Nigeria’s Christians Are Dying — and Both the US and the Vatican Are Right About Why| National Catholic Register

EDITORIAL: Washington and Rome see Nigeria’s crisis through different lenses — but each perspective highlights part of a deadly reality facing the nation’s Christians.

It should come as little surprise that Rome and Washington recently articulated very different approaches when it comes to addressing the murderous campaign of violence against Christians that’s ongoing in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

According to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, the underlying issues are “social” in nature, not religious. According to President Donald Trump, the matter is primarily religious, and the Nigerian government is to blame for allowing the killings to continue.

But, actually, the Vatican and the U.S. government both make good points about the situation. In combination, their differing approaches could assist in improving conditions on the ground for Nigerian Christians as well as for the country as a whole.

Nigeria is indisputably the world leader when it comes to killings of Christians, with tens of thousands murdered there since 2000. Yet Cardinal Parolin pointedly declined last month to characterize the Nigerian violence as a genocide of Christians conducted by Muslim militants, noting an array of other factors are also involved.

That’s true enough. As The Wall Street Journal noted in a Nov. 11 commentary, “Reducing the witches’ brew of tribal conflict, social disintegration, jihadist insurgency and religious violence afflicting that country to a charge of Christian genocide misses the complexity and scale of the horror.”

But it’s equally true that religion is a central component of the African nation’s problems. So President Trump was fully justified when he announced Oct. 31 that he was designating Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) when it comes to religious-freedom violations.

The president followed that up shortly afterward with some trademark Trumpian bellicosity, warning on Truth Social of potential U.S. military engagement if the Nigerian government fails to take immediate action to protect endangered Christians.

Such an approach would be the opposite of the policy of interreligious dialogue and constructive engagement with Nigeria’s political leaders that the Vatican advocates. 

The Nigerian government of President Bola Tinubu, who is Muslim, took understandable umbrage with the threat of American intervention.

In reality, there’s minimal likelihood of U.S. military action for numerous reasons. Notably, though, Tinubu also communicated he would welcome non-military help from the U.S. and other outside parties “to deepen cooperation on protection of communities of all faiths.”

Observers credit Tinubu, who took office in 2023, with having more sincerity about protecting Christians, who comprise nearly half of Nigeria’s population, than did his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari, who belonged to the Muslim Fulani ethnic group that continues to carry out many of the massacres of Nigerian Christians alongside attacks by the jihadist Boko Haram organization. That could be due partly to the fact that Tinubu’s wife is a Christian.

In any event, it appears that Nigeria’s current leaders have higher priorities besides curbing their nation’s epidemic of religiously tinged violence. Trump’s “Country of Particular Concern” nudge on religious freedom, which might be followed with measures like sanctions if improvements don’t occur, is a useful step to prompt greater action.

And while divisions exist among Nigerian Catholic leaders about whether it’s accurate to assign primary blame to Muslim zealots, no one disagrees with President Trump’s assessment that the situation is unacceptable. As Nigerian Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, said this week, “Instead of wasting time on whether we should be classified [as a CPC] or not, we should focus that energy on stopping the killings.”

It should be remembered that there is a powerful historical precedent regarding the good fruits that can result when Washington and Rome cooperate in pursuit of a worthy international goal. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Pope St. John Paul II shared a love of democratic freedoms and a loathing of the evils caused by Soviet totalitarianism. And while the two great men were never formal collaborators, in their differing ways, they were both enormous contributors to the subsequent downfall of Russian-bloc Communism.