The Catholic leader received Rebecca Bitrus, and other persecuted Christians on Saturday.
On February 24, 2018, Pope Francis met a Nigerian Boko Haram survivor.
Crux reports that the head of the Roman Catholic church received the survivor named Rebecca Bitrus at the Colosseum in Rome.
Bitrus managed to escape from the terrorist group after two years in captivity. While sharing her testimony, she maintained that she never lost faith in God.
Despite the death of her one-year-old son, being tortured, raped and getting pregnant, Vatican News reports that she says her faith remained.
By God's grace, Bitrus says she has managed to accept and even love the son of her captors, delivered after escaping from the group.
Pope Francis also got to meet Ashiq Masih and Eisham Ashiq, these two are the husband and daughter of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman who was sentenced to death for blasphemy in 2009.
Speaking with Agenzia Fides, Bibi’s husband, said that his wife “lives her imprisonment with great faith and entrusts herself to the Lord every day. We live this privilege of meeting the Holy Father with great confidence. We ask him to pray for us and with us”.
His daughter, 18-year-old Eisham, added that she hopes to “see [her] mother as soon as possible, in a peaceful place and in family tranquillity. I pray for this every day”.
Pope Francis told her: “I think often of your mother and I pray for her.”
Meanwhile, Joseph Nadeem, head of the Renaissance Education Foundation, which is taking care of Asia Bibi’s family and supports its legal expenses has shed some light on her case.
He said: “The lawyers are taking care of the appeal and we are awaiting a date for the hearing, which let us hope happens as soon as possible. This family lives the drama of the imprisonment of an innocent wife and mother. We have full confidence in the rule of law and the Pakistani judiciary. We are convinced that we can prove to the Supreme Court Asia Bibi’s innocence.”
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Christian Persecution
To show support for Christians all over the world being persecuted, the Colosseum, where the meeting held, was bathed in red light.
The same thing was done at St. Elijah Cathedral in Aleppo (Syria) and the Church of St Paul in Mosul in Iraq. All the buildings lit up at the same time, 6 pm (local time.)
The red light represents the blood of martyred Christians, killed 2000 years ago for refusing to renounce their faith and even today in Nigeria, Russia, China and other troubled countries.
According to World Religion News, this was done by the Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
The group said, “Christians are the victims of at least 75 percent of all religiously-motivated violence and oppression. The extent of this persecution is largely ignored by our media.”
Reportedly, over 3,000 Christian martyrs were killed in 2017.