Living in the secular Northeastern USA, I hear much about the suffering and death that has been caused by religion. I suspect that most of this is actually caused by human avarice cloaked in religiosity. Cultures clash more often than faiths; religious identity is a convenient way to distinguish one culture from another; most faiths, in most eras, don't demand that non-believers be killed but cultural supremacists will deliberately misinterpret religious teachings in order to fuel genocide.
By coincidence, two feasts on this day acknowledge the victims of the anti-religious forces that had grown intolerant of Christians.
There were millions of folks killed under Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, but twenty-five of them, listed here, are celebrated in the Canon June 27. The NKVD, predecessors of the KGB, were brutal in their methods. Zenon Kovalyk was chained upright against a wall until he died. Yakim Senkvisky was boiled to death. Andrii Ischak, a pastor in Ukraine, was simply shot by Soviet soldiers as they retreated from the advancing German army in 1941.
June 27 also honors Blessed Madeleine Fontaine and her companions. The four women were Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, one of the organizations that sprang up to relieve the suffering of the urban poor. These were not the fat prelates who had been abusing their offices for personal gain, but rather self-sacrificing nuns who ministered to the least of God's children. Arrested by the French government in 1794 for not swearing the Oath of the Constitution, they were tried and convicted of counter-revolutionary activity, and guillotined.
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