PJ Media : Estimates of the number of Christians in the Islamic Republic of Iran vary widely, and that’s understandable. Life is so difficult for non-Muslims in general in the Islamic Republic, and for converts from Islam to Christianity in particular, that many keep their faith a secret and keep up an outward show of being a Muslim.
Read it all here.....Those Christians who attempt to practice their faith more or less openly do so with the awareness that they could attract the attention of the authorities at any time, and so they have to proceed with extreme caution, a caution that is utterly foreign to Christians in the West — but might not be for much longer.
Orthodox Times on Thursday published an illuminating account of life in the tiny Greek Orthodox community in Tehran, which, we’re informed, “gathers at the only Orthodox church in the entire country, the Church of the Annunciation.”
It doesn’t, however, gather very often. Archimandrite Nikiforos Kounalis of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Crete has gone to Tehran three times to provide the faithful of the Church of the Annunciation with a parish priest, always for a brief period. Otherwise, there is no parish priest at the Church of the Annunciation, and most of the time, the church isn’t even open — because Iran’s Islamic authorities frown on its being open at all.
Fr. Nikiforos recounts: “I always went there during Holy Week, because that was the only time the church was open.” The other 51 weeks of the year, the Church of the Annunciation sits closed in Tehran, a silent witness to how difficult the Islamic Republic makes life for Christians.
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