EWTN News portal reports on yet another brutal assault on Indigenous Christian and Hindu families in northern Bangladesh, where a mob of nearly 200 Muslims attacked the village of Birganj in the Dinajpur Diocese, injuring six people—one pierced by an arrow—destroying a Hindu temple, vandalizing homes, and cutting down trees in a Catholic cemetery, all in a brazen attempt to steal land that the Indigenous community has occupied for over a century. “Six Indigenous were seriously injured in the attack and one was pierced by an arrow. The injured are undergoing treatment in the hospital,” said Pius Murmu, a 45-year-old Catholic who was himself injured. The alleged perpetrator, Rezaul Islam, claims to have purchased parcels of the disputed land in 1999 and 2023, yet denied any involvement in the violence. Father Antony Sen, convener of the Justice and Peace Commission of Dinajpur Diocese, lamented that “such incidents will be resolved only when the government of the country is humane and solves every incident fairly.” This recurring pattern of violence—bomb attacks on churches, arson of tribal homes, murder, and systematic land grabbing—reveals the utter powerlessness of so-called “human rights” frameworks and interreligious dialogue to protect the faithful, and exposes the fundamental lie that peace and justice are possible without the public reign of Christ the King over all nations.
The Illusion of Secular Justice in a Christless World
Father Sen’s appeal for a “humane” government that “solves every incident fairly” is a textbook example of the naturalistic humanitarianism that has infected even those who should know better. The implicit assumption is that justice flows from human institutions, from the goodwill of government officials, from the mechanisms of secular law. This is the very error that Pope Pius XI condemned with prophetic clarity in Quas Primas (1925): “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed. For this reason, the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The situation in Bangladesh is not an anomaly; it is the inevitable fruit of a world order built on the explicit rejection of Christ’s sovereignty. When Father Sen places his hope in government officials holding “discussions” to resolve the situation, he is placing his trust in the very secular apparatus that Pius XI identified as the root cause of societal disintegration. “For what we wrote at the beginning of Our Pontificate about the diminishing authority of law and respect for power, the same can be applied to the present times,” the pontiff warned—and how tragically applicable these words remain over a century later.
The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council recorded over 1,000 cases of human rights violations against minorities in a single year (July 2023–June 2024), including 45 murders, 10 attempted murders, and 36 death threats. These are not statistics that will be resolved by a more “humane” bureaucracy. They are the predictable consequence of a civilization that has severed itself from the supernatural order. As Pius XI wrote: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” But a harmonious association of men is impossible without the recognition of the Divine Lawgiver. The very concept of “human rights” detached from God’s law is a modernist fiction—a secular idol that crushes the very people it claims to protect.
The Omission of the Supernatural: A Symptomatic Silence
What is most striking about this report—and what reveals the depth of the spiritual crisis—is what it does not say. There is no mention of the state of souls of the persecuted faithful. No call to prayer for their perseverance in the faith. No reminder that temporal suffering, while genuinely evil and to be resisted by lawful means, is ultimately ordered toward eternal glory for those who remain faithful. No invocation of the martyrs who shed their blood for Christ. No reference to the sacramental life—the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, confession, the anointing of the sick—as the true source of strength for the persecuted. The entire framing is relentlessly temporal: land disputes, police deployment, government discussions, human rights reports.
This silence about supernatural realities is not accidental. It is the hallmark of the modernist mentality that St. Pius X condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907). The modernist reduces Christianity to a social movement, a humanitarian project, a community organizer’s agenda. When the Church’s mission is reduced to lobbying governments and issuing reports on “human rights violations,” she has already surrendered the very thing that makes her the Church: her supernatural character as the Mystical Body of Christ, the one ark of salvation. “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)—yet this name is conspicuously absent from the proposed solutions.
The persecuted Christians of Birganj need more than police protection and government “discussions.” They need priests who will offer the true Mass for their intention, who will administer the sacraments validly and licitly, who will remind them that their sufferings, united to the Cross of Christ, have infinite supernatural value. They need bishops who will defend the faith without compromise, not “interreligious forums” that treat Islam as merely another path to God. Instead, what they receive from the conciliar structures is the language of secular humanitarianism—the language of the United Nations, not the language of the Gospel.
The Syllabus of Errors and the Primacy of the Spiritual Kingdom
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned with absolute clarity the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). He further condemned the notion that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77). Bangladesh, as a Muslim-majority state, is precisely the kind of arrangement that the Church has consistently identified as contrary to the social Kingship of Christ. Yet the conciliar approach—exemplified by the very “Justice and Peace Commission” invoked in this article—is to work within these secular structures, to appeal to “human rights,” to seek “dialogue” with those who openly desire the elimination of the Church.
Pius IX wrote with unmistakable force: “Anyone who knows the nature, desires and intentions of the sects, whether they be called masonic or bear another name, and compares them with the nature the systems and the vastness of the obstacles by which the Church has been assailed almost everywhere, cannot doubt that the present misfortune must mainly be imputed to the frauds and machinations of these sects.” The persecution of Christians in Bangladesh is not merely a local land dispute; it is a manifestation of the global war against the Church that has been waged by the enemies of Christ for centuries. The bomb attack on Most Holy Redeemer Church in Gopalganj in 2001 that killed 10 Catholics, the arson of tribal homes in Gaibandha in 2016 that killed three Christians, the systematic land grabbing—these are not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated effort to eliminate the Christian presence from the region.
The Failure of “Interreligious Dialogue” as a Strategy for Survival
The article references the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, an interreligious forum that documents violence against minorities. While the documentation of atrocities is a natural good, the very structure of such an interreligious body embodies the conciliar error of treating religious pluralism as a positive good rather than an evil to be remedied through the conversion of all nations to the Catholic Faith. This is the error condemned by Pius IX in Proposition 16 of the Syllabus: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation”—a proposition explicitly rejected by the Catholic Church.
The conciliar approach to persecution is fundamentally inverted. Instead of calling for the conversion of the persecutors and the establishment of the social Kingship of Christ, it seeks accommodation within a pluralist framework that treats all religions as equally valid paths. This is not merely ineffective; it is spiritually lethal. It tells the persecuted faithful that their persecutors’ religion is legitimate, that the solution is “tolerance” rather than conversion, that the goal is coexistence rather than the triumph of the Catholic Faith. This is the very “false ecumenism” that the pre-conciliar Church consistently condemned.
The True Remedy: The Social Kingship of Christ and the Sacramental Life
The only true remedy for the persecution of Christians in Bangladesh—and everywhere—is the one that the modern world rejects with violent hostility: the public recognition of the social Kingship of Jesus Christ over all nations, and the restoration of the sacramental life of the Church in its fullness. Pius XI was unequivocal: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.” Without this recognition, every appeal to “human rights” and “justice” is built on sand.
The persecuted Christians of Birganj deserve to hear from their pastors not merely the language of secular advocacy but the language of faith: that Christ the King reigns despite every appearance to the contrary, that His Kingdom “shall never be destroyed… shall stand forever” (Daniel 2:44), that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, and that no earthly power can prevail against her (Matthew 16:18). They deserve priests who offer the true Mass—the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary—not the conciar “memorial meal” that has replaced it in most structures. They deserve bishops who will anathematize heresy, not “dialogue” with it.
Until the Church returns to her supernatural mission—until she proclaims without ambiguity that “outside the Church there is no salvation” and that all nations are subject to the authority of Christ the King—the faithful will continue to be slaughtered, their lands stolen, their temples destroyed, while “Justice and Peace Commissions” issue reports that gather dust on the shelves of indifferent bureaucracies. The blood of the martyrs cries out not for dialogue but for the conversion of nations and the restoration of all things in Christ.
Source:
Indigenous Christian families assaulted amid land grab conflict in northern Bangladesh (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.04.2026