Report: Christian Persecution 2019 a Scourge of ‘Mammoth Proportions’

June 2019 is an “especially menacing time” for Christians both on the domestic and international fronts, writes Christian persecution expert John L. Allen in a report Sunday. The U.S. Catholic Church is facing “one of the most serious potential violations of religious freedom in its history in the form of SB 360 in California,” writes Allen, author of the 2013 bestseller The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution, since the bill would compel priests to reveal information learned while hearing confessions as evidence against possible sex offenders.

“The bill passed the California senate in late May by a 30-2 vote and is expected to be considered by the State Assembly in September,” Allen notes.

On the international scene, “the scope of anti-Christian hostility is staggering,” Allen continues, with the number of Christians facing “harassment, physical assault, arrest and imprisonment, torture, and even death” on a daily basis estimated at around 200 million.

Christians in North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and a host of other countries live under a constant threat of active persecution, as documented by Open Doors, a Christian persecution watchdog group.

Even in Latin America, the world’s largest “Catholic” region, the number of Catholic clergy and personnel killed each year frequently tops the list of continents.

While the defense of religious freedom should apply equally to all creeds, Allen asserts, anti-Christian persecution deserves particular focus “given the wall of silence that still too often surrounds the subject.”

“Just as one didn’t have to be Jewish to sympathize with the plight of dissident Jews in the Soviet Union, and didn’t have to be black to be outraged by apartheid in South Africa, similarly today one shouldn’t have to be Christian to recognize anti-Christian persecution as a human rights scourge of...

360 would legally require priests to tattle, not compel them. Most will go to jail rather than go to the Law. The law, if enacted, will rather end confessions to child abuse and because such things are always expanded in practice, confessions to anything illegal and ultimately will pretty much end Confession as a practice because the law will be interpreted to require recording of all confession with links to the police. Confessions of crimes to a priest result in some of those crimes being solved as the confessing parties are told by the priest that absolution is conditional on the subject turning himself in to the authorities. The State means to end that.

Laws opening the contents of Confession(Rite of Reconciliation) will gain the prosecutors nothing. Confession will continue but most of the confessors will be government spies and priests will be subjected to show trials. A few priests will be jailed. A few priests will lose their faculties for breaking the Seal if they break under interrogation. Abusers and criminals will stop seeking absolution or a path to atone for their acts. A few cases that would be resolved will not be resolved.

I guess the process will gain the state something it craves and that is denigration of the Church and Christian practice. Protestants should not think they are safe from the state just because they do not have formal Confessions. Christianity is the target. The liturgical churches are the obvious first prey but only the first. It is an ongoing necessity of totalitarian government and governments aspiring to that status. There can be no organization or idea that is either above the State or between the State and the population.

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