Persecution

Ritche T. Salgado, OCarm, is director of the Carmelite Center for Social Pastoral Communications in Quezon City, Philippines. He spoke with Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio.

BEFORE I BECAME a priest, I was a journalist. I was writing for an alternative news outfit, Bulatlat. They asked me to write about a priest who was killed in Central Philippines. I was inspired by [his] story, and I wanted to be a priest. The [Carmelite order] I entered has very strong journalist and media advocacy. In fact, our patron saint in the Philippines, St. Titus Brandsma, is the martyr of press freedom and free speech. I never thought that I’d be in a congregation so involved in the pastoral care of media workers. As a priest, I continue as desk editor for Bulatlat.

Mainul Islam, a freelance photographer specializing in street photography, lives in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. This interview was conducted by Sojourners' Jenna Barnett in December and January via WhatsApp.

I STARTED TAKING photos because I want to tell the stories of our Rohingya people’s struggle.

I was born in 1994 in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. I have been living in the camp for about 28 years. [It] is known to the government of Bangladesh as the Registrar Refugee Camp. The Bangladesh government has police, Ansar members, and an executive magistrate to control the camp. There are various NGOs, but we are not getting any good service from them. I don’t think of it as a camp. This is a detention center. Educational institutions have been closed for four years. We are not getting the basic rights that a human being needs to survive. The rejection of citizenship rights for Rohingya, denial of freedom of movement, eviction campaigns, violence against women, forced labor, expulsion from their lands and property, violence and torture have made Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya the most persecuted minority in the world.

There is a barbed wire fence around the Rohingya camp. That’s why we are always trying to create joy inside the camp with sports, festivals, and weddings. We are playing football, volleyball, cricket, chinlone, etc. There are mosques and madrasas in the Rohingya refugee camps, and they go there to practice their faith.

As I write, thousands of Muslims families in Hyderabad have been cordoned off and interrogated for identity documents for themselves and their children. Concurrently, Modi’s BJP has forcefully stripped the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir of their autonomy and has shut off the internet and phones in the area with plans for ‘deradicalization camps’ similar to the Uighur detention centers.

Uighur leaders and experts located outside China have warned that the situation could worsen, and “mass murder” could not be ruled out. With upwards of 10 percent of the Uighurs being held against their will, it is being called the worst and the most neglected humanitarian crisis of the past 10 years. Why is this is happening, and what makes the Chinese government see Muslims as a threat?

Pence clearly scratched an itch for the crowd that gave him a standing ovation and loud chants of “U-S-A” after he was introduced. His words were also a familiar refrain in the white evangelical community. According to a 2017 study by the Public Religion Research Institute, white evangelical Protestants were the only religious group more likely to believe Christians face discrimination compared to Muslims.

Caviezel went on to say, “There is one choice, it's Christ. And that doesn't mean it's gonna be easy ... Certainly wasn't easy for Jesus, certainly wasn't easy for Luke or Paul. So what does our faith do? In these tough times, not good times, the world in good times can handle it great. In bad times, what happens to us? That's when we become beautiful. That's when the world goes, how can you love?”

Today, the Rohingya are the single largest “stateless” community in the world. Their “statelessness” or lack of citizenship increases their vulnerability because they are not entitled to any legal protection from the government.

THE BASILICA OF St. Bartholomew on the Island in Rome holds the bones of the apostle St. Bartholomew, who delivered the gospel of Matthew to India, southern Arabia, and Syria. Spreading the seditious good news eventually got him killed—crucified upside down in Baku, capital of modern Azerbaijan. Bartholomew proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus until the soldiers cut off his head.

In 1999, this church nestled on an island in the Tiber River was dedicated to modern Christian martyrs. Entering its cool interior, one can walk a global Via Dolorosa—each side altar is dedicated to parts of the world where Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox have been killed for their faith.

The relics include a letter from Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer beheaded for refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, and the missal of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero left on the altar when he was assassinated during Mass in 1980.

Christians today fall out over Christian martyrs and persecution in a right/left divide. We fight about numbers. In 2015, Christian Freedom International released an often repeated statistic suggesting that Christians are “martyred for their faith every five minutes.” This has been widely debunked. But it raises questions about definitions, methodologies, and theological perspectives.

Thomas Schirrmacher directs the International Institute for Religious Freedom, which runs a research project with several universities to measure Christian persecution. He estimates that there are 7,000 to 8,000 Christian martyrs each year, a number that roughly matches the Open Doors World Watch List, which reported 7,106 Christians killed in 2015, an increase over previous years and far less than one Christian every five minutes.

Pope Francis’ impassioned praise of China this week is the strongest sign of the pontiff’s ambitious agenda to use his personal and political clout to transform the historically fraught relations between Beijing and the Holy See. “For me, China has always been a reference point of greatness. A great country. But more than a country, a great culture, with an inexhaustible wisdom,” the pope said at the start of his interview with Asia Times, which was published Feb. 2.