The Book of Life Is Not a Spreadsheet
Against Necropolitics: Human Dignity Is Not Data
Silence is not pastoral when it hides a crime. In too many nations, Catholics, priests, religious, and lay faithful are forced to choose between telling the truth about religious freedom and keeping people alive. Persecutors know this. Whether they fly an ideology or run a protection racket, they bank on fear, euphemism, and a Catholic reluctance to publish verifiable patterns.
The first casualty is plain speech. The second is data: risk is undercounted, funding is misallocated, and officials tell themselves the danger is “unclear.” The third is accountability. If no reputable source describes the pattern, impunity becomes the default policy. Catholic monitors have documented this for years; they organize violations by type and region, explain cautious methods, and show how threats to worship, clergy, and education spread when intimidation works.
You can see the care: categories, date ranges, editorial review, and the admission that some details must be withheld to avoid reprisals, proof that speaking responsibly and speaking plainly can coexist.
Yet the Church is not a ledger, and this modern obsession with measuring everything risks overshadowing those who made the ultimate sacrifice. After my first visit to the Scavi beneath St. Peter’s, I remembered that the Church’s memory is not a datapoint. Bones do not ask to be graphed. Peter’s end was not a string of ones and zeros; it was a decision, a “yes” that became a foundation.
We live in an age that believes numbers can redeem every argument. I use them when I must, because budgets open when risks are counted, but numbers are cold. They do not bury the dead, anoint the wounded, or protect a frightened catechist when the men with guns return, nor can they replace the blood of the persecuted that has consecrated the lands where it has been shed.
The point of Catholic witness is not to produce a better annual report; it is to rouse the living to action. So yes, I’m wary of the new hunger to data-mine persecution as if a higher N will finally melt indifference. It won’t. What moves a human heart is encounter, not a histogram. In fact, at some level, the data can undermine the message and the behavior we seek to change as part of this nation’s long-standing defense of religious freedom, rooted in the American Founding, and now embedded in U.S. foreign policy.
Still, we are taught that love is prudent. I keep one guardrail number, not as gospel, but as prudence. Credible monitors reckon that roughly a third of the world’s countries restrict or attack religious practice in profound ways, and that hundreds of millions of Christians live under high pressure because of their faith. That scale doesn’t melt hearts; it only reminds me that what follows is not an anecdote, it’s a pattern.
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