THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

2018 Report on Religious Freedom in the World:
The worst surprise is from India -
but the pope's new political playmates
in China have also stepped up persecution
of Christians and Muslims alike

November 25, 2018

In the almost 900 pages of its latest report on religious freedom in the world, made public in recent days, the foundation of pontifical right Aid to the Church in Need has verified a general worsening of the lack of freedom.

Compared with 2016, the year of the previous report, in fully 17 of the 38 countries classified as countries of “persecution” or “discrimination” [mostly anti-Christian], the situation has definitively deteriorated. And among these are some of the most populous countries of the world: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria… Therefore, almost two thirds of the global population, 61 percent, today lives in countries in which religious freedom is under attack.

And among the faiths, that of Christianity continues to be the one hardest hit. One Christian out of seven lives today in a country classified as being of “persecution.”

The report of Aid to the Church in Need furnishes a precise description of the situation in each country, which starts by presenting the legal context relative to religious freedom that prevails in that given country, and continues with a review of the events that have taken place there over the past two years that contradict that freedom.

The 21 countries classified as countries of “persecution,” in which religious freedom is the most violated, are the following, in alphabetical order: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Eritrea, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen. ]Other than China, North Korea and Myanmar, the offending countries are predominantly Muslim.]

The 17 countries classified as countries of “discrimination,” meaning of oppression of religious freedom a step below the preceding: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Brunei, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mauritania, Qatar, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam. [The non-Muslim countries in this list are Laos, Russia, the Ukraine and Vietnam.. In both lists, the now predominantly Muslim (former officially atheist) ex-Soviet republics of Turkmenista, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan figure prominently.]

So then, of the 38 countries on the two lists, those in which the report of Aid to the Church in Need has registered a worsening of the attacks on religious freedom over the past two years are:
Brunei, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Myanmar, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Yemen.

To which - the report states - should be added, because there the lack of religious freedom “is already so bad that it could scarcely get any worse,” these other five countries: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia.

There are only two countries in which the report registered a relative “improvement” with respect to the previous standards: Iraq and Syria. Which nevertheless still remain among the countries classified for “persecution.”

In Iraq, in particular, one good sign is the return to their homes, in Mosul and the plain of Nineveh, of tens of thousands of Christians who previously fled under attack by the Islamic State. Many of their homes have been rebuilt thanks to none other than Aid to the Church in Need. But it has also happened that they have found their homes occupied by strangers, with false property deeds.

The problem is - the report notes - that all these sufferings of communities of faith are widely overlooked by Western governments and media, where “religious freedom is slipping down the human rights priority rankings, being eclipsed by issues of gender, sexuality and race.”

This general 'indifference' has prejudiced the case of the Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi, who spent nine years in prison until she was acquitted recently of blasphemy by the Supreme Court, thus nullifying the death penalty imposed on her by lower courts. She has been released but in hiding because of widespread threats to her life, along with her family. Pakistan has hordes of Muslim fanatics who have demonstrated by the tens of thousands demanding that Bibi be hanged. [Yet the United Kingdom has denied her asylum. Italy has offered asylum but that still has to be worked out. And, of course, the Vatican has been shockingly silent about her eventual fate.]

In an effort to grasp the most novel elements among all the countries examined in the report, he case of China is certainly striking, the Vatican having signed an accord with this country precisely when it is seeing a resurgence of hostility toward all faiths, not only that of Catholic Christianity, with even more restrictive regulations, with the destruction of places of worship and with “more than 100,000 Muslims being held in ‘re-education’ camps.” [I think the Bergoglio sellout to China should remain in the front burner of Catholic attention as much as the sex abuse scandals. Perhaps the China-Vatican news should be spiced up somehow with a sex angle to make it mediagenic!... About the persecution of Muslims in China, surely Cardinal Pietro Parolin, architect of the Bergoglio sellout, must have heard of the persecution of the Uighurs, some 11 million Muslims of Turkic origin who inhabit a large 'autonomous' region in western China. Go to a BBC factsheet about them for a quick lesson (they say about a million UIghurs are in 're-education' camps, not just 100,000):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-45474279]
Of course, Parolin - and with him, Bergoglio - have chosen to play blind to the persecution of underground Catholics by their new political playmates. But one would think that with Bergoglio's professions of concern for the persecuted Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar, he ought to be much more concerned about the persecuted Uighurs. But our consistently inconsistent pontiff couldn't be bothered either to say a word in behalf of Asia Bibi before her unexpected acquittal, nor after, for that matter. 'Religious freedom' appears to be as much an unserious issue for Bergoglio as does the PRESENT CRISIS.]

But the biggest surprise held in store by the report of Aid to the Church in Need concerns the second-largest country in the world by population, India.

According to the international pool of scholars that drafted the 2018 report, in fact, India is precisely the country in which the strongest change - for the worse - has been seen with respect to the previous standards, which were already very negative.

In the so-called “largest democracy in the world” there is no state religion. But ever since the most recent census registered a drop in the number of Hindus, the reaction has been a pronounced rise in hostility toward Muslim and Christian minorities, with a growing number of states in the federation implementing punitive laws against conversion to religions other than Hinduism.

The 2017 rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is markedly nationalistic and identifies being Indian with being Hindu, has encouraged the spread of aggression against other religions on the part of Hindu extremists, very often with the acquiescence of the security forces.

According to Persecution Relief, an ecumenical forum that studies anti-Christian persecution, in 2017 there were 736 recorded attacks, many of them deadly, a clear increase with respect to the 348 of the previous year. The pretext of the aggression is sometimes given as the consumption of beef, in violation, according to the Hindu extremists, of the rules that protect sacred cows.

And all of this amid the indifference of the Western world, where the idea continues to hold sway that Hinduism is synonymous with pacifism.