The following comes from a July 21 Orange County Catholic article by Patrick Mott:

The image remains indelible: 21 men in bright orange jumpsuits kneeling on a lonely Mediterranean beach before a line of black-clad and masked Islamic State militants. Seconds later, the militants would draw their long knives and ritually behead each of the men—all of them Egyptian Christians. The 21 had been kidnapped by the extremist group while working in Libya, and the beheadings were captured on a video that was subsequently released on a pro-Islamic State website.

During a Mass offered for the Coptic Christian victims on Feb. 17, shortly after the beheadings, Pope Francis declared that the 21 had been murdered “for the sole reason of being Christians” and prayed “that the Lord welcome them as martyrs.”

As shocking as the killings were, the motivation for them was not atypical. Throughout the world, in the early years of the 21st century, Christians have suffered persecution and martyrdom at a rate and intensity that recalls the worst periods of the ancient Roman Empire.

Though the numbers rarely show up on popular radar in the West, the International Society for Human Rights reported that Christians are the targets of 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today. “Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet,” writes John J. Allen in The Spectator.

“According to the Pew Forum,” writes Allen, author of the book The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution, between 2006 and 2010 “Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the center calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.

“In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well.”

The modern-era anti-Christian bloodletting actually began in the 20th century, though incidents were, then as now, seldom generally acknowledged.

“The secular West has been looking the other way for a very long time,” writes Susan Brinkman in The Catholic Standard and Times. “Even the average church-going Christian is not likely to know that 45.5 million of the estimated 70 million Christians who have died for Christ did so in the last century.

For this reason, scholars such as Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, refer to the past century as one of the darkest periods of martyrdom since the birth of Christianity.”

The persecutions in the 20th century “were largely the result of political ideologies—alternative religions really—that could not tolerate any competition from competing faiths,” says Royal. “Communism, Nazism and Fascism all piled up huge numbers of Christian dead. Because they think of religion as a political and not a spiritual force, of course they hate it when they see it.

“Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, the situation has changed. We’re developing our own anti-Christian ideologies in the West—persecution, but so far no real martyrs. Militant Islam seems to be doing the most, but tyrannical regimes in Africa exist that don’t like Christians who resist injustices… China does a fair job repressing Christians, who grow in numbers nonetheless, maybe because of the persecution. There are other fundamentalisms that have arisen in response to the bleak nature of the modern world: Hindu fundamentalism, for instance, has killed and tried to drive Christians away. It’s a nasty world.”

“Most Christians don’t go out of their way to conflict with authorities and with other faiths,” says Royal. “But to be a Christian in the troubled parts of the world often means to have made a deliberate choice to remain faithful to something beyond your immediate surroundings. It’s amazing how many people are willing to risk everything, including their lives, to remain faithful. Those Coptic Christians who were beheaded by ISIS in Libya were amazing to the very end, but aren’t as rare in the world as most people think.”