Christian persecution - Page 8

The archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, said Wednesday that while many Europeans have come to the aid of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, the European Union itself has been slow to mobilize.

An Iranian Christian convert received 80 lashes on Thursday for drinking communion wine, considered a crime of apostasy under Islamic law. The U.S. State Department denounced the act, perpetrated by Iranian authorities in the northern town of Rashit, as “unjust”

Jihadists with ties to the al-Qaeda terror network executed a Christian missionary after four years in captivity in the African nation of Mali, Swiss authorities reported Friday.

The founder of Chinese Christian human rights group China Aid, Pastor Bob Fu, is in hiding with his family this week following calls by a Chinese billionaire to kill him and a “protest” outside his Texas home.

Fulani Muslim militants in Delta State, Nigeria, abducted a Catholic priest this weekend whom they had previously kidnapped and released in 2016, local news reported Monday.

A masked man broke into the Incarnation Catholic Church northwest of Tampa, Florida, last weekend and set fire to the interior before fleeing, the Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday.

A lawyer for a Pakistani Christian man sentenced to death two weeks ago in Lahore for blasphemy told Fox News on Monday that his client did not insult the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, as alleged, but merely refused to convert to Islam.

Muslim extremists have carried out a door-to-door anti-Christian murder campaign this summer, killing over 500 Christians since June, Christianpersecution.com reported.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said this week that U.S. President Donald Trump confronted him in 2018 about the mass killings of Christians in Nigeria.

Police in southwestern China this summer sentenced a Christian teenager to three years in prison for practicing her faith, human rights magazine Bitter Winter revealed on Tuesday.

Fulani Muslim attacks on Christians in Nigeria have risen significantly since the country imposed a coronavirus lockdown on March 30 and dozens of mostly Christian farmers have been killed, according to a September 8 report.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomed the release of Cuban journalist Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces from a year in prison on Sunday, calling Havana “disgraceful” for punishing the writer for covering religious persecution on the island.

Presumed Satanists disfigured and toppled a wooden statue of Jesus Christ in Cremona, Italy, leaving a piece of cardboard with the inscription “Satan,” La Repubblica newspaper revealed.

Officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forcibly removed more than 900 crosses from Christian churches in the eastern province of Anhui during the first half of 2020, Bitter Winter reported Friday.

Northern Ireland has registered over 600 attacks on churches and other places of worship over the past five years for an average of one attack every three days, a new report reveals.

A 20-year-old Christian man was beaten to death in eastern Uganda by family members for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity, Morning Star News reported Thursday.

Vandals desecrated the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Malmö (southern Sweden) seven days in a row this month, breaking windows and demolishing a statue of Jesus.

ROME — Pope Francis urged Christians to pray for their persecuted brothers and sisters Sunday, reminding his listeners that those who suffer persecution are “many.”

Pope Francis sent out a message condemning religious terrorism Saturday to mark the U.N.’s International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief.

A band of armed jihadists stormed the Lion of Judah Christian church in Azikoro, southern Nigeria, last week, shooting four of the faithful dead.

A court in Pakistan ruled on Tuesday that 14-year-old Christian girl Maira Shahbaz voluntarily converted to Islam and is legally married to an older Muslim man named Mohamad Nakash, even though Maira and her family say Nakash kidnapped her at gunpoint with two accomplices during the coronavirus lockdown in April.

Unidentified vandals desecrated a Christian church in Goleszów, southern Poland, last weekend, painting Satanic symbols on the main doors of the building.

The Vatican’s foreign minister said that Christians have grown “too complacent” in the face of widespread Christian persecution and need a greater commitment to oppose it.

Leaders from the U.S. Bishops’ conference (USCCB) have denounced the recent string of vandalism, arson, and desecration of Catholic sites in the country.

ROME — The number of officially recorded anti-Christian incidents in France has risen by 285 percent between 2008 and 2019, according to Ellen Fantini, director of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE).

Unidentified thieves broke into the northern French church of Saint-Léonard last week and stole the relics of the 8th-century Saint Boniface, French media report.

Chinese communist authorities have ordered poor Christian villagers to remove Christian images from their homes and replace them with portraits of Chairman Mao and President Xi Jinping.

Catholic churches across North America suffered a devastating week of vandalism and arson from July 10-16, according to a report from the Aleteia news agency.

Black voters view former Vice President Joe Biden as central to political and social problems they perceive, said Rev. Darrell Scott.

Boko Haram Islamic terrorists carried out over “fifty different attacks on different communities between the end of 2019 to June 2020,” the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN) has revealed, most of which were “unreported or underreported” by the media.

Greek government spokesman Stelios Petsas has come out against the proposal from Turkey to convert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, saying such a move would strain relations between Christians and Turkey.

The president of the Commission of European Bishops’ Conferences (COMECE) has decried the ongoing violence and targeted persecution of Christians in Nigeria by Islamist militants.

The largest indigenous Christian denomination in the Northeast of Nigeria has reported a death toll of more than 8,370 of its members due to attacks from the Boko Haram Islamist terror group.

The Romanian government has passed a law declaring August 16 the “National Day of Awareness of Violence Against Christians.”

A number of Christian pastors have warned of growing repression of Christianity under the rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Deutsche Welle reported Saturday.

Some 200 communist officials raided the Sunzhuang Christian Church in China’s Henan province earlier this month, demolishing the building and beating the faithful who tried to interfere, the Christian Post reported Saturday.