spirit, but also in blood, with a blood that is a seed of unity for all followers of Christ.” What the rhetoric of the killers and the reverential language of the two Christian leaders made plain is that the struggle here was not primarily political or cultural. It was religious. It involved a conscious and vicious attack on Christians because of their Christianity. I find particularly moving the words of confession on the lips of some of the dying men. I don’t mean, of course, confession of sins, but rather profession of faith in the lordship of Jesus. From the time of Peter and Paul, through that of Thomas More, right down to the present day, the challenge has been fundamentally the same: proclaiming the distinctive lordship of Jesus in the face of sometimes ferocious opposition.

          In the summer of 2016, I was in Kraków to speak at the World Youth Day gathering in that wonderful Polish city. I had prepared a homily on the Eucharist for a celebration of benediction in a sports stadium filled with tens of thousands of young people. But just before the presentation, I received word of the shocking murder of French priest Father Jacques Hamel, and I decided, spontaneously, to change the subject of my sermon. I spoke to the Catholic youth from all over the world about witnessing, even with our blood, to Christ the Lord. I told them about Father Hamel and about the way his life had ended.

          Jacques Hamel was a parish priest who, at the time of his death, was eighty-five years old. Ordained in 1958, he served in a number of parishes in northwest France. His final assignment was to the church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, from which he retired in 2005. However, he continued to work in the final decade of his life, making himself available to the people for confession and celebrating Mass. He also, during this time, served on an interfaith committee in Normandy with representatives of the Muslim faith. He was a good man and a good priest, not flashy, but beloved for his simplicity and dedication to his people.

          While he was saying Mass in Saint-Étienne, two young men, both nineteen, both professing allegiance to the Islamic State, kidnapped him along with four others, holding them captive for a short time. During the struggle, Father Jacques was heard to say to the men, “Va-t’en Satan!” (Get away, Satan!). In short order, they slit his throat. The murdered priest’s last words show that he had a keen sense of the contours of the struggle in which he was engaged. His young killers were but minions of a far greater and more dangerous spiritual authority that has long dogged Jesus and his mystical body.

          Some of the most outrageous attacks on Christians have taken place in the Middle East over the past twenty-five years. Among the worst occurred during the period in which ISIS exercised authority over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Formerly substantial Christian communities were decimated, as many were killed, captured, or forced to flee. I will relate just a few of the atrocities that have occurred in the region.

          In August 2002, Sister Cecilia Moshi Hanna, a Catholic nun, was brutally attacked in Baghdad at her monastery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Seventy-one at the time of the outrage, Sister Cecilia had spent her life in quiet service of the ailing and the poverty-stricken. She had taken no public positions on political matters and posed no obvious threat to the regime. She had never attacked Islam. On the night of August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, three men entered the enclosure and stabbed Sister Cecilia again and again. Then they cut her head off.

          In June of 2007, Father Ragheed Aziz Ganni, a Chaldean priest assigned to the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul, was murdered together with a group of subdeacons in his company. Father Ganni knew how perilous his situation was. Again and again, he received bullets in the mail and telephone calls demanding that he shutter his church. Despite conditions that he described as “worse than hell” (one can only imagine the psychological pressure he was under), he refused to close the Church of the Holy Spirit. Apparently, one of his terrorizers asked him directly why he didn’t acquiesce to their demand, and the priest replied, simply enough, “How can I close the house of God?” Father Ganni was a remarkably gifted man and had received an impressive theological education in Rome, where he had made many connections. He had many opportunities to return to Europe for his safety, but he wouldn’t leave his people. Shortly after celebrating Mass, Father Ganni departed the church with three subdeacons, and the group was waylaid by masked men armed with machine guns. After shouting that their Christian targets were blasphemers, they opened fire, killing Father Ganni and his companions.

          The following February, Father Ganni’s bishop, Paul Faraj Rahho, was abducted. Despite receiving threats— and even informing his superiors in Rome that his murder was a likely possibility—he had not only remained with his people but also spoken out against the injustice being done to them. That resistance continued even after his kidnapping: From the trunk of a car, he managed to make a phone call to his Christian friends, instructing them not to pay a ransom, as it would no doubt be used to fund further evils. Sadly, Archbishop Rahho’s prophecy regarding his own fate proved accurate: Two weeks after the abduction, he was found dead.

          One of the accounts that got the attention of Americans in particular was that of the journalist James Foley. A devout Catholic and a graduate of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Foley said he wanted to be a journalist so as to expose to a wide audience what really happens in war. This conviction brought him to some dangerous places, including the Middle East just as ISIS was on the rise. He was first kidnapped in Libya in 2011 as he was covering the so-called Arab Spring. What got him through the terrible weeks of his imprisonment, he said later, was the rediscovery of the Rosary, which his mother and grandmother had taught him when he was a child: “I said 10 Hail Marys between each Our Father. It took a long time, almost an hour to count 100 Hail Marys off on my knuckles. And it helped to keep my mind focused.” He elaborated, “If nothing else, prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and later the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no real incentive to free us.” When he was eventually set free, he did not take the opportunity to stay home; rather, he went back to Libya and eventually to Syria, the belly of the beast at that time. On November 22, 2012—Thanksgiving Day—he was taken hostage by ISIS. For nearly two years, he was held captive, and once again, he relied on prayer to sustain him. But this time there was no happy ending. He was cold-bloodedly beheaded, and his murderers captured the appalling incident on video and subsequently distributed it through the internet. During the ISIS takeover in Syria, such killings and beheadings of Christians became common.

          In 2013, Father François Mourad was killed in Ghassanieh, Syria. A native Syrian, he had taken refuge at the Franciscan Convent of Saint Anthony, one of many convents under the care of the Custody of the Holy Land, which honors and protects holy Christian sites in the region. It is worth noting, by the way, that many Christian buildings and works of art were also desecrated during this time: icons slashed with knives, sacred images with the eyes gouged out, images of the cross and the Lord eradicated, etc. Father Mourad had been forced to abandon the Monastery of Saint Simon Stylites when it was bombed by Islamist forces, but his enemies had not lost sight of him. They later invaded the Convent of Saint Anthony, “ransacking it and destroying everything” and threatening the nuns who worked there. When Father Mourad intervened to protect the sisters, the gunmen shot him dead.

          The following year, another priest­ in Syria—a Dutch Jesuit named Frans van der Lugt—was also brutally executed. A missionary in Syria for fifty years, Father van der Lugt had hunkered down with a small coterie of Christian refugees in a Jesuit residence in the city of Homs, which was caught in the middle of the firefight between the regular Syrian army and rebel warriors. He had been given an opportunity to flee, but like so many of his other courageous Christian colleagues in ministry, he elected to stay: “I will stay here even if there are no more Christians,” he said, “because I came here for Syria, for all Syrians.” A masked gunman invaded the residence in Homs and shot Father van der Lugt twice in the head.

          Stories of individuals killed by Islamic militants in Syria and elsewhere could be multiplied almost endlessly, but it is also worth drawing attention to a sort of mass violence visited upon Christians by these same intolerant enemies. When ISIS garnered authority over the city of Raqqa in northern Syria, it menaced the entire Christian population there. Followers of Jesus were presented with an awful either/or: conversion or death. In the wake of the threat, thousands of Christians disappeared, some put to death and others compelled to flee. In nearby Homs, the Catholic Archbishop Jean-Abdo Arbach declared that ninety-six martyrs resulted from similarly sweeping violence; no fewer than 1,800 families were compelled to flee the diocese. Prior to the ISIS takeover, roughly two million Syrians were Christian; when the persecution and atrocities began to diminish, there were around three hundred thousand Christians left in the country.

          Perhaps the most striking examples of anti-Christian persecution are on the African continent. Part of the reason for this is that ISIS, once its power was neutralized in the Middle East, gained ground in Africa. Another reason for anti-Christian militancy in Africa is the very success of Christianity on that continent. There are approximately 2.3 billion Christians in the world, and about 700 million of them—which is to say, 31 percent of the total—are found in Africa. This helps to explain why militant Muslims in the region would be particularly vexed and spurred to action.

          Hotspots of violence against Christians in Africa include countries like Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and, perhaps most prominently, Nigeria. In 2020, a Catholic seminarian in Nigeria named Michael Nnadi, only eighteen years old, was kidnapped by Muslim gunmen, along with three of his classmates. While the other students were freed days later, Nnadi remained in custody, apparently because he consistently proclaimed his faith and even upbraided his captors for their actions, encouraging them to repent. These same brutal kidnappers also apprehended a Catholic woman, Bolanle Ataga, and her two daughters. When the barbarians tried to rape Ataga, she resisted and was immediately murdered. In time, the leader of the marauders, Mustapha Mohammed, killed Michael Nnadi and later, upon his capture, confessed that he respected the young man for his “outstanding bravery.”

          The Nigerian atrocity that first served to bring anti-Christian persecution vividly to the attention of the West was the 2014 abduction of 276 girls, mostly Christian, by Boko Haram militants in the town of Chibok in Borno State. Though the school had been closed for four weeks due to security concerns, hundreds of students had returned for their final exams. The kidnappers arrived disguised as Nigerian military, and they loaded hundreds of the girls onto trucks and drove them into the jungle. Around 50 of the young women managed to escape, but the rest were taken to a variety of Boko Haram camps. Most were forced to convert to Islam, and some were used as sex slaves. In a video taking responsibility for the kidnapping, the Boko Haram leader defended the practice: “Slavery is allowed in my religion, and I shall capture people and make them slaves.” A later video revealed a number of the Christian girls dressed in hijabs and long Islamic chadors. This brutality raised the ire of many in the West, but frankly, little of consequence was accomplished besides public protests. And to this day, many of the girls are missing and unaccounted for.

          A characteristic feature of the persecution of the churches in Nigeria is the kidnapping, torture, and in many cases, murder of Catholic priests. The story of Father Stephen Ojapah is typical. In May of 2022, two gunmen entered Father Ojapah’s rectory at night while he was sleeping. They seized him and three others and forced them to march for two days to a primitive campsite. There they were “welcomed with a heavy round of beating.” Chained together so that they wouldn’t escape, they were tormented both physically and mentally week after week. The group was eventually released thanks to the negotiations of another priest from the diocese, but in the months that followed, Father Ojapah had to undergo intensive therapy due to the trauma that he had experienced. Not every priest was as fortunate as Father Ojapah. In 2023, Father Isaac Achi was burned alive by bandits attacking his presbytery in Kafin-Koro, Niger State, and Father Charles Igechi, only thirty-three years of age and in his first year of priesthood, was killed in the midst of his pastoral work in Benin City.

          On Christmas Eve, 2023, an army of Fulani terrorists stormed dozens of Christian villages in coordinated attacks near Bokkos in North-Central Nigeria. Three hundred people died in these assaults and hundreds more were injured. The invaders shot at their victims indiscriminately with machine guns and chopped at them with machetes. Some of the men tried to fight back, but they were overwhelmed by the number of terrorists and the sophistication of their weapons. That the onslaught occurred on Christmas Eve, just when the people would be gathering for dinner after Mass, shows unambiguously the anti-Christian character of the violence. And more recently, in April of 2024, the same militant group attacked three villages in the vicinity of Bokkos, killing ten Christians, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child. The following week, Fulani raiders unleashed heinous violence in the region for three days straight, burning down homes and churches and killing another twenty-nine Christians.

          These are, of course, but a few instances, taken from just one country, of a general anti-Christian mayhem that has afflicted Africa for decades.

          There is also terrible hostility to the Christian faith in India, coming to some degree from militant Islam but more often from an aggressive Hindu nationalism. A particularly instructive instance is the orgy of violence that broke out in the wake of the murder of a Hindu monk named Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati in 2008. Though the killing took place inside a Hindu establishment and though a Maoist leader operating in the vicinity took credit for it, lethal attention turned to Christians. Local nationalists banned the practice of the Christian faith and insisted that Christians come to Hindu temples to renounce their faith formally. When many resisted, the consequences were tragically predictable. Here is the summary provided by a news broadcast: “Valiant Christians who defied the order were burned alive, buried alive, and chopped into pieces. Nearly 100 Christians were killed, and over 300 churches and 6,000 houses were plundered in unabated violence that rendered 56,000 people homeless.”

          A well-known incident of anti-Christian persecution took place in India’s neighboring country of Pakistan. It had to do with Asia Bibi, a Catholic woman who was accused of violating Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy laws. Nearly everyone who examined the case objectively could see how questionable the charges and evidence against her were. In the wake of the accusation, local mosques stirred up mobs through their loudspeaker systems, and Asia Bibi was beaten and then arrested. The young woman was forced to spend an entire year in squalid conditions in prison even before being brought to trial. Given this overheated cultural and religious context, she was—incredibly enough, considering the facts of the case—convicted and sentenced to death. Here is how she described her feelings after receiving her sentence: “I cried alone, putting my head in my hands. I can no longer bear the sight of people full of hatred, applauding the killing of a poor farm worker. I no longer see them, but I still hear them, the crowd who gave the judge a standing ovation, saying: ‘Kill her, kill her! Allahu Akbar!’” The story of Asia Bibi thankfully has a happy ending, but only because campaigns on her behalf were launched throughout the world, propagated by people who had at last become aware of the assault on religious liberty entailed in Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy laws.

          A very courageous man who defended Asia Bibi in Pakistan was Shahbaz Bhatti. A Christian, Bhatti was appointed to the cabinet-level post of Federal Ministry for Minorities Affairs. Upon taking office, he announced that he would fight especially for “human equality, social justice, and religious freedom.” During his relatively brief tenure, he helped to organize a number of interfaith enterprises and dialogues that brought together top religious leaders in Pakistan. He even managed to orchestrate a joint statement against terrorism, signed by his friends across the religious spectrum. All of this work, of course, did not please the avatars of militant Islam. Especially following his vocal support of Asia Bibi, he received frequent death threats. The United States government tried to provide an armored vehicle for Bhatti but was unsuccessful. Clear-eyed about his prospects, the minister recorded a video to be played in case of his death. “I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know the meaning of the cross, and I’m following the cross. And I am ready to die for a cause. I am living for my community and suffering people, and I will die to defend their rights.” He didn’t have long to wait. While he was traveling through a residential neighborhood after visiting his mother, he was confronted by a gunman, who sprayed his car with bullets. Though he was rushed to a nearby hospital, he succumbed to his wounds. A local Taliban leader celebrated Bhatti’s killing, saying that the minister was “a known blasphemer.”

          Another highly dangerous place to be a Christian today is North Korea, a country controlled by a brutal dictator who aspires to dominate every aspect of his society. The only “religion” permitted in North Korea is Juche, an ideology of self-reliance grounded in Marxist principles and invented by the father of modern North Korea, Kim Il-Sung. The ruling elite of the country perceives Christianity as a severe threat to its totalitarian intentions, though Christians number only 0.38 percent of the population. Anyone discovered practicing the Christian religion is subject to arrest, incarceration, and torture. Moreover, citizens of North Korea are mandated to inform on their fellows, and children are indoctrinated to report the anti-state activities of their own parents.

          In May of 2023, a family caught in possession of a Bible was locked in prison for life; even a two-year-old child wasn’t spared the sentence. That same month, a Christian already incarcerated in a detention camp was beaten nearly to death for the crime of quietly praying. In recent years, hundreds of North Koreans who had defected to China have been returned to their home country. Anyone who made contact with Christians while in China is sentenced to internment camps, and those exposed to the Scriptures or Christian teaching are further sentenced to hard labor. Christians in these camps are treated as enemies of the state and are routinely subject to severe torture and even execution.

          Speaking of China, this second-most-populated country in the world has been, and continues to be, a place where Christians live under extreme duress. During the early years of Mao Tse-Tung’s revolution, all religions in China were under attack, indeed all opponents to the regime. Thousands upon thousands of Christians were put to death, and many more were tortured, harassed, or imprisoned. Things became a bit easier for believers after Mao’s death in 1976, but oppression certainly continued. Asia News has provided information regarding numerous priests and bishops who have been persecuted in the last twenty-five years or so. To give just a few examples: Father Zheng Ruipin was arrested along with eighteen of his seminarians in April of 2003. Father Pang Yongxing, Father Ma Shunbao, and Father Wang Limao were arrested simply for doing their priestly work and were sentenced to hard labor. Archbishop John Yang Shudao spent, all told, nearly thirty years in Chinese prisons before his death in 2010. First arrested in 1955, he was released in 1981 after twenty-six years of internment, only to be arrested once again in 1988 and compelled to spend another three years in prison. The list goes on and on.

          The harassment of the Catholic Church took particular shape through the formation of a so-called “patriotic church,” which touted the principles of Communism along with a somewhat watered-down version of Christianity. This association enjoyed, at least to a degree, state sanction, while the Church loyal to the pope and to the Catholic tradition was forced underground. The underground Church was the object of constant harassment by the state, and many of its bishops were arrested, tortured, and in some cases, “disappeared.” In 2018, the Vatican put together an agreement with the Chinese Communist government, the exact terms of which have never been divulged. But indications are that one of its principal features is a collaboration between the Vatican and the government according to which the former can choose bishops from a slate of candidates proposed by the latter. Moreover, in some concrete cases, the Chinese government has not cooperated even with this generous agreement, appointing its own bishops and going ahead with their installation even without Vatican approval.

          Someone who has long opposed the Communist government of China and the agreement between that government and the Vatican is Cardinal Joseph Zen, the bishop emeritus of Hong Kong. For years, Cardinal Zen has supported various pro-democracy efforts both on the mainland and in Hong Kong and has actively discouraged his coreligionists in Rome from trusting the Communist leadership in China. In May of 2022, Cardinal Zen was arrested because of his maintenance of a fund designed to assist protesters. He was briefly incarcerated and then released, but his passport was confiscated; now he can travel only with the explicit permission of the government.

          Another Chinese Christian who has suffered enormously because of his opposition to Communist tyranny is the Hong Kong business leader Jimmy Lai. A massively successful entrepreneur and publisher, Lai actively supported pro-democracy efforts in his native city. In 2020, he was arrested for “organizing unauthorized assemblies” and, after a brief release, was arrested again—and has been incarcerated ever since. In late 2025, he was convicted on charges of sedition and colluding with foreign forces, and in February of 2026, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Numerous attempts by religious and civic leaders around the world to secure Lai’s release have proved to be of no avail. Yet throughout his ordeal, Jimmy Lai has demonstrated a Christian trust in divine providence that has astounded his friends and family.

          So far, we have looked largely at Christian persecution in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries, the story of Father Hamel being the exception. Therefore, it might come to many as a bit of a surprise that there is also an increasing level of hostility to Christianity in the West. In France, over the past twenty years or so, vandalism of Catholic churches has been dramatically on the rise. There are thousands of reports of the desecration of tabernacles, the tearing down of crucifixes, and the destruction of sacred statues. In 2018 alone, 877 attacks on Christian sites took place across the country. What has been perhaps most alarming in this regard is the intentional burning down of Catholic churches. Though evidence suggests that the great Notre-Dame Cathedral fire of 2019 was the result of carelessness on the part of those working on the roof, we should not forget that, in the weeks just prior to that blaze, there were a number of arson attacks on French churches, including on the famous Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

          There are also cases of anti-Christian bias and persecution in the United Kingdom that have drawn the attention of the world. They have to do with the absurd restrictions on freedom of speech that have been tolerated in order to protect a woman’s right to an abortion. The law in Britain has established buffer zones around abortion clinics inside of which any opposition to what is going on inside the clinic is prohibited. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce has been arrested multiple times outside of such an establishment simply for the crime of praying—silently. In a similar case, Adam Smith-Connor was arrested and convicted for silently praying near an abortion facility, even though he was out of sight of the clinic itself. It appears as though even thinking in ways that run counter to the anti-religious consensus is off-limits.

          Vandalism against Christian churches is also a serious problem in North America. A prime example is the desecration visited upon a Catholic church in Bellevue, Washington, by an individual named Maeve Nota, who identifies as transgender. Evidently in response to the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Nota spray-painted obscenities and blasphemies on the church building.

          As of the writing of this book, according to the latest figures from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “at least 410 incidents have occurred across 43 states and the District of Columbia since May 2020. Incidents include arson, statues beheaded, limbs cut, smashed, and painted, gravestones defaced with swastikas and anti-Catholic language . . . and other destruction and vandalism.” I can personally testify that during my time as auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, there were numerous attacks on the mission churches founded, for the most part, by Padre Junípero Serra. Many of his statues were desecrated or torn down, and the great mission church of San Gabriel was severely damaged through an intentionally set fire. At one point, I was compelled to organize a large group of parishioners, Knights of Columbus, and Franciscan friars to protect the grounds of the Santa Inés mission church, which was within the boundaries of my pastoral region.

          Given the dominance of a woke ideology, which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, and given the fact that Christians are routinely assigned to the wrong side of that binary, psychological and institutional violence against Christians is not uncommon in America. The story of Jennifer Encinas and her husband, Carlos, is sadly typical. Devout Christians, they endeavor to raise their three children with biblical values. Their son Shea, a fifth grader, had been flourishing at the local public elementary school but one day came home disturbed. During “buddy time” with kindergarten students, during which typically he would read to them, Shea was forced to teach his reading partner about changing genders through a book entitled My Shadow Is Pink. When Shea’s parents complained to the teacher and the principal, they were rebuffed. When they persisted in their objections, they became the recipients of opprobrium, and their opponents organized a “Pink Out the Hate Day” in order to shame Jennifer’s family. Things got so bad that Shea became afraid to return to school. When Jennifer and Carlos asked that their children simply be excused from any instruction session dealing with gender identity, they were refused. That this sort of threat to the free exercise of religion now exists in a country where that right is guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution is disturbing indeed.

          Another egregious example of this denial of First Amendment freedom is a recent law proposed by the Washington State Senate. In the admirable pursuit of protecting children from abuse, the legislature proposed a law according to which Catholic priests would be obligated to break the seal of confession in order to bring evidence against a child abuser. When this gross violation of the free-exercise clause met with ferocious opposition, it was, thankfully, blocked by a federal judge. However, similar statutes are on the books in several states, and nothing is preventing still more states from enacting such legislation.

          One of the most appalling features of life in contemporary America is the frequency of mass killings, especially in our schools. Something that was never even imagined when I was a child now haunts the minds of practically every young student in my country. There are, of course, multiple causes of these outrages, and I don’t have the opportunity within the confines of this short book to explore them adequately. But I would like to draw attention to the anti-Christian sentiment that appears to be motivating at least some of these wanton killers.

          In my home state of Minnesota, a terrible mass shooting occurred on August 27, 2025. The crime took place at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, where hundreds of children had gathered in church for their first school Mass of the year. Carefully following best practices, the leaders of the school had locked the exterior doors to the church. Just before 8:30 a.m., as the Mass was getting underway, twenty-three-year-old Robin Westman approached the side of the church, armed with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. He commenced firing through the stained glass windows, getting off 116 rifle rounds and 3 shotgun blasts. At first, the children thought firecrackers were exploding, but soon enough, realizing what was happening, they ducked for cover. Many heroic adults and even children used their own bodies to shield students from danger. When he heard sirens approaching, Westman took his own life, and the horrible ordeal came to an end. Inside, ten-year-old Harper Moyski and eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel were dead, and thirty other people—twenty-six children and four adults—were injured, some very seriously.

          What motivated the killer? As is often true in these cases, his reasons were an incoherent farrago, but it seems clear that he was, at least to some degree, motivated by hatred of Christianity and the Church. A graduate of the school, Westman consciously targeted children while at Mass, and videos posted online showed him using an image of Jesus Christ for target practice. He also inscribed anti-Christian slogans on the ammunition he used, and on one of the guns employed in the attack was the taunt “Where is your God now?” Finally, a “manifesto” discovered after the killings contained numerous anti-religious and specifically anti-Christian statements. All of this evidence led federal officials to declare that they would investigate the incident as an act of domestic terrorism as well as “a hate crime targeting Catholics.” Some objected to this latter designation, but if someone opened fire at a synagogue service, would anyone doubt for a moment that it was an anti-Semitic attack?

          I fully realize that this litany of horrors from around the world that I have rehearsed in this chapter might be too much to take in. But I encourage you to be patient and remain attentive, allowing the sheer number of these outrages to seep into your soul. Those of us who live in a still relatively tolerant and religion-friendly cultural environment might imagine that the problem of anti-Christian persecution is manageable and at a distance. Not so. It is a rampant and growing problem around the globe, including in the West.
          It is also not anything particularly new.