As persecution of Christians deepens from Nigeria to Syria, advocates warn religious freedom is vanishing while the faithful hold fast in hope.
Newsroom (31/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) As 2025 draws to a close, the plight of persecuted Christians remains one of the world’s most underreported human-rights crises. Across continents, from Africa to the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Americas, the year has exposed how fragile religious freedom has become, even as believers strive to survive with courage, hope and community. Church leaders like Regina Lynch, executive director of the pontifical charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), warn that “there are more cases, there are more countries where religious freedom doesn’t exist or … is being eaten away,” a phrase that now reads less as warning and more as diagnosis.
Lynch’s assessment is borne out not only in statistics but in human stories — kidnapped schoolchildren, bombed churches, imprisoned priests, exiled bishops, and laity forced into hiding or driven from homelands they have inhabited for centuries. What binds these disparate stories is a stark pattern: states that are unwilling or unable to protect religious minorities, extremist movements determined to erase them, and a global public that often moves on before the next Mass is interrupted by gunfire or the next priest disappears.
Nigeria: Where Faith and Fear Collide
As the 2025 Jubilee Year drew to a close, nowhere was the crisis more visible than in Nigeria, often described by advocates as ground zero for Christian persecution. Militant Islamist groups and extremist herding militias continue to ravage Christian villages, abduct clergy and laity, and destroy homes, schools and churches in a pattern of violence that has become devastatingly familiar. In late December, the Diocese of Zaria announced that Father Emmanuel Ezema had been abducted from his residence at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Rumi, Kaduna State, another name added to the long list of missing clergy.
Just weeks earlier, the country had reeled from one of its worst mass kidnappings in recent memory. On Nov. 21, more than 300 children and their teachers were seized at gunpoint from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, central Nigeria. Fifty escaped and were reunited with their families; 100 more were released Dec. 8, and the remaining children were finally returned home just before Christmas. The staggered releases did little to ease the trauma for a nation where schoolyards and sanctuaries have long ceased to be places of safety.
In Nigeria’s northeast, the threat is not episodic but constant. In dioceses such as Maiduguri, the faithful live under daily menace from militants and violent herdsmen. Bishop John Bogna Bakeni of Maiduguri encapsulated the mood in a few stark words: “Every day is a grace … because we never know what will happen in the next hour.” That sense of precariousness defines life not only for priests and religious, but for families deciding each morning whether it is safe to send children to school or attend Mass.
The scale of the violence is staggering. A recent report by Intersociety, an advocacy group, found that an average of 32 Christians are killed in Nigeria every day, with as many as 7,000 Christians massacred in the first 220 days of 2025 alone. The number hints at communities systematically emptied — villages where churches stand roofless, farmlands lie abandoned and Christian communities that have existed for generations now exist only as memories and mass graves.
A Country of Particular Concern — and a Forgotten War
This year, Nigeria’s crisis finally forced its way back into high-level diplomacy. On Oct. 31, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would once again designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom, a classification that opens the way for sanctions and other penalties. He coupled the announcement with a blunt warning: nonhumanitarian aid could be suspended and “action” taken if Nigeria’s government failed to protect Christians from extremist violence.
On Christmas Day, that promised action arrived in the form of a deadly U.S. strike in northwestern Nigeria, which Trump said targeted Islamic State group terrorists responsible for persecuting Christians. The move briefly thrust Nigeria’s Christians into the headlines, framing them not as a distant humanitarian issue but as central to international security policy.
Yet despite such moments, Lynch says the wider media landscape largely looks away. “It’s difficult to get the secular media to report on these situations,” she told OSV News. “Occasionally the BBC will say something, but it’s really a battle to be that voice there.” For ACN, breaking that wall of indifference is now almost as urgent as delivering food or rebuilding churches.
Lynch says she finds allies not so much in newsrooms as in legislative chambers. She looks with hope to parliamentarians in the European Union and members of the U.S. Congress — “people who are ready to listen, who do believe that there is persecution of Christians in some of these countries.” The task for organizations like ACN, she explains, is to “move them … to do something about this,” transforming concern into policy, resolutions into protection.
Her focus extends beyond Nigeria to the broader Sahel region, where “growing jihadism” is driving atrocities in countries such as Burkina Faso as well. The violence, she stresses, does not target Christians alone. “All people are being attacked, not just Christians, but anybody who does not accept this form of jihadism.” Extremist ideology, not confessional label, determines who is marked for death.
Yet against this backdrop of horror, faith in Nigeria remains resilient in a way that can seem almost defiant. Surveys show that up to 94% of Nigerian Catholics claim to attend Mass weekly or even daily, an astonishing figure in a country where churches are as likely as markets or government buildings to become targets. The pews, in other words, are still full.
Syria: A Church That “Is Dying”
If Nigeria is one epicenter of violence, Syria is another, where Christian communities already battered by a decade of civil war have faced renewed and targeted attacks. Over the past months, Christians and other religious minorities have endured a sharp increase in violence, insecurity and displacement. On June 22, tragedy struck during Divine Liturgy at Mar Elias Church, a Greek Orthodox parish in the Dweila neighborhood of Damascus, when a suicide bomber attacked the congregation.
At least 20 worshippers were killed and more than 60 injured. The assailant, reportedly linked to the Islamic State group, opened fire on worshippers before detonating his vest, turning a moment of communal prayer into an inferno of panic and grief. About 350 people were believed to be inside the church at the time, many of them families who had thought the capital’s relative calm offered a respite from years of front-line fighting.
The bombing was not an isolated incident. In the southern district of Sweida, home to substantial Christian and Druze populations, sectarian violence erupted in July 2025. Militias descended on Christian and Druze neighborhoods, torching homes and desecrating sacred spaces. In the village of Al-Sura, the Greek Melkite Church of St. Michael was burned to the ground, and 38 Christian homes were destroyed by fire, leaving many families with nothing but the clothes they wore as they fled.
One displaced Christian summed up the devastation in a few words: “This community has lost everything.” Religious-freedom advocates describe the security situation for Christians and other minorities in Syria as “disastrous.” According to ACN’s statistics, the Christian population has plummeted from roughly 2.1 million in 2011 — before the war — to about 540,000 today. Each departure is a calculation of fear and survival; each family that leaves takes with it a thread in the tapestry of a religious heritage that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Church.
Syrian Archbishop Jacques Mourad of Homs does not hide his alarm. He has warned that the “church in Syria is dying,” a stark phrase that captures both demographic collapse and a pervasive sense that believers have no future in their homeland under the Islamist-led government of Ahmed al‑Sharaa. For many, emigration feels like the only guarantee that their children will not grow up under the shadow of car bombs and burned-out altars.
Even so, Church leaders insist on the spiritual and historical importance of Christians remaining in their ancestral lands. “These are the living stones. These are the roots. They carry the roots of our faith,” Lynch said, invoking a vision of the Middle East where Christian presence is not a museum relic but a living, breathing community. Their survival, she suggests, is not only a local concern but a matter for the entire global Church.
Gaza: A Tiny Community Under Siege
A similar fragility is on display in Gaza, where a Christian community of only about 400 people shelters amid the ruins of a still-contested enclave. For months, they have remained largely confined within the premises of Holy Family Catholic Parish and St. Porphyrios Orthodox Church, relying on Church networks for shelter, food and a measure of security. The October ceasefire after two years of constant Israeli bombardment offered a reprieve from daily air strikes, but it did not erase the hardships of war or the challenges of winter.
“They manage, but it’s not easy. … It’s terribly sad,” Lynch said, capturing both the courage and the exhaustion of a flock that is almost literally living in the shadows of church walls. For Gaza’s Christians, staying is a decision to preserve a presence that predates modern borders but feels increasingly precarious. For now, the candles are still lit in the churches of Gaza City; the question is how long that light can endure.
Belarus: A Church Under Legal Siege
In Eastern Europe, Belarus offers a different but equally sobering picture of religious repression. The Nov. 20 release of two Catholic priests, Fathers Andrzej Juchniewicz and Henrykh Akalatovich, provided a rare moment of celebration after years of crackdowns. Their freedom followed an October visit by papal envoy Claudio Gugerotti and was described by authorities as a “gesture of mercy,” widely interpreted as the result of high-level Vatican intervention.
Yet the gesture did not signal a broader opening. The most prominent group of political prisoners — many of them Catholics — remains behind bars, swept up in the aftermath of the rigged 2020 and 2022 elections and the subsequent assault on civil society. Among them is Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, whose supporters have urged Western church leaders not to abandon his cause four years after his arrest and imprisonment on what they say are trumped-up charges.
For ordinary Catholics, the reality is one of pervasive legal and administrative pressure. A 2023 religious-freedom law requires all parishes to re-register or risk liquidation, and sharply curtails missionary activity, religious education, minority-language worship and monastic life. Dozens of clergy — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike — have been arrested on vague and elastic accusations ranging from possession of “extremist material” or “subversive activity” to outright treason and espionage.
Lay Catholics are not spared. One of the most emblematic cases is that of Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist and member of Belarus’s Polish minority, who has been imprisoned since 2021. His case resonated beyond Church circles this December when the European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, hailing him as a “symbol of the struggle for freedom and democracy” in Belarus. The award highlights how, in some countries, the fight for religious freedom is inseparable from the broader struggle for political rights.
India: Laws Turned into Weapons
In India, 2025 has brought its own mix of legal pressure and social hostility toward Christians. In one high-profile case, two Catholic nuns from Kerala, Sisters Vandana Francis and Preeti Mary, were arrested alongside an Indigenous youth in the central state of Chhattisgarh. Authorities accused them of “human trafficking and forced religious conversion,” invoking some of the most politically charged allegations in the country’s legal arsenal.
Their detention sparked outrage among religious leaders and civil-society figures, who condemned the charges as “unlawful” and demanded their immediate release. In August 2025, a special court granted the trio conditional bail, but the legal process itself sent a clear message about how easily criminal law can be used to intimidate Christian workers and cast suspicion on humanitarian outreach.
In an Aug. 3 editorial, Deepika — a Malayalam daily published by the Catholic bishops in India’s Kerala state — issued one of the most blunt assessments yet of the national climate. The paper slammed the “growing Hindu fundamentalism” in the country, arguing that it was being fostered by governments in various states and reminding readers that this ideology had increasingly silenced minorities, especially Christians. The editorial served as a warning that persecution does not always wear military fatigues; it can also arrive in police uniforms and court summonses.
According to the United Christian Forum, based in New Delhi, persecution of Christians has steadily increased since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi first came to power. Lynch notes that in countries like India and China, patterns of persecution have become “more sophisticated,” with coordinated extremist networks and bureaucratic tools replacing overt bans. Harassment can take the form of sudden inspections, opaque registration rules or allegations of “forced conversions” that hang over any act of evangelization or social service.
Nicaragua: A Church Silenced into “Calm”
On the other side of the world, in Central America, the Church in Nicaragua is enduring what advocates describe as a systematic dismantling. Under the authoritarian rule of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, a once-visible Catholic presence has been pushed into a kind of enforced quiet. Over the past years, more than 200 clergy and religious leaders have been detained, expelled or driven into exile, while churches and charitable organizations have had their legal status revoked, properties seized and worship tightly restricted.
Official figures suggest that reported attacks on the Church in 2025 dropped to around three dozen, compared to 321 in 2023. On the surface, the decline might suggest an easing of tensions. But experts warn this apparent “calm” masks a deeper reality: “the church has been decimated.” Many clergy and lay leaders no longer dare to report harassment or violence, knowing that complaints could trigger further repression. In effect, silence has been imposed as policy, and the chilling effect is itself a measure of persecution’s success.
In Nicaragua as in Belarus and India, the threat is less a single spectacular crackdown than a sustained campaign to strip the Church of its institutions, voice and social influence. The result, Lynch suggests, is a global pattern in which persecution is no longer confined to war zones or failed states, but also appears in the court docket, the customs office and the fine print of new regulations.
A Report That Reads Like an Alarm Bell
This year’s Religious Freedom Report from Aid to the Church in Need attempts to capture the breadth and depth of this global assault on conscience. The document, spanning some 1,200 pages and released Oct. 21, is more than a statistical survey; it is, in effect, a map of where religious freedom is under siege and where it is steadily being erased. Catholic aid officials say its findings are alarming: persecution is expanding across continents and deepening in severity, affecting Christians and other religious communities alike.
“There are more cases, there are more countries where religious freedom doesn’t exist or is being eaten away and is less than was before,” Lynch said in discussing the report’s conclusions. The phrase “eaten away” evokes not a sudden collapse, but a slow, relentless corrosion — a process that can be harder to confront precisely because it rarely makes front-page news.
ACN responds on two main fronts. One is material: humanitarian and logistical aid delivered to communities shattered by violence or legal discrimination. The other is spiritual. Lynch stresses that “prayer is something that those persecuted communities appreciate most,” even more than physical assistance in some cases. Travelling to afflicted regions, she has repeatedly heard the same refrain: the knowledge that fellow Christians elsewhere are praying for them offers a powerful sense of solidarity, a signal that they have not been abandoned.
“Being a voice for the voiceless is a very important aspect,” Lynch said, describing ACN’s advocacy work with lawmakers, diplomats and Church leaders. The organization’s role, as she sees it, is not simply to chronicle suffering, but to ensure that those who suffer for their faith are not reduced to anonymous statistics.
The Challenge of Indifference — and the Witness of Suffering
If there is a thread running through the stories of Nigeria, Syria, Gaza, Belarus, India and Nicaragua, it is the contrast between the intensity of believers’ suffering and the relative indifference of societies that are free to worship without fear. Lynch points to “the secularization that we have in our so-called Western countries today” as a major obstacle to raising awareness. “It’s not always easy to … raise the awareness that … Christians are being killed,” she said.
In places where religious practice has become optional or private, the idea of risking one’s life for a creed can seem remote, even incomprehensible. Yet those who endure persecution firsthand often display a conviction that shames complacency. Lynch recalls meeting a man in Pakistan who had been falsely accused of blasphemy, tortured and pressured to renounce his faith. He refused.
“He looked at a crucifix on the wall behind me and said: ‘But he suffered so much more than I did,’” she recounted. In that single sentence, the man not only contextualized his own suffering but offered a stark reminder of the Christian story at the heart of these global crises — a story of a God who suffers, and of disciples who believe that fidelity is worth any cost.
As 2025 ends, the question facing the wider Christian world is whether that testimony will be met with action or apathy. The persecuted have already answered, in blood and steadfastness, what their faith is worth. The rest of the world, Lynch suggests, is still deciding how much their suffering matters.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from OSV News
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