It will be another Holy Week with strictures placed on worship. The Vatican Easter Vigil Mass will take place earlier at 7.30 pm. In Germany, protesting bishops are pushing Merkel to reverse her government’s measures. Meanwhile, in Ireland,  threats are mounting to arrest 'disobedient' priests and in Belgium a 15-person limit remains in effect  for all religious services other than funerals. COMECE bishops denounced using Covid as a pretext to restrict religious freedom.

2021 is not only the centenary of the Italian Communist Party, but also of the much more powerful Communist Party in China which still wields (absolute) power over the most populous nation on earth. Regarding this occasion, celebrated next 23 July (date of the Party's founding in Shanghai), Chinese Catholics have received precise directives from their government. The Communist regime is promoting a "pastoral" programme that is actually political and aims to transform the Church into a mouthpiece for Party propaganda.

Nadia Geerts, a Brussels-based philosophy teacher, militant atheist and radical secularist, wrote an article for Marianne magazine, expressing intellectual solidarity with Samuel Paty, a history professor beheaded by Islamists in France for having shown cartoon drawings of Mohammed in his classroom. Now, she is the one under threat. Who will the left stand with? Will a  multicultural Belgium come to her defence?

The annual World Watch List was presented last week: in 2020 there were 340 million Christians persecuted because of their faith, 309 million of them very severely. The number of Christians killed increased by 60%: from 2,983 to 4,761, an average of 13 per day. 4,277 believers were arrested without trial and 1,710 kidnapped. Islam remains the main matrix of persecution. Religious nationalism and, especially in China, communism, also weigh heavily. North Korea is still the worst performer. Among the factors responsible for the greatest difficulties for Christians, especially where they are a minority, Open Doors identifies Covid.

Even if Masses in Ireland have just resumed after a six-week ban imposed by the government, some bishops and laity have accused the government of acting unconstitutionally.  To avoid further attempts to impose new closures, an appeal has been made to the High Court. The sentence is now in the waiting.

The European Commission's anti-Covid guidelines recommend EU Member States limit the celebration of Christmas Masses with the faithful and encourage religious ceremonies on TV. At the same time Christmas masses have been prohibited in Belgium, in France the government and the bishops are engaged in a tug-of-war and in Italy an obligation to anticipate midnight masses has been imposed. This amounts to an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the Church. We now await a response from Pope Francis. Until now he has openly supported government-imposed lockdowns and his addresses are used in the United States by Jeffrey Sachs, for years one of the principal advisors of Santa Marta, to support church closures.

China is becoming increasingly closed, especially with regard to religions. The draft of the new bill regulating "foreign religious activities in the People's Republic of China" spells further crackdown measures. New rules make entering China  even more difficult. Whoever doesn’t respect the spirit of  “sinicization” of religions in China is treated as a spy.

While the West is isolated at home out of fear, Christians in North Korea prefer freedom of the soul to physical safety. A document of the Korea Future Initiative is really an interview of about a hundred former inmates of labor camps, narrating the atrocities committed against women, elderly persons and children, but also offering the response of believers, who do not fear their persecutors, before whom they pray and smile.

The violent Islamist attacks in France over the last few days and confirmed by the ones in Austria, constitute a broadside against the West. The Catholic Church, which doesn’t even name Islam or use Islamist, reveals its unwillingness to defend the West. Just the opposite of Benedict XVI’s pontificate.

The tears and anger in front of a mother killed while praying, a beheaded elderly woman, a man stabbed while serving God with love, serve to understand that keeping silent about the differences between the Christian God of life and the Islamic God of death is a source of conflict. Only the proclamation of the faith witnessed by these martyrs can bring peace to the world. As one wrote shortly before his death, citing Psalm 91: "I will rescue him, for he acknowledges my name... I will show him my salvation.”

"The burned down churches are a blow to the hearts of Catholics: protestors draw blasphemous graffiti and incite violence" the Archbishop of Santiago de Chile spoke to the Daily Compass following the Sunday fires. "It would be foolish to deny that the inspiration for these attacks on the Church and religion are the errors of our Church and the sins we have committed and are ashamed of."

Spain’s government has given the go ahead for a new “Historical Memory Law”. In Orwellian language, this means establishing a system of "democratic pedagogy" by adapting history to anti-Francoist ideology. This also means an attack on Christianity, with the expulsion of the monks from Basílica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, a  Civil War sanctuary-mausoleum, and placing restrictions on other state cemetery chapels. Spain’s Observatory on Religious Freedom has denounced the situation to the Daily Compass as an act of “barbarism” which calls for the“bishops to take a stand.”