Ashur Sargon Eskrya, president of the Assyrian Aid Society–Iraq (AASI), passed away today from COVID-19 complications. A champion of the Assyrian Christian minority, he was also a central figure in US efforts to shelter refugees from ISIS and later rebuild the Nineveh Plains. AASI was honored for
A Catholic priest and at least six others were killed by gunmen in an attack on St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Benue State, Nigeria, the Diocese of Katsina-Ala confirmed Wednesday. Fr. Ferdinand Fanen Ngugban had just offered Mass in his parish church of St. Paul
To be blunt about it, worshippers yesterday at Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, the capital of Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province, got lucky. When two suicide bombers detonated their devices outside a Palm Sunday Mass, they were the only ones who died, in part
A suspected suicide bomb attack targeted Catholics leaving a cathedral after Palm Sunday Mass on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The explosion occurred March 28 outside Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, capital of South Sulawesi province, as church-goers were exiting the cathedral at
The term “genocide” is one of the more emotionally-charged words in the English lexicon. But there’s something yet more extreme about an autogenocide, in which the perpetrators belong to the same ethnicity as the victims. The 1975-1979 reign of the Khmer Rouge ranks up there with
Last month, a Christian family in Pakistan was brutally attacked by a mob of Muslims after they unblocked a sewer drain coming from their home. Local police have taken no action against the attackers, leaving the Christian family feeling unsafe and marginalized. On February 14,
The bandits stepped from the roadside bushes and opened fire just as Father Aloysius Ezoenyeka finished praying the rosary. The pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Ventura was driving on a deserted highway as New Year’s Eve afternoon dimmed into evening, on the way from
Ten years after his assassination, various world leaders have praised the life and death of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistan cabinet minister killed after defending religious minorities persecuted under the country’s strict blasphemy law. His relatives, collaborators, and victims of persecution praised his example and urged continued
The Nigerian schoolgirls who had been, last Friday, abducted from the Government Girls’ Secondary School (GGSS) Jangebe in Zamfara State within Nigeria’s Ecclesiastical Province of Kaduna, have been released. The February 26 night abduction saw hundreds of schoolgirls taken away after gunmen stormed the school
“In August 2014 while I was parish priest in Stowe, Vermont, ISIS swept across the Nineveh Plain; and, as a consequence, for the first time in 2000 years, there would be no Mass at Mosul. I asked myself: What could I do about this?” This
