The headlines focus on the war in Iran, with the world’s oil supply as an important subplot. Understandable.

But don’t neglect another important subplot: the endangered status of Christians in the region where the faith was born. In Iraq, the Christian population has dropped from about 1.5 million to less than 300,000 in less the a generation; in Syria the statistics are eerily similar. Now Lebanon’s Christians are caught in the crossfire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah.

“Today we are talking about survival,” says Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Eastern Churches. “Christian communities, which have always had the sense of being merely tolerated, now fear that they may no longer be tolerated at all.”