Robert Royal is a witness to the witnesses with his new book, The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century. As he did in an earlier book about 20th-century martyrs, Royal spans the globe, sketching the cruelties visited upon Christians in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and, yes, the West, where radical Islamists target Catholics and other Christians for no other reason than that they’re Christians. His nuanced chapter “White (and Red) Martyrs in Red China” should be required reading in the Vatican Secretariat of State when, it may be hoped, a root-and-branch re-appraisal of the last pontificate’s China policy is undertaken.
