We are bombarded by a constant stream of news concerning supposed mistreatment of and microagression against popular minorities, but little is said about the very real persecution of Christians.
On June 22, a suicide bomber attacked the Greek Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elias in the Damascus suburb of Dweila, killing 25 members of the congregation. The Syrian government blamed the attack on the Islamic State, which has been murdering Christians for well over a decade. Though many prominent corporate media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post covered the story, the incident elicited little commentary on the plight of Christians in their ancestral homelands, despite the fact that Christians are suffering such severe persecution across the Muslim-majority Middle East that they are fleeing by the thousands.
In Christian circles, the persecution of the faithful across the world is generally well-known. Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, China: these are infamous among Christians as countries inhospitable to Christian populations. Yet as prominent Catholic writer Robert Royal demonstrates in his new book—The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century—the problem of contemporary persecution of Christians is a truly worldwide phenomenon and has, in just the first few decades of the century, resulted in many martyrs.
In 2024 alone, almost 5,000 Christians were killed for their faith. Though it’s little surprise that most of the top 50 countries responsible for persecution of Christians are Muslim, the top offender might surprise you: North Korea. There, those discovered by the government to be Christians are thrown into prison camps where they are subjected to torture, starvation, and even execution.
It might also surprise you to learn that the most dangerous place in the world to be a Catholic priest is not somewhere in Africa or the Middle East but in America’s southern neighbor: Mexico, where the number of priests who have been killed is higher even than in Nigeria. Between 2007 and 2022, as many as 50 Catholic priests were assassinated in narco-related violence (the number is much higher if nuns, seminarians, and lay pastoral workers are added). Nor, amazingly, is Mexico terribly unique among Latin American countries when it comes to violence against clerics—priests in Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and in the Caribbean nations of Haiti and Cuba have all been the targets of either narco traffickers, criminal gangs, or even the government.
Of course, there’s no denying that the Middle East has been a terrible place for Christians in recent decades. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Christian population there was estimated to be somewhere between 800,000 to 1.5 million. Today, that number has reduced to between 150,000 to 400,000, as thousands of Christians have fled violence and persecution by religious extremist groups such as the Islamic State. A similar story is told for Syria, where the Christian population fell from as many as 1.5 million to 300,000, as Christians were caught in the cross fire between the Syrian regime and various militant and extremist groups.
Perhaps the most shocking country in the region for persecution of Christians is Israel, where Ultra-Orthodox Jews routinely terrorize the minority Christian population. As recently as the 1990s, Christians comprised a majority of the population of Bethlehem, whereas now they are only about twelve percent of the town’s population, a result both of a border wall constructed by Israel in 2003 and Islamist threats from Gaza.
We have heard for decades of the remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa, a continent where the Christian population has increased exponentially in the last century. Indeed, today about one-third of Christians are in Africa. Yet, it is also the place of the most contemporary martyrdoms. In 2023-2024, more Christians were martyred in Nigeria alone than the rest of the world combined. In 2023 alone, almost 5,000 Christian were killed. Yet there is persecution in many other countries as well, such as Cameroon, Eritrea, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, where 21 Coptic Christians were brutally beheaded by Islamic extremists in 2015.
Finally, we have Asia, where persecution of Christians takes many forms. In Hindu-majority India, tensions with Christians have increased under the rule of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. In Pakistan, about which I have written extensively in my book The Persecuted, Islamic extremists exploit the country’s draconian blasphemy law to target Christians, some of whom have been placed on death row for what can only be called trumped-up charges. Some of the most heinous of crimes are regularly committed against Christians there—including Christian women being routinely abducted and coercively married to Muslim men—with nary a word from secular corporate media. Mobs regularly attack Christians accused of having committed blasphemy, including ripping pages out of the Koran (as if any Christian in his right mind would do such a thing).
And, of course, we cannot forget about communist China, where Christians are closely monitored, imprisoned, and sometimes disappeared for failing to abide by the atheist regime’s laws regarding worship. And, thanks to heroes such as Cardinal Joseph Zen and Hong Kong newspaper magnate Jimmy Lai (who is still in prison), many Catholics are aware of the communist regime’s duplicity when it comes to its relations with the Vatican, which have given the Chinese Communist Party incredible influence over the Church.
Robert Royal has done the Church a great service by carefully cataloguing the persecution of Catholics (and Christians more broadly) across the world in this first quarter of our 21st century. Lord willing, laymen and clerics alike will read this and petition Rome that more of these great heroes be canonized so that all Catholics might more easily benefit from their remarkable witness.
Martyrs of the 21st-century Church, pray for us!
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (July 2025).
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The featured image, uploaded by Ali Haj Suleiman / UNOCHA,is a photograph of the Greek Orthodox Mar Elias Church, Damascus, after a shooting and detonation of an explosive device (Date 22 June 2025). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.