Christian persecution - Page 15

President Donald Trump told Bloomberg reporters Thursday that he was “very disappointed” in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for not yet releasing American pastor Andrew Brunson from his prolonged imprisonment on false charges.

Communist officials have replaced two underground Gansu province parish priests who were accused of holding a summer camp for a youth group at their church.

Chinese Christians have denounced recent destruction of their churches and shrines by government authorities, comparing the actions to crushing their ancestors’ bones into ash.

A Turkish court on Tuesday ruled against American pastor Andrew Brunson’s appeal to be released from house arrest.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence excoriated North Korea’s record of human rights violations Thursday, asserting that the nation’s persecution of Christians is the worst on the planet.

The following post is sponsored by The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy (CRFP). Religious liberty advocates from across the country and around the globe gathered in Washington, DC, this week for the U.S. State Department’s first-ever ministerial on religious freedom.

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney accused previous White House administrations of withholding foreign aid from countries in sub-Saharan Africa to secure compliance with left-wing policy initiatives on “abortion [and] gay marriage.”

Egyptian Muslim men routinely treat Christian women as “whores,” which makes life in Egyptian society a living hell, a female Coptic journalist wrote in a revealing op-ed this week.

A Turkish court, to the dismay of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, on Wednesday ruled against releasing Andrew Brunson, an American pastor imprisoned on terrorism and spying charges pending trial.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari this week accused opposition politicians of “blackmailing” him by claiming that he is allowing terrorists from the Fulani herdsmen group, with whom the African leader shares his ethnicity, to continue butchering thousands of Christian-majority farmers in

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration on Sunday argued that “climate change” is the driving force behind the massacre of thousands of predominantly Christian farmers at the hands of terrorists from the African leader’s Fulani ethnic group.

ROME — There is a danger that the Christian presence in the Middle East will disappear, “disfiguring the very face of the region,” Pope Francis said Saturday.

rists from the Fulani herdsmen group in Nigeria used machetes and firearms to massacre more than 200 people in a predominantly Christian region over a two day period in June, a testament to the group’s growing lethality that has far surpassed Boko Haram’s.

Iraqi Christian leaders praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration this week for keeping the pledge to help victims of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) genocide campaign against ethnoreligious minority groups in the Middle East.

A Catholic cardinal published an open letter over the weekend accusing Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari of culpable inaction to protect Christians from Muslim violence and demanding that he step down from office.

The death toll of last weekend’s massacre of Nigerian Christians by militant Muslim Fulani herdsmen has risen to at least 200, according to a report released Friday by Open Doors, an organization that monitors Christian persecution.

Catholic bishops in central Nigeria are calling for an end to the “ethnic cleansing” of Christians after Muslim herdsmen slaughtered about 120 Christians during the weekend, the majority of whom were returning from a church funeral.

“It is a dangerous time to be a person of faith,” said U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, Monday in kicking off a one-day symposium on religious liberty in Rome.

The vast majority of Syria, about 80 percent, is now safe after more than seven years of war, prompting millions of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) to return to their original homes, a Damascus-based Christian priest who leads a humanitarian aid group declared on Thursday.

On Tuesday Asia Bibi will complete her ninth year of imprisonment for her Christian faith after being arrested for blasphemy in 2009 and sentenced to death by hanging in 2010.

The Catholic Church in New York has inaugurated the first Shrine in the world dedicated to prayer for persecuted Christians, with the blessing of the icon of Our Lady of Aradin, “Mother of the Persecuted Church,” at St. Michael’s parish Wednesday.

In most Muslim-majority nations, “religious liberty is either crushed altogether or it barely exists,” wrote Catholic League president Bill Donohue Monday.

An outraged Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state-run news outlet of North Korea, accused the United States on Friday of promoting the desecration of the Quran in response to the publication of the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2017.

Iranian-backed Shiite militias stand accused of harassing and sexually assaulting Iraqi Christians who survived the recent genocide campaign by the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), the U.S. State Department (DOS) acknowledges in a report released Tuesday.

The last remaining Jewish citizen in Afghanistan finds himself among a small group of non-Muslim religious minorities who have become a target of a deadly persecution campaign at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and the Taliban, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) mentions in a report released on Tuesday.

The U.S. State Department affirms in its annual International Religious Freedom Report, published Tuesday, that the communist regime controlling North Korea “considered Christianity a serious threat, as it challenged the official cult of personality and provided a platform for social and political organization and interaction outside the government.”

Former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong-ho told the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo in an interview published Friday that Kim regime leaders view Christianity as a true challenge to them because “they know that Christianity would hamper the Kim family’s dynastic succession to power.”

A Nigerian pastor who escaped persecution in his native country told a Michigan newspaper that Boko Haram jihadists set his church and his Christian father ablaze, forcing him and his family to flee to America.

Pope Francis announced Sunday that he will name 14 new cardinals on June 29, including the redoubtable head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Iraqi Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako.

Persecution of Christians in India is inextricably linked to the fact that many suffer discrimination for being members of the dalit or “untouchable” caste, and Hindu extremists have become “bolder and more mainstream” in recent memory, a prominent Indian Christian bishop tells Breitbart News.

A family of six jihadists blew themselves up at three different Christian churches in Indonesia Sunday, killing at least 13 and injuring scores more.

President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, two U.S. Secretaries of State, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) pressed Turkish officials this week to release American pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been in prison since October 2017 for allegedly aiding terrorists.

Sam Brownback, the new U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, joined faith leaders, activists, experts, and laymen at a summit on Capitol Hill on Thursday to urge U.S.-based Christians to stop ignoring the plight of fellow followers of Christ brutally persecuted overseas.

The future of Christianity overseas looks “bleak” if U.S.-based Christians continue to ignore the persecution of their spiritual brothers and sisters in places like the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy think tank, suggested on Thursday.

Contents: Killing of two priests escalates farmer-herder conflict in Benue State, Nigeria; News of revenge attacks by farmers criticized as fake news; Israel, Iran and Syria exchange fire in first direct military confrontation

The resumption of the trail in a Turkish Court on Monday where an American pastor faces 35 years in prison for his alleged ties to terrorism ended after one day, with the judge dismissing all of the witness testimony in support of Andrew Brunson and left him behind bars until the next hearing in July.