The Voice of the suffering and persecuted​

Pope Francis has been hospitalized in the Gemelli clinic, in Rome, after routine exams detected a respiratory infection.

“We hope these new leaders will treat everybody fairly and justly, so that it doesn’t matter who you are, you should be treated as any other citizen. We are not making any special demand, just to be treated justly, fairly and with equity."

"We don't ask for anything special as Christians, we want to be treated just as Iraqi citizens, equal to anybody else, no more, no less. We want our human dignity to be respected as all other Iraqi people.”

Faced with this “painful and outrageous” event, the provincial of the Clerics of Saint Viator uses terms such as “violence” and “anarchy” to describe the “dark hour” the country is experiencing.

They beat us during those phone calls. We were crying with the tension, while our parents listened over the phone. This routine continued for about two weeks. Every time we made the call, they beat us.

He was injured during the Syrian war, in 2012, when a staircase collapsed during a bombing, crushing his hands and much of his face.

"Some camp residents have suffered multiple displacements. Others have seen their loved ones slaughtered, shot at, and butchered like animals. We have staff who give psycho-social counselling to address their trauma."

"One of the men took his machete and cut off my mother’s head. Her blood splashed on my face. I screamed."

The Pope flagged "a polite and hidden persecution of Christians, no longer marked by terror and terrorist violence, but by a lack of regard for conscience and by pressure to live in ways that are opposed to moral values and to the sacred,”

“They put the Christians in cages, like animals. The first thing they did was forcefully convert us to Islam. … The warned us not to pray as Christians or we would be killed.”