‘You Are Not Abandoned,’ Cardinal Assures Persecuted Africans

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With Christians in parts of Africa under relentless and deadly attack for their faith, Cardinal Dolan declared that Catholics and other Christians in New York are “not deaf, blind and mute” to their travails.

“We hear you, we see what they are doing to you,” the cardinal said at a vespers service in Manhattan to a congregation that included Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, who is a top Vatican official, and many African Catholics from U.N. missions and parishes in the archdiocese.

“And we this evening, at least, speak up to God, to the unconcerned world, for you and your people,” said Cardinal Dolan, who led the Solemn Evening Prayer Service June 29 in special remembrance of the Christian martyrs of Africa.

The service at Holy Family Church, the parish that serves the United Nations, was held on the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul, the earliest martyrs of the Church, symbolizing the reality that “persecution of believers is as old as the wood of the cross,” the cardinal said.

“But we know that God can bring good out of evil, light from darkness, life from death…(and that) the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith,” he said, reading from a letter he had written but not yet sent to Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, president of the Nigeria Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“We acknowledge all of this,” the cardinal continued, reading from the letter. “But even such deep beliefs do not keep us from crying with you, from apologizing that we in a country so rich in religious freedom and friendship…that we, of all people, have been timid in standing with you against today’s barbarians and shouting, ‘No more! Enough! Stop!’ ”

The prayer service—which acknowledged African martyrs including SS. Perpetua and Felicity in the third century, St. Charles Lwanga and the Ugandan martyrs in the 19th century and the victims of Boko Haram in Nigeria today—was meant to raise awareness here of the escalating crisis and to assure Christians in Africa that they’re not forgotten. The church was filled to capacity.

Also addressing the service was Archbishop Charles Balvo, papal nuncio to Kenya and South Sudan, a native New Yorker who was ordained a priest of the archdiocese. Archbishop Balvo noted the martyrdoms in Africa of Blessed Isadore Bakanja in 1909, two teenage catechists in 1915 and more recent incidents, including an attack this year at Garissa University College that left some 150 dead.

In Africa, he said, “there is no lack of men and women who continue to bear witness to their faith in God by offering their very lives.”

Cardinal Turkson, the Vatican-based president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace who was in New York to address the United Nations on climate change, attended the service accompanied by Archbishop Bernardito Auza, papal nuncio to the U.N.

Also at the service were Christian, Jewish and Islamic leaders in New York, and Father Gerald Murray, pastor of Holy Family.

Outside the East 47th Street church, African musicians wearing traditional dress played for the enjoyment of arriving and departing congregants.

Cardinal Dolan, in his reflection, read from a letter he had received from Nigerian Archbishop Kaigama, who wrote that he and his people remain strong in their faith even as they see attention paid by millions around the world to atrocities perpetrated against believers elsewhere, including the Charlie Hebdo journalists killed by Islamic extremists in Paris.

“We here in Africa are in spiritual and moral unity with them, but…this only increases our sense of abandonment and isolation (because)… we have hardly heard a whimper about our 276 Christian girls (kidnapped by Boko Haram) or the ongoing religious cleansing in Sudan, or the continued harassment, injustice and persecution of Christians in Egypt,” the archbishop wrote.

“Africa is the new Coliseum, where we are thrown to the beasts and the world seems deaf, blind and mute,” he wrote. “Please do not abandon us. Do African Christians not matter?”

Cardinal Dolan, reading the letter he wrote in response, said, “You are not abandoned, Ignatius.”

“Tonight, hundreds of your brothers and sisters ….embrace Africa,” the cardinal wrote, “…confident that God cries with us, that Jesus is still on his cross with you.”

When he finished the letter, the cardinal asked, “Should I send it?”

The enthusiastic applause of the congregation was his answer.