The Prince of Wales has urged people to remember the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East this Christmas.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning Prince Charles said that the suffering of those fleeing violent religious persecution in the Middle East and elsewhere echoed the suffering of the Holy Family, who had arrived in Bethlehem as refugees.
His pre-recorded Thought for the Day was inspired by a report by the charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) on Religious Freedom in the World 2016.
A special video recording of the message is available on the charity's website.
Prince Charles recalled a recent meeting with a Jesuit from Syria, describing religious freedom in that country as a “daily, stark choice between life and death."
He explained: “He told me of mass kidnappings in parts of Syria and Iraq and told me how he feared that Christians would be driven en mass out of lands described in the Bible. He thought it quite possible that there would be no Christians left in Iraq in five years.”
John Pontifex of ACN said that the Prince's high profile intervention was important both for the charity and for those suffering persecution.
"For the many thousands of people that ACN helps, many of whom have fled their homes like the Holy Family, this was more than a crumb of comfort, but a sign that they are no longer suffering in silence but have been heard at the highest level," he told The Tablet.
Prince Charles said that such persecution was not limited to Christians in the Middle East, but was spreading and becoming more extreme as it was directed at people of minority faiths like Yazidis and Baha'is.
“According to the United Nations, 5.8 million more people abandoned their homes in 2015 than the year before, bringing the annual total to a staggering 65.3 million. That is almost equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom,” he added.
He likened the rise of populist groups around the world to the “dark days of the 1930s” and the Nazis' “inhuman attempts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe”.
“That nearly 70 years later we should still be seeing such evil persecution is to me beyond all belief,” he said. “We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.”
Photo - Prince Charles meeting the Archbishop of Basra on a visit to London in 2014
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