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Pope Leo XIV on June 20 praised the religious of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual and the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives, who gathered for their General Chapters at the Vatican, for their faith and their closeness to people who lack religious freedom – and he urged them to persevere, Vatican News reported.
Calling to mind that the Trinitarians have prayed for the past months about their desire to console people who lack religious freedom, the Pontiff said that he joins them in that prayer and asks God that the order always remembers, both in its prayer and work, people who are facing such persecution.
“Moreover, this orientation toward the members of the Church who suffer the most will draw the attention of vocations, of the faithful, and of people of good will to this reality,” Pope Leo said, according to Vatican News, “and will keep you available for the frontier services that you carry out in the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.”
He told the friars — whom he thanked for “speaking of the things of God” — to listen to God “in the voice of your brother, in the discernment of the community, in attentiveness to the signs of the times, in the appeals of the Magisterium” and to “be a living reminder of the primacy of the praise of God in Christian life.”
The prayers for those who lack religious freedom come as Christian persecution remains common in many countries.
GB News reported June 14 that Tim Osmond, the UK ambassador of the Help the Persecuted, a nonprofit that ministers to Christians in countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia that are hostile to Christians, said that mobs in Pakistan are regularly burning churches and homes after false claims of blasphemy.
“It’s a regular occurrence,” Osmond said, according to GB News. “I would say on a weekly basis, they are attacking churches, mainly burning them, burning everything that’s in them, and then knocking the crosses off the top.”
In Iran, Christians who have a house church in the country, which has “the fastest underground Christian church in the world,” face 10 to 15 years in prison, according to Osmond. Turkish President Recep Erdogan had covered Christian paintings in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul with banners or “great big circles with Arabic writing on them,” he added.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, said that at least 640 religious sites have been destroyed and at least 67 Ukrainian priests, pastors, and monks have been killed or tortured after Russia invaded the country in 2022, GB News reported.
According to a June 19 Union of Catholic Asian (UCA) News article, United Christian Forum (UCF), an organization based in New Delhi, India, said in a June 18 press statement that, “this year till May,” its helpline has recorded 313 incidents of attacks on Christians. The number of attacks rose from 601 in 2022 to 734 in 2023 and 834 in 2024. Back in 2014, there were 127, UCF said.
The Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have become “hot spots of viral hate, brutal mob violence and rampant social ostracization,” with 58 and 64 incidents of violence, respectively, against Christians from January through May, according to UCF’s national coordinator, A.C. Michael. In 2024, there were 209 incidents in Uttar Pradesh and 165 in Chhattisgarh, UCA News reported. According to Michael, Christians fear retribution because they can’t rely on the justice system.