Meanwhile ...

It is somewhat ironic that the loss of Prime from the Liturgy of the Hours—and thus the loss of a daily liturgical reading from the Roman Martyrology—coincided with the greatest century of persecution in the history of the Church. It’s a point well-established but little appreciated within American Catholicism: we have been living, and we’re living now, in the greatest era of persecution in Christian history. More Christians died for the faith in the 20th-century than in the previous 19 centuries of Christian history combined