“The situation is serious.” Simple words to describe an alarming reality. This Monday, October 20, the Catholic NGO Aid to the Church in Need (AED) presented its annual report on religious freedom, under the auspices of the town hall of the 6th arrondissement of Paris. 1,200 pages long, and written thanks to the contribution of around forty authors from 20 different nationalities, the document exhumes “factual and objective data from 196 countries around the world on the current situation of religious freedom”in the words of Amélie Berthelin, member of the editorial committee. To date, the ACN is the only NGO to produce such a report at the global level, thanks to the importance of the sources of information available. An association under pontifical law, it benefits from the Vatican’s diplomatic network, which is the second largest on the planet, behind that of the United States.
Persecution in 24 countries
The reliability of the figures makes the general situation presented by the report all the more implacable. “International law is increasingly under attack around the world, says Benoît de Blanpré, national director of the association. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which defends “freedom of thought, conscience or religion”, is violated. According to ACN criteria, persecution affects 24 countries, among the most populous in the world, such as India, China, Nigeria and Pakistan, or 4.1 billion inhabitants likely to be oppressed because of their faith. Added to this is the lower level of “discrimination”, which the NGO defines as “discreet threats, harmful to daily life and social status”, such as censorship, restriction of worship or legal inequalities. By combining the situations of persecution and discrimination, we arrive at the figure of 62 countries where “religious freedom is seriously undermined”, or nearly 5.4 billion people potentially affected, almost 65% of the world population. In the vast majority of these States, the situation has deteriorated since the previous report.
Three major causes contribute to this situation. The first factor, authoritarianism, that is to say the coercive action of the State on religious communities, represents the majority of cases. The Chinese example, where the Communist Party is carrying out a forced Sinicization of Muslim minorities, such as the Uighurs, Christians or Tibetans, is cited several times. Religious extremism constitutes the second cause of persecution, led by jihadism which, since the fall of the Daesh caliphate in 2019“has experienced a transnational evolution”recalls Thomas Oswald, journalist at AED. Branches of the Islamic State continue to strike in the Sahel, Central Africa and East Africa. The latest massacre to date, the attack on the Catholic parish of Komanda, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, causing the death of 43 people on July 28, was perpetrated by rebels affiliated with Daesh. Finally, ethno-religious nationalism constitutes the third cause, primarily the oppression carried out by Islamic theocracies on religious minorities.
Millions displaced
The consequences are dramatic for the populations. In many countries, millions of people are fleeing: 2 million displaced in Burkina Faso since 2015 (10% of the population), 7.8 million in Venezuela (out of 27 million), 2.3 million in Nigeria or 1.8 million in Cuba (18% of the population). Added to this are attacks, which strike civilians indiscriminately, and targeted assassinations, particularly of religious dignitaries. Victims of prostitution, sexual slavery or forced marriages, women are particularly vulnerable.
Christians are prime targets. Guest of the press conference, Brother Olivier Poquillon, director of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EFAP), quotes a word from Father Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, assassinated in 1980 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2018: “The Church is by definition persecuted because it carries a doctrine which denounces evil and immorality (…) As long as man carries evil within himself, we will try to crush the Church”. Like the situation in the Gaza Strip, many Christians die trying to intervene between the belligerents. “The peacemaker cannot have friends when the supporters are not ready for de-escalation,” affirms the Dominican friar. Parish priest in Gaza, Father Gabriel Romanelli revealed that Pope Francis called him every day, at the height of the clash between the IDF and Hamas. There remain between 400 and 600 Christians in the Palestinian enclave today, compared to 1,000 before October 7, 2023.
Thus, through its report, the ACN wants to recall the immutable nature of religious freedom, as prescribed by international law. “Religious freedom is interdependent with other rights, such as freedom of expression, opinion or conscienceinsists Brother Poquillon. It is all the more important because it conditions our way of living individually and in community (…) In short, it conditions living together”.
If the NGO is Catholic, it does not ignore the suffering suffered by other religious minorities. “We do not want to defend our own backyard, but to serve the common good,” adds Amélie Berthelin, while announcing the upcoming launch of a global petition, over a year, to reaffirm everyone’s attachment to religious freedom, “the basis for peace in the world”, as Pope Leo XIV said on October 10, during a private audience with the ACN.
