Pope: Slashing the throats of Jews and Christians is not due to the economy

[duluxe]

This week, another Christian school was attacked, 300 children kidnapped. The reaction of the media and the world is indifference, while Pope Leo is in denial. Opinion​

Jihadists (illustration)iStock

Manga is a Christian in Nigeria, the most dangerous place in the world for Christians, the country where a Christian is killed every two hours. Manga was supposed to be one of them. He was returning home as usual after university. His mother was preparing dinner. Terrorists burst into his house. They dragged Manga, his father, and his brother outside, while his mother and younger siblings hid in a room.

“Then they asked my father and the two of us if we were ready to renounce Jesus and embrace Islam,” Manga testified to the NGO “Open Doors.” Manga’s father refused. “So they told us: ‘We will kill you.’ I answered: ‘If you kill us, what do you gain?’” Manga was struck with a rifle butt, and his father was brutally murdered. “They beheaded him and placed his head on his stomach in front of my eyes,” says Manga. “Then they tried to decapitate my brother.” Manga watched helplessly as his family was massacred. Then came his turn. “They took a knife, serrated by their teeth, and tried to cut my neck.” Manga managed to find the strength to pray. The young man was left on the ground, with the bodies of his father and brother before his eyes.

I don’t know what to call all this: “genocide,” “extermination,” “religious cleansing,” but Manga certainly did not suffer because of “the economy.”


“I think that in Nigeria, in certain areas, there is danger for Christians, but [also] for everyone-Christians and Muslims have been massacred,” Pope Leo said recently, responding to a question about Manga’s country.

“There is a terrorism issue,” Leo said. “It is an issue that has much to do with the economy, if you will, with control over the lands they own. Unfortunately, many Christians have died, and I think it is very important for the government, together with all peoples, to promote genuine religious freedom.”

So something is happening: Christians and Muslims are being killed equally, and causing it is the economy-and, by the way, it is also a matter of terrorism.

Enough with the fairy tale of the murderous economy: Christians die at the hands of human killers. The economy has no knife blades-the blades belong to those whom the West never names.


I don’t know where the Vatican gets its numbers and words, but here they are:

Since the beginning of the year, 7,087 have been killed and 7,800 kidnapped by jihadist militias. Sixty lives destroyed every day on average, in the heart of a nation that today accounts for 90 percent of all Christians murdered for their faith in the world. Twenty thousand churches have already been razed to the ground and 10,000 Christian schools closed for security reasons.

And yet the BBC wonders whether “Christians are really persecuted in Nigeria as Trump says.” It even unleashes its Global Disinformation Unit.

1,200 churches are attacked every year in Nigeria: what does the BBC say-this is disinformation?


Emmanuel Isa Saliu, a Nigerian priest, tells Journal du dimanche:

“I come from a village in northwestern Nigeria, a predominantly Muslim region. At that time, sharia was not yet in force. We lived near a church where an Irish priest, the region’s first missionary, offered to care for the children and teach them reading and writing. We were all happy to spend time with ‘the white man.’ I was baptized and added a Christian name, Emmanuel, meaning ‘God with us,’ to my birth name, Isa. I continued my path, becoming a Brother of the Christian Schools before going to Rome to be ordained a priest and trained in interreligious dialogue.

"Now I have returned home and teach at the seminary in Kaduna. None of this would have been possible without that first contact with the Christian faith. Today, Islamic law reigns supreme. During Ramadan, for example, a Christian eating in front of a Muslim is considered sinful, because it is a ‘temptation.’ Girls are kidnapped, Islamicized, and forced into marriage to become sexual objects. Priests are kidnapped for ransom or murdered.


"Some Boko Haram terrorists are invited by Nigerian politicians themselves to Islamize the country. They talk about a ‘program to Islamize Nigeria.’ When I see, in videos, my companions lying on the ground, slaughtered like animals by men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ I call it genocide.”

And yet Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, had just said the violence in Nigeria “is not a religious conflict, but a social one.”

The same line was adopted by the late Pope Francis, who always avoided or bypassed the issue of the mass murder of Christians. On 14 February 2025, Muslim terrorists kidnapped 70 Christians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, brought them into a church, tied them up, and beheaded them. Their bodies were left to rot by the Muslim killers, who did this to demonstrate the supremacy of Islam over Christianity.

Pope Francis made no reference to this massacre of Christians in a church; instead, in a meeting with the Slovak Prime Minister, he spoke of the “grave humanitarian emergency in Gaza.” Pope Francis accused Israel of genocide but said: “Let me say clearly that I do not like it when people speak of a ‘genocide of Christians’”.

Benedict XVI in 2012 used simpler and more courageous words, describing what Christians were facing as “systematic religious cleansing.”


This week, another Christian school was attacked, 300 children kidnapped. The reaction of the media and the world is indifference-only Donald Trump stands out.

“How can climate change or economic inequality kill people like this?” said Nigerian Catholic Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe and Protestant Reverend Remigius Ihyula in New York. “Butchering people and destroying everything. How do they explain someone shooting unarmed villagers in the back with an AK-47 as they try to flee a terrorist raid? This is Islamic jihad.”

Simple, but apparently impossible for Church leaders to react to and report.

France 24 reports: “Mado was praying in an evangelical church. Armed men burst in, shot her two-month-old daughter point-blank, told her to leave the body on the ground and follow them outside with the other faithful.” Then they told her: “Now you will no longer be burdened.”


We can ignore the tragic truth, hide it behind strange euphemisms, and mask it with all our good intentions. But it is not the economy-it is the ideology, the one that shouts “Allahu Akbar” while slashing the throats of Jews and Christians.