Recently Pope Francis declared that “the persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.” The slaughter of 200,000 Christians in the Darfur region of Sudan since 2011 may not have received the attention it deserved. But now the religious cleansing of Christians in Iraq resulting from Islamic jihadists’ conquest of lands Christians had called home since the first centuries A.D. cannot be ignored.
