The petition, filed by Machado and other petitioners, tells the court that more than 800 incidents of violence against Christians were documented across India in 2025 alone, with another 285 recorded in just the first six months of 2026. The attacks cluster around Christmas, Lent, Good Friday and Easter — the very seasons when congregations gather in their largest numbers to worship.
The petition points to Chhattisgarh's Narayanpur district, where Christian families were driven from their homes in 2022 and 2023 amid accusations of unlawful religious conversion. In many of those cases, it says, authorities charged the victims themselves rather than protect them. With the help of ADF India allied lawyers, 38 Christians swept up in that campaign were acquitted this year, in February and April, after courts found the charges had no basis at all.
Machado and his fellow petitioners are asking the court for preventive policing with real teeth, genuine accountability for mob violence, evenhanded enforcement of the law so that victims stop being treated like criminals, and heightened protection for Christian gatherings during festival seasons. The justices will take the matter up again next month.
Something Older Than Any Court Docket
Eight hundred incidents in a year. Two hundred eighty-five more before summer. Families run out of Narayanpur for the crime of gathering to pray. Read numbers like that long enough and a man starts asking why. Why does faithfulness draw fire? Why does the quietest thing a person can do — kneel, sing a hymn, break bread with neighbors — provoke a mob?
Scripture never pretended this would be rare. It called it normal.
"Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12)
That is not a verse for India only, my friend. It was written to a young pastor named Timothy by a man who had been stoned, beaten, and left for dead more than once, and it was written as plain description, not exception. The world has never much cared for the light. It did not care for it when it walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ, and it has not learned to care for it since.
But look at what the Lord said about that very hostility, in the same breath He preached the beatitudes to a hillside full of ordinary people:
"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)
Blessed. Not cursed, not forgotten, not abandoned to the mob — blessed. Heaven keeps its own accounts, and every stone thrown, every family driven from a home in Narayanpur, every false charge laid against an innocent believer, is written down by a Judge who misses nothing and forgets nothing. Courts on earth are worth petitioning — Archbishop Machado is right to ask India's judges for justice, and every believer ought to hope the bench delivers it on August 21. Earthly justice matters; government is not given the power to punish wrongdoing for nothing. But no court, however faithful, is the last word.
Vengeance belongs to a higher bench than the one in New Delhi.
"Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." (Romans 12:19)
That promise is not an excuse for passivity — it is the reason persecuted believers can walk into a mob's path and keep singing. It is the reason a Christian family that has lost a house does not have to lose its faith along with it. They know Who holds the final ledger.
If you have never had to weigh whether worship is worth the cost, thank God for that mercy, and do not grow soft in it. And if you are watching brothers and sisters half a world away pay a price you have never had to pay, do not merely feel sorry for them. Stand with them. Pray for them by name if you know their names. And examine your own life, because a faith that never costs you anything may not be the faith that saves you. The gospel that sent Christ to a cross is the same gospel worth a Christian's whole life in Narayanpur or anywhere else — and it is worth yours too.