Christian persecution growing

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen

By

An array of activists yesterday offered a grim assessment of religious freedom around the world, saying that 2005 years after Jesus' birth, many of His followers are severely repressed.

The chief villains in a "Christmas Under Siege Around the World" panel at the Capitol were Indonesia, China, Uzbekistan, Iran and North Korea.

"Anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world ... is ugly, it's growing, and third, the mass media seem to generally ignore or downplay its gravity," Catholic Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput said.

The press has been particularly remiss, he said, in covering Indonesia, where three teenage Christian girls recently were beheaded by Muslim militants.

"News reports tend to describe Indonesia's violence as generically 'sectarian,' as if Muslim and Christian extremists were mutually responsible," the archbishop said. "This is troubling and flatly false. The bloodshed is overwhelmingly provoked and carried out by Islamic militants against the Christian minority."

The archbishop was one of eight panelists who painted disturbing portraits of life for the average Christian in about a dozen countries.

The setting -- a small chamber off the Senate galleries with hot chocolate and cookies as refreshments and brightly colored buttons offering Christmas greetings in Chinese, Korean and Arabic -- was incongruous with large photos of a tortured or imprisoned Pakistani and Laotian Hmong Christians.

Jeff King, a panelist representing International Christian Concern, offered attendees a chance to view photos of the beheaded girls. There were no takers.

Indonesia, he said, had made it "practically impossible" for a Christian congregation to get a building permit. The government is drafting new laws about church buildings, "but the bottom line is, the cure is worse than the cold."

Notwithstanding the photos about the room of the second Bush inauguration, the Bush administration came in for criticism by Lawrence Uzzell, president of the International Religious Freedom Watch.