BALI, Indonesia (LifeSiteNews) — During a gathering of religious leaders, Catholic bishops from Nigeria and Iraq addressed the violence committed by Islamist extremists in their countries.
Bishops Matthew Hassan Kukah from Nigeria informed participants at the “G20 Religion Forum” in Bali that both churches and mosques are being attacked by Islamist extremists.
“Every day, news of abductions, armed robberies, kidnappings for ransom, murders, and assassinations of our innocent citizens persists. Our sacred spaces have become killing grounds,” the prelate said. “Hundreds of worshippers have been murdered in mosques and churches across the country.”
According to a report by the NGO Open Doors, 4,650 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in 2022 so far, more than in any other country in the world. Many of them were murdered by Islamic extremist groups like Boko Haram.
Kukah, the bishop of the Diocese of Sokoto, a region where Muslims are in the majority, shared details of recent attacks committed by Islamist extremists in his diocese, including the kidnappings of priests and the case of Deborah Samuel, a Christian student who was accused of blasphemy and brutally murdered by a group of Muslim students.
The Nigerian bishop explained how “Muslim elites” see secular state laws as threatening to Islam and, therefore, ignore them.
“In northern Nigeria, Muslim elites have tended to see the institutions of the modern state as an alien imposition that attempts to displace their own religion, with Western education as a foreign enemy to Islam,” the bishop said. “They thus consider the present constitution and secular laws as fundamentally subordinate to Islam, and in practice ignore the written laws of the land as they see fit.”
“This cancer of the weaponization of religion threatens us all. History shows us that empires and emperors have had their day,” Kukah continued. “The world will always be full of men and women with grand delusions about how they have been divinely sent to create a new world at the cost of human blood.”
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Chaldean Catholic archbishop Bashar Matti Warda of Erbil, Iraq, was also present at the G20 Religious Forum. Warda was pessimistic about the future of Christians in Iraq, given the Muslim country’s long history of violence.
“Throughout the Islamic world, the reality of structured violence, persecution, and marginalization against the minorities remains, century after century,” the Iraqi bishop said.
Warda revealed that talking about violence in Islamic countries often leads to charges of “Islamophobia” by Westerners.
“To raise this matter in Western or global audiences is to invite a charge of ‘Islamophobia,’ mainly from social critics speaking theoretically from places far removed from any threat or actual experience,” he said. “But for [us] Iraqi Christians, this is not an abstract matter.”
“There is a crisis of violence in Islam, and for the sake of humanity, including the followers of Islam themselves, it must be addressed openly and honestly,” Warda continued.
The Iraqi bishop talked about how Christians in Iraq can give witness to the teachings of Christ by practicing forgiveness:
Ours then is now a missionary role, to give daily witness to the teachings of Christ, to provide a living example to our neighbors of a path to a world of forgiveness, of humility, of love, of peace. Lest there be any confusion here I am not speaking of conversion. Rather, I am speaking of the fundamental truth of forgiveness and a renunciation of violence which we Christians of Iraq can share and do so from a position of historically unique moral clarity.
“We forgive those who murdered us, who tortured us, who raped us, who sought to destroy everything about us. We forgive them. In the name of Christ, we forgive them,” the archbishop proclaimed.
According to the Open Doors World Watch List of the countries where Christians are persecuted the most, 34 of the top 50 and 8 of the top 10 countries have a majority Muslim population. Christians in these countries suffer from what Open Doors calls “Islamic oppression.”
Islamic persecution, especially towards Muslim converts to Christianity, is also on the rise in Europe, according to a report by The European Centre for Law and Justice.
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