This is the time of the year when Christians the world over -- more than 2 billion of us -- reflect upon the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord.
In light of the tragic massacre of Christian college students in Kenya on Thursday, and the ongoing threat against Christians in other nations, this Holy Week we are calling upon Christians to also reflect upon the crucifixion, beheading, stoning, enforced slavery, sexual abuse, human trafficking, harassment, bombing and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Christians -- and others -- whose faith alone has made them a target of religious extremists.
Countless lives have been utterly destroyed in nations such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria.
In June 2012, Bishop Shlemon Warduni of Iraq told the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "We beg you to help. We want only peace, security, and freedom. Please no more death, no more explosions, no more injustice." By then, nearly every remaining church in Iraq had constructed a blast wall around its building to buffet the threat of the inevitable church bombing.
This crisis escalated substantially last summer when ISIS swept like lightning through Iraq's Nineveh province, capturing the country's second-largest city, Mosul; a city that was until 2014 a home of a thriving Christian community, there centuries before Islam.
Again and again the world did not respond as it might have, and now the inconceivable has happened: Iraq's Nineveh Plain has been emptied of its ancient Christianity community, which existed there for more than 1,500 years.
On March 27, in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako referred to the present reality of his fellow Iraqi Christians as a "catastrophic situation."
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