(Credit: Ruslan Kalnitsky/Shutterstock.)
ishtartv.com - cruxnow.com
Hannah
Brockhaus, Feb 8, 2018
ROME
- The Roman Colosseum will be illuminated by red lights later this month to
draw attention to the persecution of Christians around the world, and
especially in Syria and Iraq.
On
Saturday, Feb. 24, at 6 p.m. the Colosseum will be spotlighted in red, to
represent the blood of Christians who have been wounded or lost their lives due
to religious persecution.
Simultaneously,
in Syria and Iraq, prominent churches will be illuminated with red lights. In
Aleppo, the St. Elijah Maronite Cathedral will be lit, and in Mosul, the Church
of St. Paul, where this past Dec. 24, the first Mass was celebrated after the
city’s liberation from ISIS.
The
event, sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), follows a similar
initiative last year, which lit-up London’s Parliament building in red, as well
as the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris and the cathedral in Manila,
Philippines. In 2016, the famous Trevi Fountain in Rome was lit.
Alessandro
Monteduro, director of ACN, told journalists Feb. 7 that the “illumination [of
the Colosseum] will have two symbolic figures: Asia Bibi, the Pakistani
Christian condemned to death for blasphemy and whose umpteenth judgment is
expected to revoke the sentence; and Rebecca, a girl kidnapped by Boko Haram
along with her two children when she was pregnant with a third.”
“One
of the children was killed,” he said, “she lost the baby she was carrying, and
then became pregnant after one of the many brutalities she was subjected to by
her captors.”
Once
she was freed and reunited with her husband, she decided she “could not hate
those who caused her so much pain,” Monteduro said.
Aid
to the Church in Need released a biennial report on anti-Christian persecution
Oct. 12, 2017, detailing how Christianity is “the world’s most oppressed faith
community,” and how anti-Christian persecution in the worst regions has reached
“a new peak.”
The
report reviewed 13 countries, and concluded that in all but one, the situation
for Christians was worse in overall terms for the period 2015-2017 than during
the prior two years.
“The
one exception is Saudi Arabia, where the situation was already so bad it could
scarcely get any worse,” the report said.
China,
Eritrea, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria
were ranked “extreme” in the scale of anti-Christian persecution. Egypt, India,
and Iran were rated “high to extreme,” while Turkey was rated “moderate to
high.”
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