David EW.
Dec 7, 2025
Africa’s Christians Endure Genocide in 2025 – On Top of Seventy Thousand Slain Since 2009
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
– John 15:13
In 2025 alone, more than 8,000 African Christians have been slaughtered for the Faith — the overwhelming majority in Nigeria, where monitoring groups recorded over 7,000 martyrs by autumn, with the killing unrelenting into December. This is on top of the more than 52,250 Nigerian Christians butchered between 2009 and 2023 (Intersociety Report, widely cited by the U.S. Congress, Aid to the Church in Need, and Open Doors), and the additional thousands slain in 2024–2025.
The total now exceeds 70,000 Nigerian Christians martyred since the jihadist insurgency exploded in 2009.
Seventy thousand named souls — husbands, wives, children, priests — offered in odium fidei in just sixteen years. This is the greatest sustained massacre of Christians anywhere on earth in the modern era.
And still the Church grows.
These Are Not Numbers — These Are Our Brothers and Sisters
Let us speak their names, as the Church has always done.
Catholic Priests murdered or died in jihadist captivity in recent years (many in 2024–2025):
Rev. Fr. Matthew Eya (parish priest of St Charles Catholic Church, Nsukka Diocese; ambushed and assassinated while returning from pastoral duties, 19 September 2025)
Rev. Fr. Sylvester Okechukwu (abducted March 2025, Kaduna; killed by captors)
Rev. Fr. Tobias Chukwujekwu Okokwo (shot and killed 26 December 2024, Diocese of Nnewi)
Rev. Fr. James Audu Issa (kidnapped 28 August 2025, Kwara State; body found October 2025 after ransom)
And dozens more whose kidnappings end in silence — 145 Catholic priests abducted in the last decade alone, many never seen alive again.
Lay faithful whose names the world must never forget (2025 alone):
Yohanna Adamu (46)
Bala Bude Chawai (57)
Yakubu Bala (50)
Abubakar Ya’u (30)
Ishaya Dauda (56)
Monday Nveneh (46)
Savior Emmanuel (12 years old — a child crucified for Christ)
Joseph Dauda Mwanti (28)
Adoya Ejigai
Ejeh Loko
Rev. Yahaya Kambasaya (pastor, slain with his flock, 28 October 2025)
Rev. Simon Nbach (Flaming Fire Ministry, butchered with parishioners, 3–4 November 2025)
Thousands more lie in mass graves whose names only God knows — but He knows them all.
Nigeria: The Epicenter of the 21st-Century Christian Genocide
In the Middle Belt especially — Plateau, Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Taraba — Fulani jihadists and Boko Haram/ISWAP descend on Christian villages shouting “Allahu Akbar,” burning churches, beheading men who refuse to deny Christ, raping women in front of their children, and hacking little ones to pieces.
2025 has been devastating:
March–April: Over 200 slain in coordinated Easter-season massacres
June–July: Hundreds more in Yelwata, Jebu, and sustained campaigns across Plateau and Benue
September–November: Fr. Matthew Eya assassinated; Damakasuwa village massacre (including 12-year-old Savior Emmanuel); Anwule Oglewu slaughter; over 100 killed in Wukari LGA in a single week
Every single week another village burns.
This is not “farmer–herder conflict.” Survivors repeatedly testify: the attackers scream that they are cleansing the land of infidelity, that Christians must convert, flee, or die.
Democratic Republic of the Congo: ISIS in the Jungle
The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF-ISIS) have turned eastern Congo into a killing field for Catholics:
13 February 2025: 70+ Christians rounded up and executed in a church (Kasanga area)
July–August 2025: 40–50 worshippers massacred during a night vigil in a Catholic church; dozens more hacked to death in a church-run hospital
September 2025: 70+ murdered at a funeral wake
Machetes. Guns. Locked church doors. Children kidnapped for jihad.
Mozambique and the Sahel: The Jihad Spreads
In Cabo Delgado, ISIS resumed beheadings in October–November 2025 — dozens of Christians executed, churches razed. In Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, entire Christian communities have been erased; churches are permanently closed, priests celebrate Mass in hiding.
The Silence Is Finally Breaking
In November 2025, President Donald Trump publicly threatened consequences if Nigeria continues “allowing the killing of Christians.” The U.S. Congress introduced bipartisan resolutions condemning the genocide, citing over 50,000 murdered and 19,000–20,000 churches destroyed. Secular voices — even comedians like Bill Maher — have begun calling it what it is.
The African bishops have cried out for years. Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly named the persecution. Aid to the Church in Need, Open Doors, and the Pontifical foundations ring the alarm.
Yet still the arms flow. Still the media equivocates. Still the U.N. speaks of “climate change” and “resource conflict” while Christians are crucified.
This Is Our Family Bleeding
Little Savior Emmanuel, age 12, hacked to death on 31 October 2025 — that is your son.
Fr. Matthew Eya, gunned down driving home to say Mass — that is your parish priest.
The unnamed mother burned alive in her church — that is Our Lady herself suffering in her children.
We are one Body. When one part is slaughtered, the whole Body bleeds.
Africa is the future of the Church. By 2030 one in four Catholics will be African. The enemy knows this. That is why he rages with such satanic fury.
But the blood of these seventy thousand-plus martyrs since 2009 is the most fertile seed the Church has ever received. Every burned village produces vocations. Every orphaned child dreams of the priesthood or religious life. Every drop of blood cries out — and the Church in Africa rises stronger.
Martyrs of Nigeria, Congo, Mozambique, Burkina Faso — you are the Charles Lwanga and the Denis and the Perpetua and Felicity of our time.
We have seen this all before in history- The era of the Knights Templar (1119–1312) was the Church's most militant, organized, and theologically uncompromising response to centuries of Islamic jihad that had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world. By the 11th century, Muslim armies had seized the entire Christian Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Sicily, and were raiding into France and the Byzantine Empire. Jerusalem itself — the holiest city of Christendom — had been under Islamic rule since 638, with Christian pilgrims increasingly humiliated, robbed, raped, and massacred.
What the Church faced was not "cultural exchange" or "peaceful coexistence." It was aggressive, expansionist jihad waged by Seljuk Turks, Fatimids, Almoravids, and later Ayyubids — armies that explicitly fought under the banner of jihad, promising paradise to those who died killing Christians.
My Fellow Americans, Awake! Return to Christ and His Church – For the Sake of the Martyrs
We were once a nation whose founding documents acknowledged the Creator, whose cathedrals and missions dotted the frontier, whose people filled churches on Sunday and built the greatest Christian civilization the world had ever seen. Now we export abortion, pornography, transgender ideology, and endless war while our own children no longer know the Our Father. We have legalized the mutilation of minors, silenced prayer in schools, and watched as drag queens read to toddlers in public libraries. We have traded the Cross for the rainbow flag and the dollar.
And in our complacency, we have forgotten our brothers and sisters who are dying for the very Faith we treat as optional.
While we argue about politics and comfort, over 8,000 African Christians were slaughtered for Christ in 2025 alone — on top of the 70,000+ Nigerian martyrs since 2009. Little Savior Emmanuel, age 12, hacked to death in October. Fr. Matthew Eya, gunned down driving home to say Mass. Entire villages burned while the survivors flee into the bush clutching rosaries.
We need men to become knights again — spiritual Templars who will defend the Faith with their lives if necessary.
We need women to become mothers of saints, raising armies of holy children in homes that look like domestic churches.
We need priests who will preach the full truth without apology, even if it empties the pews of the comfortable.
We need bishops with the courage of St. John Fisher, who will go to the scaffold rather than betray the Faith.
The same jihad that slaughters Christians in Nigeria, Congo, and Mozambique has already reached our shores in softer forms: the creeping sharia in Michigan, the mosque-building boom funded by the same ideologies that arm Boko Haram, the cultural jihad that tells our daughters to submit and our sons to stand down.
But the real battle is spiritual, and it is won on our knees.
America, return to the Church. Now.
Go to Confession this week.
Start praying the Rosary daily — all 15 decades if you can.
Get to Mass every Sunday and holy day — and daily if possible.
Enroll in the Brown Scapular.
Fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Read the lives of the saints instead of scrolling.And above all: pray for the persecuted Church.
Every Rosary you pray weakens the demons that drive the jihadists.
Every Mass you attend strengthens a priest in Nigeria who celebrates in secret.
Every hour of adoration consoles the Heart of Jesus wounded by our national apostasy and by the silence in the face of genocide.The martyrs are not dead — they are more alive than we are.
They see the Face of God.
And they are praying for us, begging us to wake up before it is too late.America was given great graces.
We have squandered them.But Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared on this continent for a reason.
She who crushed the serpent in Mexico can crush him here too — if we return to her Son.
My fellow Americans, my brothers and sisters, come home.