From Nigeria to Belarus, 2025 marks a grim year for religious freedom

(OSV News) — As 2025 draws to a close, the plight of persecuted Christians around the world remains dire — and in many places, deeply forgotten. The year has exposed how fragile religious freedom is, even as the faithful strive to survive with courage, hope and community.

Church leaders like Regina Lynch, executive director of Aid to the Church in Need pontifical charity, warn that “there are more cases, there are more countries where religious freedom doesn’t exist or … is being eaten away.”

Nigeria: Ground zero for Christian persecution

As the 2025 Jubilee Year drew to a close, nowhere was the crisis of Christian persecution more visible than in Nigeria, where militant Islamist groups and extremist herding militias continue to ravage Christian villages, abduct clergy and laity, and destroy homes and churches.

In the latest sign of Christian tragedy in the country, Father Emmanuel Ezema was abducted late on Dec. 2 from his residence in St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Rumi, in Kaduna State, the Diocese of Zaria said on Dec. 3, according to Reuters.

On Nov. 21, in one of the worst cases of kidnappings in the recent history of Africa’s most populous country, more than 300 children were taken at gunpoint, along with their teachers, from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, in central Nigeria. Fifty managed to escape and were reunited with their families, and Nigeria secured the release of 100 more, Reuters said Dec. 8, but the rest of their colleagues remain in captivity.

For the kids’ parents, anxiety turned into anger as they watched the government’s slow response to the crisis.

Sunday Gbazali, a father of 12 whose 14-year-old son was among those seized, told Reuters two weeks into the kidnapping he barely sleeps and his wife constantly cries thinking about their boy.

In the northeast — particularly dioceses such as Maiduguri — Christians live under constant threat from militants and violent herdsmen. As Bishop John Bogna Bakeni of Maiduguri put it, “Every day is a grace … because we never know what will happen in the next hour.”

On Oct. 31, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would again designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom and threatened to suspend nonhumanitarian aid and take “action” if the Nigerian government did not act swiftly to protect Christians from extremist violence.

The latest Intersociety advocacy group report revealed that an average of 32 Christians are killed in Nigeria every day. The report published in August indicates that as many as 7,000 Christians were massacred across the country in the first 220 days of 2025.

Amid this horror, faith persists. Surveys show that up to 94% of Nigerian Catholics claim to attend Mass weekly or daily.

For a brief moment, the Trump Administration move put Nigeria in the spotlight of mainstream media reports — otherwise the atrocities were mostly forgotten by global media companies.

“It’s difficult to get the secular media to to report on these situations,” ACN’s Lynch told OSV News. “Occasionally the BBC will say something, but it’s really a battle to be that voice there.”

She said she looks with hope to parliamentarians in the European Union, and members of the U.S. Congress — “people who are ready to listen, who do believe that there is persecution of Christians in some of these countries.” She said the job of organizations like ACN is to “to move them … to do something about this.”

“What’s really a big concern for us today is the growing jihadism in West Africa, in the Sahel region,” the official said, calling “atrocities” in Nigeria but also Burkina Faso “really, really horrible.”

Lynch underlined that in countries like Nigeria, “all people are being attacked, not just Christians, but anybody who does not accept this form of jihadism,” ACN’s executive director said.

Syria and Gaza

Over the past months, Christians in Syria — along with other religious minorities — have faced a sharp increase in targeted violence, insecurity and displacement. A brutal reminder came on June 22, when a suicide bomber attacked Mar Elias Church, a Greek Orthodox church in the Dweila neighborhood of Damascus, during Divine Liturgy.

At least 20 worshippers were killed and more than 60 injured. The attacker, reportedly linked to Islamic State group, opened fire before detonating his vest. According to witnesses, around 350 people were present inside the church at the time.

But that was not an isolated incident. In the southern district of Sweida — a region with substantial Christian and Druze populations — a wave of sectarian violence erupted in July 2025. Militias attacked Christian and Druze neighborhoods: in the village of Al-Sura, the Greek Melkite Church of St. Michael was burned down, while 38 Christian homes were also destroyed by fire, leaving many families homeless. As one displaced Christian recalled, “This community has lost everything.”

Religious-freedom advocates describe the security situation for Christians and other minorities as “disastrous.” According to ACN’s statistics, the Christian population in Syria has shrunk from roughly 2.1 million in 2011 (before the war) to about 540,000 today. The sense of vulnerability and fear among survivors and remaining Christians is deep.

Syrian Archbishop Jacques Mourad of Homs warned that the “church in Syria is dying,” lamenting that many believers feel they have no future in their homeland under the new Islamist-led government of Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Still, church leaders insist on the importance of Christians remaining in their ancestral lands. “These are the living stones. These are the roots. They carry the roots of our faith,” Lynch said.

Mentioning Gaza, where a 400-strong flock still shelters in the premises of Holy Family Catholic Parish and St. Porphyrios Orthodox Church, amid difficulties of winter and as a ceasefire was reached in October after two years of constant Israeli bombardment of the enclave, Lynch said, “They manage, but it’s not easy. … It’s terribly sad.”

Belarus

While the Nov. 20 release of two priests offers a rare glimmer of hope, for most Christians in Belarus the situation remains bleak — marked by harsh sentences, legal restrictions and suppression of independent religious life.

The release of Fathers Andrzej Juchniewicz and Henrykh Akalatovich came only after a visit in October by the papal envoy Claudio Gugerotti.

It was described as a “gesture of mercy,” interpreted as linked to high-level Vatican intervention. While it was a joy that the outspoken priests supporting freedom in Belarus have been freed, Szoszyn recalled, the most prominent group of political prisoners — many of them Catholics — is still behind bars.

Among them is Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. His supporters have urged Western church leaders to take up his cause four years after he was detained and jailed in Belarus on trumped-up charges.

Overall repression remains widespread as Catholics face sweeping legal and administrative restrictions, such as the 2023 religious-freedom law under which all parishes must re-register or risk liquidation; this law curbs missionary activity, religious education, minority-language worship and monastic life.

Dozens of clergy — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant — have been arrested on vague charges ranging from “extremist material” or “subversive activity” to treason and espionage. Political prisoners arrests occurred after the rigged 2020 and 2022 elections and the subsequent crackdown on civil society and dissent.

Prominent lay Catholics are also targeted. Andrzej Poczobut — a journalist and member of Belarus’s Polish minority — remains imprisoned since 2021. In December 2025, the European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, making him a “symbol of the struggle for freedom and democracy” in Belarus.

From India to Nicaragua, religious freedom shrinks

In 2025, religious oppression in India has also taken damaging forms. In one high-profile case, two Catholic nuns from Kerala, Sisters Vandana Francis and Preeti Mary, along with an Indigenous youth, were arrested in Chhattisgarh on charges of “human trafficking and forced religious conversion.”

Their detention sparked outrage, with religious leaders and civil-society figures calling the charges “unlawful,” and demanding their immediate release.

A special court granted them conditional bail in August 2025 — but the case remains a stark reminder how legal and administrative tools can be used to harass Christians, stigmatize their humanitarian work, and suppress minority faiths.

In a scathing editorial on Aug. 3, Deepika, a Malayalam daily published by the Catholic bishops in India’s Kerala state, slammed the growing Hindu fundamentalism in the country under the patronage of governments in different states, reminding that Hindu fundamentalism had gained a presence in the country and was suppressing the voices of minorities, especially Christians.

Persecution against Christians has steadily increased since 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, according to the United Christian Forum, based in New Delhi, the nation’s capital.

Some of the patterns in persecution have changed dramatically. “It’s become, in some countries, more sophisticated,” Lynch said, citing India and China and coordinated extremist networks.

On the other side of the world, in Central America, the situation for Christians is also catastrophic — though less visible. In Nicaragua, a systematic crackdown on religious institutions has unfolded under the authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.

Over the past years, more than 200 clergy and religious leaders have been detained, expelled or forced into exile. Churches and charitable organizations have had their legal status revoked, properties seized and worship restricted severely.

Although reported attacks in 2025 dropped to just around 3 dozen compared to 321 in 2023 — experts warn that this “decline” masks a deeper reality: the church has been decimated. Many clergy no longer dare report harassment or violence.

Religious freedom report alarming

A 1,200-page Religious Freedom Report, published by ACN Oct. 21, is drawing urgent warnings from Catholic aid officials who say persecution is expanding across continents and deepening in severity.

“There are more cases, there are more countries where religious freedom doesn’t exist or is being eaten away and is less than was before,” Lynch said.

She emphasized ACN is sending humanitarian and logistical help as needed but “prayer is something that those persecuted communities appreciate most.”

Travelling the world, “I’ve heard to myself how much it means to the local Christian population to know that there are Christians elsewhere in the world praying for them,” she said.

Advocacy is another pillar. “Being a voice for the voiceless is a very important aspect,” Lynch said.

At the same time, rising secularism in the West is making raising awareness more difficult. “With the secularization that we have in our so-called Western countries today, it’s not always easy to … raise the awareness that … Christians are being killed.”

Yet those experiencing persecution firsthand offer a sharp contrast in conviction. One man falsely accused of blasphemy in Pakistan refused to renounce his faith despite torture. Lynch recalled: “He looked at a crucifix on the wall behind me and said: ‘But he suffered so much more than I did.'”

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