“Last year on the feast of Pentecost in a diocese in Africa, Islamists burst into Sunday Mass and slaughtered more than 40 men women and children. After this atrocity, the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, wrote a letter of condolence in which he blamed ‘global warming’,” said Fr Benedict Kiely in a must-watch interview with Michael Knowles this week.
“The bishop of the diocese said, ‘My people were not killed because of global warming, they were killed because they were Christians.’ If we don’t care about that in the west, especially if we claim the name of Christian, then there is something wrong with us.”
I have plucked many letters out of my children’s school bags over the years, which have contained cause after cause: Self-esteem Day, Wear Yellow Day, Christmas Jumper Day, Pride Month, Bring-a-salad-to-school Day, Black History Month, Meatless Mondays and so it goes on.
Then one day, just recently, I was presented with a letter entitled, “Go to Mass for someone who can’t”. I read on: “’It is time for us to rediscover that the most powerful force in human history is prayer joined to sacrifice’ (St Pope John Paul II).”
After months of garbage, finally something worthwhile: a letter about the#RedWednesdaycampaign from Aid to the Church in Need. So pleased was I to see my children being called to prayer and sacrifice that I contacted ACN’s education lead Marie Fahey to thank her and ask more about the campaign.
“Aid to the Church in Need is a pontifical foundation of the Catholic Church supporting the Catholic faithful and other Christians where they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need,” she told me.
“From building churches to providing copies of our Child’s Bible, our projects range from big to small and cover a whole range of ideas – including some very unusual ones – to help nurture the faith of persecuted and suffering Christians.”
I asked her about the #RedWednesday campaign and the decision to reach out to young people in Catholic schools.
“We want to involve schools in our work,” she said. “My feeling is that young people do care about injustice and religious freedom, but they need to know what’s happening. I also think that many well-meaning young people are being, what you might call, culturally-conditioned or media-manipulated and peer-pressured into supporting trendy causes.
“Part of our mission as a Church and as a Catholic charity is to offer alternatives. Their passion needs to be shepherded, and we need to be better at pointing out worthwhile causes as well as proclaiming that the power of prayer is efficacious and really can change the course of human history.
“I see it as a circular relationship – the persecuted Church needs us (prayer, material help, advocacy) and our young people need the persecuted – as examples of courageous witnesses who will inspire them in their own faith. There is such a dearth of good role models today and these Christians facing persecutions around the world, whilst standing firm in faith, offer something true, good and beautiful.”
Red Wednesday was established in 2016 to encourage people to take action to help persecuted Christians around the world, by organising events, making donations or wearing red clothing to symbolise Christin martyrdom. This year it falls on 22nd November and there are a number of national and international events to mark the day including a special evening Mass at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark – where ACN will present its new “Courage to be a Christian” award.
Fr Benedict Keily reminds us that, “Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, more now than during the first centuries,” and says that if Christians in Iraq, for example, were likened to the World Wildlife Funds list of endangered animals they “would fit into the nearly extinct category”. In 2003 there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq, in 2023 that figure stands at 100,000.
In his conversation with Fr Benedict Keily, Michael Knowles highlights the madness of a world which has so destabilised the right order that it has become blind to the suffering of Christians. “We hear handwringing and gnashing of teeth over extinction of the Delta Smelt in California, but barely a mention of persecuted Christians,” he says.
In response, Fr Benedict shares a sinister reminder that Adolf Hitler relied upon this failure to remember in order to implement his program of Jewish persecution, when he famously said of the first ever Genocide of 1 million Armenian Christians slaughtered by the Turks. “Who remembers the Armenians?”
With so many empty but trendy causes crowding around our children like a rugby team in a lift, we have to open the doors, provide the space and help them discern, lest they get crushed.
“When you’re about to have your head cut off, you don’t worry too much about global warming,” said Fr Benedict Keily, bravely encouraging us to reorder our priorities and do what we can to help our brothers and sisters in Christ who stand up for a faith that we take for granted.
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