Continued Martyrdom of, and Attacks on Christians

08-03-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The bomb that fell the previous day on the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Gaza (see photo), which knocked down part of the roof and killed three and wounded ten of the 550 worshipers who daily took refuge there, is only the latest sign of a growing wave of rejection of the Christian presence in the Holy Land by a significant segment of Judaism, with its fanatical parties and ministers, its settlers rampaging in the occupied territories, its soldiers intolerant of orders. It is that messianic extremism which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government supports in its acts and which makes any political solution to the war unrealistic, that of two states, Israeli and Palestinian, and that of a single state with two peoples with equal rights.

At the Angelus the following Sunday, July 20, Pope Leo called by name the Christians killed: Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad, and Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud, the latter a young Gaza correspondent for L’Osservatore Romano. And to “our beloved Middle Eastern Christians,” he said, “thank you for your witness of faith,” or in other words, for their martyrdom. But Leo also spoke unequivocally against the “forced displacement of the population,” which is what extremist Jews want for their fellow Palestinians, perhaps toward surreal destinations recently identified in Libya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

“During the night between 13 and 14 June, a terrible massacre took place in the city of Yelwata, located in the local administrative area of Gouman, in the state of Benue, Nigeria. Around two hundred people were killed with extreme cruelty. The majority of those killed were internally displaced people who were being housed at a local Catholic mission. I pray that security, justice and peace prevail in Nigeria, a beloved country that has suffered various forms of violence. I pray in particular for the rural Christian communities in the state of Benue, who have unceasingly been victims of violence.”

While on the second massacre, which took place in Syria (see photo), these were his words at the general audience on Wednesday, June 25: “Last Sunday, a heinous terrorist attack was carried out against the Greek Orthodox community in the Church of Mar Elias in Damascus. We entrust the victims to God’s mercy, and we offer our prayers for the wounded and their families. I say to the Christians of the Middle East: I am close to you! The whole Church is close to you! This tragic event recalls the profound fragility that Syria still faces after years of conflict and instability. It is therefore essential that the international community does not ignore this country but continue to offer support through gestures of solidarity and a renewed commitment to peace and reconciliation.

On this resurgence of Islamic terrorism “La Civiltà Cattolica” – the magazine of the Rome Jesuits published after review by top Vatican authorities – dedicated in its latest issue a thorough analysis from the pen of Giovanni Sale, which it is useful to run over in its main points. No longer centralized in a specific territory, the jihadist galaxy, from the Arabic “jihad,” holy war, has become more decentralized and widespread, with intense recruitment activity even far from its theaters of operation. For example, an ISIS network recruiting followers among Bangladeshi migrants was dismantled in Malaysia in recent days. In the West, recruitment is also aimed at mobilizing individual attackers, induced to act against heretical Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but in practice massacring ordinary citizens, often run down with a vehicle driven suddenly into a crowd.

These terrorist acts are carried out primarily in the United States, France, and Germany, and La Civiltà Cattolica provides a striking overview of them. They are easy to execute and always result in many victims, instilling widespread terror. But the area where the proponents of jihad have never lost ground, and indeed have consolidated their presence, is sub-Saharan Africa, from Mali to Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad. Here, it is rather the French, American, or United Nations troops that have withdrawn, replaced by a growing Russian presence, with Wagner mercenaries, in support of the local regimes.

In this vast region, the Islamist terrorists belong to two movements. In Mali, rampant above all is the GSIM (Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims), composed largely of Tuaregs converted to radical Islam by Arab and Pakistani preachers. Elsewhere, the ISWAP, Islamic State’s West Africa Province, operates. The former is part of the al-Qaeda galaxy, while the latter reports to ISIS. And the differences are not slight, to the point of provoking armed clashes between the two groups, with a great many deaths. The former are Salafists, from the Arabic “salaf,” “elder,” meaning that they hark back to the Islam of the golden age and condemn as apostates only the leaders of Muslim states who do not follow their vision of Islam, but not the people. While the latter are Takfirists, from the Arabic “takfir,” “excommunication,” and maintain that the people are also apostates and should be condemned. So civilians can also be killed. Both represent the two wings of contemporary jihadism.

And both are expanding. “La Civiltà Cattolica” cites a recent UN report according to which jihadists already “threaten the coastal states of West Africa and could establish, as has happened on other occasions, ‘a terrorist sanctuary’ from which to attack both Africa and the West.” But expansion is also taking place in populous Nigeria, where Islamization is advancing at the expense of the Christians, supported by the offensives of both jihadist groups, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram and the ISIS-affiliated ISWAP. The states where radical Islamists are most dominant are Borno and Adamawa, in northeastern Nigeria, bordering Chad. While further to the south, in the states of Benue and Enugu, the Muslim Fulani tribe, made up of herdsmen, mistreats and persecutes with ever greater aggression the Christian farmers, according to these latter with the evident approval of the central government.

What matters most is that the bombing of the church in Gaza is only the latest act in an increasingly aggressive erosion of the Christian presence in the Holy Land, within that much broader “massacre of the innocents”– “pointless and unjustifiable,” – of which Pope Leo incessantly invokes an end. A prime example of this erosion is what is happening in Taybeh, the ancient village traditionally identified with the one called “Ephraim” in the Gospel of John (11:54), where Jesus is said to have withdrawn before his last Passover.

Taybeh, not far from Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian territories, is today the last village in the West Bank entirely inhabited by Christians, 1,500 in all, 600 of whom are Catholic. But the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers surrounding it are ever more intolerant of this presence, wrongful in their view. They want an Israel purified “from river to sea,” from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, of every Palestinian presence, whether Muslim or Christian. And they systematically harass the villagers, without any restraint on the part of the Israeli army.

On July 7, after days of escalating violence, some settlers set fire to the ancient 5th-century Church of St. George and the nearby cemetery. The village’s Latin parish priest, Bashar Fawadleh, recounts: “More than twenty young people rushed to the scene with me and managed to put out the fire, while the attackers stood by and watched. They also blocked the roads with their cars, preventing us from using them, while the main roads leading into and out of Taybeh remained blocked by army checkpoints. On July 14, the patriarchs and heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, including Cardinal Pizzaballa, visited the site and subsequently issued a stern joint declaration. It reads in part:

“In recent months, the radicals have led their cattle to graze on the farms of Christians on the east side of Taybeh — the agricultural area — rendering them inaccessible at best but at worst damaging the olive groves that families depend on. Last month, several homes were attacked by these radicals, lighting fires and erecting a billboard that said, translated into English, ‘there is no future for you here.’ “The Church has had a faithful presence in this region for nearly 2,000 years. We firmly reject this message of exclusion and reaffirm our commitment to a Holy Land that is a mosaic of different faiths, living peacefully together in dignity and safety.” But the violence didn’t stop. Some Jewish settlers took their cows to graze among the scorched ruins of the Church of St. George, a clear insult to the sacred nature of the site.