The Vatican’s timid defense of persecuted Christians

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 29, 2025

“Nigeria is the most deadly place in the world to be a Christian,” says Jeff King, the president of International Christian Concern (ICC), a group that tracks religious-freedom violations. According to ICC, at least 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since the start of the 21st century.

Robert Royal, the author of The Martyrs of the New Millenium, provides equally stunning figures: “from 2019 to 2023, 33,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists…”

”It is genocide,” laments Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi. “They want to Islamize the country.” He describes Catholicism in Nigeria as “a Church under Islamic extermination.” From across the border in Benin, Bishop Martin Adjou Moumouni of N’Dali reports: “Nigerian jihadists have long been spreading terror in our diocese.”

The picture is reasonably clear, is it not? Our Christian brethren in Nigeria are under attack. From time to time a secular reporter will downplay the religious element of the bloodshed, saying that the conflicts in Nigeria reflect old tribal animosities, between herders (mostly Muslim) and farmers (mostly Christian). Those disputes are factors, certainly. But the victims of the bloodshed are overwhelmingly Christian. And in the region where the killings are most common, Christians have no doubt that they are targeted precisely because they are Christian.

So it was a shock last week that at a conference in Rome—on the topic of religious freedom, no less—Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters that the violence in Nigeria is “not a religious conflict, but rather more a social one—for example, disputes between herders and farmers.”

Why would the Vatican’s Secretary of State side with those who would minimize the suffering of Nigerian Christians, as opposed to supporting and defending those who are now suffering under persecution? Robert Royal provides an all-too-plausible answer:

Why all this double-clutching over the worst persecution of Christians in the world? The answer seems to be fear of having to recognize that Islam, since its founding, has been a militant movement that spread through Christian lands by conquest. And tries to do so even today.

Cardinal Parolin is above all a diplomat, anxious to avoid giving offense. Readers will recall that he is the principal architect of the Vatican’s secret agreement with Beijing governing the appointment of new bishops in China. The results of that accord have been sparse; dozens of Chinese dioceses are still without bishops. The government-backed Catholic Patriotic Association (which Pope Benedict XVI said was “incompatible with Catholic doctrine”) routinely claims control over the governance of the Chinese Church. Yet Cardinal Parolin insists that the agreement with Beijing has been fruitful, and avoids criticizing Chinese leaders even when they apparently violate the terms of that agreement. (I say “apparently” because we do not know what the terms of the accord are.) So in China, as in Nigeria, while faithful Catholics struggle, the Secretary of State minimizes their suffering.

The problem here is not simply that Cardinal Parolin has made poor foreign-policy choices (although he has). The problem is compounded because as the Secretary of State he serves an awkward dual role: as the Vatican’s top diplomat but also as the 2nd-ranking official of the Holy See, ranking only below the Sovereign Pontiff.

The Secretariat of State is not, like the US State Department, exclusively a foreign-policy office. In Rome, the Secretariat of State is also responsible for coordinating the work of all offices of the Roman Curia. The deputy Secretary of State, the Sostituto, functions essentially as the Pope’s chief of staff. All of the paperwork produced at the Vatican—and therefore nearly every decision—flows through the Sostituto’s office.

Stato is the uber-dicastery, assigned that leading role by Pope Paul VI (himself a former Sostituto) when he reorganized the Roman Curia. Although Pope Francis insisted that the work of the Holy See should always have been viewed primarily as a function of evangelization, he confirmed and even strengthened the primacy of the Secretariat of State in his own reform of the Curia.

So all the work of the Vatican dicasteries is guided and shaped by the office that also handles the Vatican’s foreign affairs. Quite naturally, that office has a special interest in the diplomatic impact of any Vatican statement—rather than, say, a special interest in how the statement will promote evangelization, or the understanding of Catholic doctrine, or the work of bishops and clergy. The tendency to waffle—to speak softly, even when the time calls for a strong voice—is baked into the structure of the Vatican bureaucracy.