Today, on Holy Sunday or Easter Sunday, Christians celebrate the most important holiday of the year, the one in which, according to our belief, the Lord Jesus was resurrected.

And we do when Christianity is, surprisingly, by far the most persecuted religion in the world today. And the most serious thing of all is that when you think of persecution, you believe that it is only destroying temples, killing people or kidnapping them. But the question goes much further.

Open Doors USA is a non-profit organization that studies the phenomenon of persecution of Christians around the world. Its 2022 report found that 360 million Christians live in countries where there has been significant and significant persecution. About 5,600 Christians were killed for their faith, more than 6,000 were arrested or imprisoned, and more than 4,000 were kidnapped. In addition, more than 5,000 churches and sacred buildings or structures were destroyed.

The list of countries with the highest levels of persecution for 2023 has already been published and can be viewed at www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/. This list thoroughly reflects the behavior of 2022. I am sure that Nicaragua, which is in 50th place today, will take one of the first places on the list in 2024. It is enough to remember what Ortega did to priests, churches, believers, the ultimate ban on the celebration of Holy Week.

The list reveals that the vast majority of countries where this phenomenon exists are the result of “Islamic oppression”. Although it is true that North Korea is at the top of the list, and that in that country the source of the phenomenon is attributed to communist and post-communist oppression, and that there are other countries such as India, where religious nationalism is what drives the issue, or that in Vietnam or Cuba, Colombia , Mexico or Nicaragua, Islamism is not the main reason for mistreatment, it is no less true that of the 50 countries that persecute Christians the most, 33 have an Islamic majority. And where there is no such majority, the infamous task of persecution is carried out by dictators or communist fanatics, as in Cuba and Nicaragua, or organized crime and corruption, as in Colombia and Mexico.

But these persecutions, which are bloody and infamous, are not the only ones. Christians today live another form of harassment, real pressure. They are forced, if they are doctors, to perform abortion against their conscience. They are forced to teach gender ideology, under threat of sanctions, in many nations of the world. They are forced to act against their beliefs, but not because of things that have any scientific validity, such as gender ideology, but because of an orchestrated campaign by minorities who have tyrannized and subjected the permissive majority to the situation of destroying the values ​​​​upon which Western society is based.

Both forms of persecution are terrible. One bloody, the other bloodless. But both are deadly, both are deadly, and the other, like a silent cancer, is undermining the foundations of the West, jeopardizing the 2,000 years in which Western civilization has achieved the greatest achievements any civilization has ever achieved in human history.

When in Pakistan, for example, the well-established, albeit very minority, Catholic Church receives donations for a natural disaster, the bishops do not discriminate and give the aid they receive from the world to all citizens regardless of their faith. Have you seen Islam do this for any Christian in the world?

What is most painful about the list published by Open doors is that there are four Latin American countries on the list, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua; countries with a Christian majority. The first two, not because of the despotic tyranny of sick dictators like Ortega, or because of an almost irreversible system of oppression like the Cuban one, but because of the structures of corruption and organized crime. Be careful with these two terms: corruption and organized crime. It is mentioned a lot in today’s Ecuador.

God forbid that these two plagues make our country, where good and religious people believe in God, and where people have never been violent, start as a cherry on the cake of all the evils that affect us and religious persecutions.

We hope that in this Holy Week we have valued the great gift of religious freedom and become aware of the phenomenon of persecution against Christianity that haunts humanity, which is present, alive, and which we do not even recognize in countries like Ecuador. (OR)