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John L. Allen Jr. | All Things Catholic

Christians suffering in the Middle East

An Egyptian man held a cross and a Quran as security forces stood guard last week during the funeral of Egyptian Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat.Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

CAIRO — At the very origins of Christianity lies the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, escaping persecution under an Israelite king. In the crypt of a small Cairo church, one can still find the well from which, tradition holds, Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus drew fresh water during their exile.

Sadly, Egypt today has become a place a small number of Christians are running away from, not toward, while most express a determination to hold on no matter how bad it gets.

Along with my Crux colleague Inés San Martín, I spent time recently in Egypt collecting the stories of these persecuted Christians.

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Our hope was to reverse-engineer Stalin’s famous dictum that one death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic. Rather than accumulating facts and figures, we wanted to unearth the individual dramas beneath such data.

For instance, we met Wadie Ramses, a 64-year-old Christian doctor who was kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai region last year and held for 92 days, blindfolded and handcuffed, until his family paid a ransom. Periodically, he would be put in a car and driven around listening to verses from the Koran, while his captors beat him with a rubber hose for refusing to accept Islam.

We met Andraous Oweida, a 44-year-old construction worker and father of two who was severely wounded when the Egyptian army plowed their armored personnel carriers into a crowd of Christian protesters four years ago, leaving 22 people dead.

We met Nadi Mohani Makar, 59, once a prosperous merchant in a mid-sized town called Dalga, and learned of how a mob burst into his home, shot his wife in the leg, set the house ablaze, and dragged him off for a beating. He was held by local police for 15 days, allegedly as a precautionary measure, and then told he was no longer welcome in town.

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We met Nabil Soliman, a former security guard from Upper Egypt who lost his home, his job, and all of his property to a mob of Muslim radicals in 2013. He survives today with his wife, children, and grandchildren in a run-down Cairo apartment that’s barely worthy of housing human beings.

We met Ayman Samwel, a 33-year-old pharmacist who’s part of the Zabbaleen, Cairo’s legendary underclass of “garbage people” who are almost entirely Christian.

Samwel recently was rousted from his bed by police at 3 a.m. and taken off to a station house, where he says he was beaten for four hours and subjected to verbal abuse about his faith. As Samwel describes it, it’s part of the routine harassment of his community.

We met Saqer Iskander Toos, 35, whose father was killed in August 2014 in another spasm of anti-Christian violence. Muslim friends helped Toos and his brother escape their village, then buried the father because his sons weren’t allowed to return.

In a final humiliation, a mob later dug up the corpse and paraded it through the streets.

Such stories are depressingly easy to find.

Two big-picture points suggest themselves about the situation facing Christians in Egypt, which to greater or lesser degrees is shared across most of the Middle East.

First, Christians are not the only ones suffering.

Right now, Egypt’s most embattled minority group is arguably the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative Islamic movement whose members are subject to arrest, torture, and extra-judicial execution by security services. Other minorities, such as Egypt’s small Shi’ite Muslim population, also experience hardships, as do many women, gays, free-speech activists, and other constituencies.

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Second, Christians in Egypt insist their aim is not special privilege but equality as citizens. They see themselves as fully Egyptian, not the “other,” and their suffering as part and parcel of the broader difficulties facing the entire nation under a regime that, to put it charitably, has a checkered history vis-à-vis human rights.

That said, there’s no doubt that Christians are especially at risk in places such as Egypt, where they’re a convenient target anytime someone is mad at the state, the West, or any other perceived enemy.

Christians will take a natural interest in such suffering by fellow religionists. Concerned citizens of any stripe, however, should be able to recognize these abuses not as a confessional matter but an urgent human rights challenge.

There’s also a clear strategic value at stake: If Christians go down in Egypt, they’ll go down all across the entire region, and with them any realistic hope for pluralism, democracy, and stability in the Middle East.

Here’s hoping that realization takes hold in time to do the victims we met some good.

Trip to Latin America

Pope Francis leaves Sunday for a weeklong swing to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay, with vast crowds expected to turn out to welcome history’s first Latin American pontiff.

It will be the 146th overseas trip for a pope since Paul VI launched the modern era of papal travel in 1964. Theoretically, all such outings are equal, but in terms of cultural and political power, some have been more equal than others.

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There are some key challenges awaiting the pontiff, and how well he navigates them will form the trip’s drama.

While it’s too simplistic to say that Francis aims to bring down capitalism the same way John Paul II brought down Communism, there’s no doubt that he wants significant reform in what he’s called an “economy that kills.”

It’s a message that will resonate in three of the most impoverished and marginalized nations in the region. Paraguay and Bolivia rank among the bottom seven Latin American nations on the United Nations’ Human Development Index and are at the bottom of the pack outside Central America.

The question, however, isn’t whether the pope’s antipoverty campaign will play well. It’s whether it will make any difference, and there the jury is out.

The Catholic Church has suffered significant losses in Latin America in recent decades to mushrooming Evangelical and Pentecostal movements and to rising secularism and religious nonaffiliation.

The numbers are eye-popping. During the 1990s, the Latin American bishops issued a study concluding they were losing 8,000 people every day, while the polling firm Latinobarometro, based in Chile, projected 10 years ago that by 2025 less than half of Latin Americans will identify themselves as Catholic.

Granted, the main concern of the Catholic Church isn’t — or, at least, it shouldn’t be — market share. When the retired Pope Benedict XVI was asked about those losses during a trip to Brazil in 2007, he famously replied that “statistics are not our divinity.”

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Still, Catholicism is a missionary religion and its leaders have to be concerned if the momentum seems to go, in their eyes, in the wrong direction.

To date, there’s scant evidence that Francis’ high approval ratings and his standing as a media icon have translated into a significant bump in church attendance or self-identification as Catholic. Observers will be watching to see if that changes in the wake of this trip.


John L. Allen Jr. is a Globe associate editor, covering global Catholicism. He can be reached at john.allen@globe.com.