Persecution of Christians

Police and paramilitaries maintained a heavy presence outside the Nicaraguan Managua cathedral on Palm Sunday, ensuring celebrations occurred entirely on church property—and sending a not-so-subtle message of intimidation.

The Catholic Register’s exclusive April 8 report about the threats two Nigerian clerics are facing for speaking abroad about Christian persecution in Benue State has sparked condemnations against religious intimidation from the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Nigeria, an international religious freedom alliance and by U.S. and U.K. politicians.

A Nigerian Catholic bishop standing in the breach to alert the world about Christian persecution in Benue State has drawn verbal attacks and apparent escalating threats in recent weeks.

Mexican parishioners placed eight candles on church altars in memory of the eight young people shot dead in an attack outside a parish church.

The military junta in Myanmar's strife-torn Kachin state allegedly burned down a Catholic cathedral dedicated to St. Patrick on the eve of the revered saint's feast.

A young seminarian has become the latest victim of killings in Nigeria, the West African country where attack and kidnapping of Catholic clergy is on the rise.

A Catholic pastoral centre in northern Myanmar is among the latest Christian sites bombed by the country's governing military junta.

A "silent genocide"—mimicking the Rwandan one of 1994—is occurring eastern Congo, said some Catholic Church sources, as shock greeted the killing of 70 people in a Protestant church in the North Kivu Province.

International Christian Concern’s (ICC) 2025 Global Persecution Index outlines how authoritarianism, religious nationalism, mass surveillance, displacement and acts of terror are imperilling believers of Christ around the world.

Thirteen Catholic "missionaries" were killed in 2024, most of them during the commission of a robbery, but several obviously were targeted for the church work they did.