Religious persecution

It’s been a pattern under Joe Biden’s time in executive office. As much as he has prefaced his political career in the media on his deeply held faith as a Catholic, time and again it is his administrations, as vice president and now as president, that have targeted American Catholic organizations with burdensome and often ridiculous regulatory challenges. The Little Sisters of the Poor met the ire of the Obama administration. Now Biden's Department of Health and Human Services is demanding that the largest hospital system in Oklahoma, Saint Francis Health System, literally snuff out the flame of their belief to keep their doors open. St. Francis, a nonprofit hospital system which opened in 1960 and now serves 400,000 Oklahomans every year, has chapels, you see.

From Stalin’s Russia to Castro’s Cuba, socialism and religious persecution have nearly always gone hand in hand. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, a seventy-seven-year-old former Sandinista terrorist turned twenty-first-century dictator, is no exception to that rule.  The Havana Times reported last week that at least twenty Nicaraguans were kidnapped by Ortega’s dictatorship during the first ten days of April, most during Holy Week, a period in which the regime prohibited processions and religious celebrations in the streets. “In 2023, the policy of terror imposed by the Ortega government has mostly focused on the Catholic Church, and proof of this is that most of those imprisoned have some relation with the religious institution,” the report notes.