During the COVID-19 lockdown, Father Louismary Ocha spent a lot of time Father Andrew Struzzieri, pastor of St. Clare Parish in Queens, who was terminally ill with cancer. Father Andy’s example is a pillar of priesthood that Father Ocha now shares with his seminarian students back home in Nigeria.
Brooklyn Priests marched in solidarity with the people of Biafra to say no to injustice, nepotism, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing by the Nigerian Government against the Indigenous people of Biafra.
At least 3,462 Christians, including 10 priests or pastors, were murdered in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021.
“A land of infidels” is how Boko Haram’s leader described the Kano state of north-central Nigeria. Last year, an Islamic recording artist received a death sentence there for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
The Catholic bishop of Gboko, Nigeria, and the Knights of Columbus added their voices to a Dec. 17 congressional hearing spotlighting sectarian violence in Nigeria in which thousands of Christians have been killed simply for their faith identity.
Ongoing violence in Nigeria pits Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers in a bloody struggle for agricultural land at Nigeria’s center, said Father Cosmas Nzeabalu and Sister Elizabeth Ogbu, both assigned to the Diocese of Brooklyn.
Nigeria’s internal conflict is “a Molotov cocktail of anger, frustration, religious extremism, toxic politics, corruption and deep rut,” according to a leading bishop in the country.
Two bishops who participated in a major summit on African Catholicism earlier this month have a message to the Catholic Church in the western world: Don’t bring your polarization onto our continent.
Throughout his papacy, during which he clocked some 40 trips to Africa, St. Pope John Paul II would frequently refer to the continent as both a “missionary church and a mission church.”
Violence in Nigeria, long a staple in the northern part of the country, is increasing in the Christian-majority south, according to Auxiliary Bishop Ernest Obodo of the Diocese of Enugu, which is located in the southeastern region of Nigeria.
