At least nine people including three police have died in an attack on a Coptic Christian Church south of Cairo.

Two gunmen opened fire at the entrance to the church of Mar Mina in Helwan district on 29 December, which was being guarded by police in the run-up to Orthodox Christmas celebrations.

One attacker was shot dead by security forces. The gunmen is said to have been wearing an explosives belt, suggesting an even more deadly attack was planned, reports BBC correspondent Radwa Gamal in Cairo. The second gunman has been detained.

Islamist militants have claimed several attacks on Egypt’s large Christian minority in recent years, including two deadly bomb attacks on Palm Sunday in April and an explosion at Cairo’s largest Coptic Cathedral last December that killed 28 people.

At least 29 Copts were killed on a bus in May and a Coptic Orthodox priest was stabbed to death in Cairo in October.

Police have stepped up security measures around churches ahead of the Coptic Christmas celebrations on 7 January, deploying officers outside Christian places of worship and installing metal detectors at some of the bigger churches.

In a letter to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, Christian associations on December 18 expressed their “deep concern” over new measures introduced by the minister of the interior to control immigration and access to the right of asylum.

“The minister of the interior is seeking to excessively accelerate asylum procedures and make access to procedures on French territory nearly impossible by placing all bodies dealing with migrants under his control,” states the letter signed by Secours catholique president, Véronique Fayet, and Jean-Michel Hitter, president of the Fédération de l’Entraide protestante.

An Afghan refugee woman begs for coins near St Christopher Catholic Church in early September in Berlin. The church has continuously provided sanctuary to refugees fearing deportation while their asylum claims are considered by German authorities. Sitting on the bare pavement outside a Catholic Church, an Afghan refugee woman, dressed in a bright floral headscarf, calls out plaintively to passersby, begging for coins.

It’s a scene repeatedly played out in the German capital overwhelmed by refugees fleeing war, persecution and economic deprivation in the Middle East and Africa.

But at Christmas time and beyond, Catholic and Protestant churches are doing what they can to help those struggling and in need. Such sanctuary, known as church asylum in Germany, is providing temporary protection for some 600 refugees currently who do not have a legal residence, in effect placing the church between the refugees and the public authorities and safeguarding them until their legal cases can be heard and considered. While most German church members say they support providing sanctuary to refugees, Michael Haas, coordinator of refugee work in the Catholic Archdiocese of Berlin, told that some parishes are fearful of the practice because it falls into a kind of grey area of the law. It also requires financial resources and manpower to provide the care. Still, he said, the “church, bishops, congregations and the government in Germany have agreed that there might be a mutual trust and that the church will not abuse the system of church asylum.” Churches, he said, have agreed to use sanctuary in “very few and particular cases after a thorough legal check,” while there appears to be a tacit agreement that the government “would not deport such cases without first having a second look at the application.”

When no priests were available, the bishop of the Que-bec Diocese of Rouyn-Noranda sought and received Vatican permission for a local nun to officiate at a recent wedding.

While the story has been portrayed around the world as a sign that Pope Francis is changing the role of women in the church, Bishop Dorylas Moreau said the wedding was carried out according to a long-established provision of canon law.

It allows an exception for a layperson to be permitted to officiate at a wedding when a bishop, priest or deacon is unavailable. That layperson can be a man or a woman.
“It was also an experiment for the Catholic Church.”

“It is an exceptional situation, not something habitual,” Bishop Moreau said in French.

The bishop said he has only 16 priests for 35 parishes in a diocese that covers nearly 9,300 square miles of rugged territory. The diocese has more than 75 nuns, but no deacons, although three are currently in formation.

German church leaders warned that religious free-dom is under threat across the world, and that a Christian presence in areas of the Middle East is at risk of disappearing entirely. The German Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches (EKD) published a report focusing on religious conversion to Christianity as a “litmus test for religious freedom.” The 70 page report, entitled “Ecumenical Report on the Religious Freedom of Christians Worldwide,” was released during the German Bishops’ Conference. While the Berlin conference is organized by bishops of Germany’s Catholic dioceses, the report was published jointly by the country’s Catholic and Evangelical church organizations. The EKD shared the report on Twitter. Representatives from both churches said that Christians are especially at risk of having their religious rights infringed upon.

Petra Bosse-Huber, the EKD’s bishop responsible for foreign ministries, said: “In our secularized Western society, we can often barely imagine what it means when people are hindered from visiting a mass or reading and studying the Bible with others.”

The report said Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, along with other religious minorities, face the greatest threats. Long-term trends and the effects of the “Islamic State’s” (IS) terror “threatened the end of a Christian presence in some countries.”

The report also highlighted sub-Saharan Africa, including Northern Nigeria, as a region where Christians are victims of Islamist terror, as well as China, Vietnam and countries of the former Soviet Union, where they face repressive authoritarian regimes.