The latest episode of citizen protests against the Iranian government’s ineptitude and brutality began in late December 2025. The government’s unprecedented brutal response has once again shown its true colors. The paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the voluntary plainclothes Basij militia were deployed in large numbers across the country, often armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. Snipers were placed in strategically located buildings. In one instance in west Tehran, security forces were seen with a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck.
Because the government shut down internet and phone service, estimates of those murdered by their own government have been slow to emerge. The number of Iranian citizens killed in the protests has varied widely, most recently to more than 30,000, according to Time magazine. The government has demonstrated that evil is at its worst when it is imaginative: Security forces have been instructed to aim their rifles at the genitals and faces of protesters, especially the women. Many men and women have been deliberately blinded in one eye with pellet guns. Many others were executed with a single shot to the back of the head. Parents must pay a considerable fee just to see the corpses of their children—if their offspring can even be located.
It is difficult for those in other countries to understand just how horrific are the conditions under which Iranians live, even in normal times, but an acclaimed graphic novel provides a view that other genres cannot equal, whether novels, nonfiction histories, commentaries, documentaries, or even cinema. These events, transpiring in one of the world’s few theocratic regimes, offer an opportunity to reflect on the Catholic Church’s guidance on the relationship between church and state.
The Graphic Novels of Marjane Satrapi
The graphic novel Woman, Life, Freedom was a response to tragedy. In September 2022, 22-year-old Iranian Mahsa Amini was murdered. She was beaten to death by the Iranian morality police, the Gasht-e Ershad (Guidance Patrol), a law enforcement body created to enforce regulations on modest dress and chaste behavior. Her crime? She wore her veil “improperly,” revealing loose wisps of hair. Her death sparked a nationwide uproar, evolving into a global feminist revolution, supported as well by Iranian men.
Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, creator of the graphic novel series Persepolis about her upbringing, directed the international outrage into an unusual text—an edited collection of short stories written in comic book fashion. Woman, Life, Freedom deals with domestic politics and culture, and the reader is likely to learn as much or more about the country’s internal repression as from a forum in Foreign Affairs. The book lifts the veil on the undercurrents and dynamics of the senile Iranian theocracy and the amoral nouveau riche who support them in exchange for decadent privileges. Each chapter presents an ugly facet of the Iranian regime.
Veiled Abuse
Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, women in Iran have been culturally enslaved by the “guardianship” of backward-looking mullahs who limit their freedom in every imaginable way. Offenses include shoes that are too open and unmarried couples holding hands. If possible, the pitiless police favor beating women in the area of their body where the violation was detected. Accordingly, they severely beat Mahsa Amini on the head until she was comatose and, after a few days, dead. The second chapter of Woman, Life, Freedom, “Sparking a Revolution,” explains how, in response to Amini’s death, protests erupted in over half of Iran’s thirty-one provinces. Veils, the government’s symbol of oppression, were thrown into bonfires. Iranian men joined the women. Protests are always risky: According to another chapter, “A Demonstration in Iran,” the country has a special cadre of brutes, the Lebas Shakhsi, whose only talent lies in viciously attacking peaceful protesters with clubs and batons.
“The Anthem of the Uprising” explains how Iranian Shervin Hajipour’s hauntingly beautiful Grammy-winning lament, “Baraye,” became the anthem of the Women, Life, Freedom movement as it describes the tragedy of everyday life in Iran for men and women. The government banned “Baraye,” but not before it spread across the globe. Here the song is covered in Buenos Aires by the British supergroup Coldplay. The Iranian diaspora comprises 10 percent of the Iranian population; this group of expatriates is in Brisbane. The cruelty of the regime in the aftermath of the protests is described in detail in the graphic essay “The Winter of Executions.” Many refused to recant even under torture.
The counterpart to Ireland’s Bloody Sunday is Iran’s Bloody Friday (September 30, 2022). A protest in southeastern Iran was incited when a police chief in the port of Chabahar raped a fifteen-year-old girl. During the protest in Zahedan, sixty-six of those attending were killed by snipers stationed in nearby buildings. The event is dramatically portrayed in narration and art in the chapter “Bloody Friday.” Iranian university students are increasingly resistant to the regime’s discrimination against women. Not all of the issues are as weighty as that in Zahedan. At one university, coeds refused to use the women’s side of the cafeteria, instead crossing to the male line. They were refused service and left in protest. Soon, men and women brought their food trays outside and joined the “troublemakers,” even bringing them their meals.
Appalling Oppression
The Iranian regime employs primitive means of control. In the chapter “Women Saying No,” the author notes that in 2022 alone, over 27,000 girls under the age of fifteen were “married off” in Iran. Iranian human rights attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh refused to stop litigating on behalf of the many protestors. Ultimately, she herself was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison and one hundred forty-eight lashes. According to the BBC, over a hundred crimes are punishable by flogging. The pain is so severe that some faint after only eight or nine lashes. Other young women were subjected to less violent but equally sinister incarceration, detained in isolation in a featureless white room with “no sense of time, of day and night.” Crammed into small windowless rooms with five other inmates, they share the overwhelming stench of their own excrement.
Many of these women are kept as potential bartering chips, but many dissolve into insanity before they can be bartered. The line “Because of the girl who wished she was a boy” in the song “Baraye” refers not necessarily to transgenderism but to the special misery inflicted on females; hence, if she were a boy, life would be less severe.
The chapter “Poisoned Schoolgirls” in Woman, Life, Freedom is difficult to imagine. The author explains,
Since November 2022, over one thousand young schoolgirls have been poisoned by toxic gas in schools across Iran. People suspect this to be an intentional act, an attempt to force girls’ schools to close, since the government fears the youth and young girls most of all.
Some parents surrounded their daughters’ schools to ensure that poisoners were not able to enter. The episodes were widely reported by major news outlets, including PBS, the BBC, and Amnesty International.
A darker technique is the constant glorification of martyrdom, found especially useful during the nihilistic Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), in which around a million soldiers perished. One of the slogans went “To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society.” Iran used children as young as nine as minesweepers. Needless to say, the toy soldiers did not have their parents’ permission to serve as “martyrs”; rather, they were “drafted” into service by the military.
The chapter “The Madness of Censorship” describes the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, in which a decrepit, blind clergyman “watches” films while assistants describe the scenes as the sightless, senile censor regularly yells, “Cut!” Offending images include too much of a woman’s ear visible under her veil, and the possibility—although it is not certain—that another woman may be barefoot. The final scenes of Othello were revised because “it is preferable that they should continue to live together happily.”
Church and State
Theocratic Iran provides an opportunity to consider the proper spheres of church and state. This seems especially relevant to the United States because we find ourselves in a moment in which many feel the nation is in decline. In response, some favor a greater official role for Christianity in the governance of the nation; others would be content to end the hostility against their faith.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on church and state is at once clear and prudential. It begins with Jesus’s explanation that his disciples have obligations to both: Render to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. St. Augustine, in response to the collapsing Roman empire, wrote that the city of man will never be the city of God.
Chapter IV of Gaudium et Spes, “The Role of the Church in the Modern World,” elegantly explains that both spheres have their distinct role; yet, there is interaction between the two, to the benefit of both.
The Church has a saving and an eschatological purpose which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the earthly city who have a call to form the family of God’s children during the present history of the human race, and to keep increasing it until the Lord returns. . . . She serves as a leaven and as a kind of soul for human society as it is to be renewed in Christ and transformed into God’s family.
The document further notes that “the earthly and the heavenly city penetrate each other.” Thus, the Church does not advocate a theocracy in any of the forms it might take; at the same time, she insists that the Church is the soul of the secular order, without which political society will suffer. Any other framework for church and state is likely to be counterproductive at best and, at worst, tragic.
Portions of this article were originally published on December 10, 2024, here.