Accra, Ghana, May 13, 2019 / 06:48 pm (CNA).- As part of his efforts to increase interreligious peace, Ghana’s chief imam attended Easter Mass ahead of his 100th birthday celebration.
Sheikh Osman Sharubutu recently captured the public eye after pictures went viral of his attendance at Mass at Christ the King Catholic Church in Accra.
According to GhanaWeb, parish priest Father Andrew Campbell welcomed the Muslim leader, and Christians from the community later visited the imam’s house. The country’s vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia, applauded the efforts of peace in the country.
“At the time the world is experiencing religious intolerance,…Ghana is enjoying a great collaboration between the two main religions in our country,” Bawumia told GhanaWeb.
“As we heard, two days ago, the national imam paid a remarkable visit to the Catholic church in Accra and a day after this historic visit, a group of Christians also paid a visit to the Chief Imam at his home,” the vice president said.
According to the BBC, some Muslims have criticized the leader’s actions, saying his participation in Christian prayer was shameful. Sharubutu said he was not there for worship but to advance peace and promote a different perspective on Islam.
“The chief imam is changing the narrative about Islam from a religion of wickedness, a religion of conflict, a religion of hate for others, to a religion whose mission is rooted in the virtues of love, peace and forgiveness,” Aremeyao Shaibu, the imam’s spokesperson, told the BBC.
Sharubutu, who was appointed chief imam in 1993, has been an active promoter of peace in sermons and deeds. According to the BBC, he is also one of the 13 religious leaders in the country’s National Peace Council.
Late last year, a protestant pastor predicted that the Muslim leader would pass away in 2019. The prophecy was received with outrage from some Muslims, and the pastor’s church was vandalized. Sharubutu reprimanded those attackers, encouraging them to instead forgive the pastor.
In 2016, violence almost broke out after a Tafo chief leader in Kumasi was slapped by Muslims angered over land disputes. The action is considered a cause for war, but Sharubutu spoke to the Tafo chief and calmed the situation.
Interfaith dialogue and peace have also been a major focus of the pontificate of Pope Francis. When the pope was in Bulgaria last Monday, he encouraged a group of faith leaders to view peace as a gift and action.
“Peace requires and demands that we adopt dialogue as our path, mutual understanding as our code of conduct, and reciprocal understanding as our method and standard,” Pope Francis said in Sofia May 6.
“Peace is both a gift and a task; it must be implored and worked for, received as a blessing and constantly sought as we strive daily to build a culture in which peace is respected as a fundamental right,” he added.
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Catholic Archbishop Matthew Ishaya Audu of Jos marches alongside evangelical leader Rev. Dr. Gideon Para-Mallam in front of the Plateau state governor’s office building in Jos, Nigeria, Jan. 8, 2024. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Rev. Dr. Gideon Para-Mallam, photo by Plateau State Government Media Team.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 9, 2024 / 15:30 pm (CNA).
Thousands of Christians rallied yesterday in front of the governor’s office in Nigeria’s Plateau state to demand action after more than 200 were killed in a series of Christmas massacres.
The attacks, which targeted Christian villages beginning Dec. 23 and continuing through Christmas day, left Christian communities in Nigeria’s Plateau state reeling. Photos obtained by CNA after the attack showed villagers burying their slain relatives and loved ones in mass graves.
According to Rev. Dr. Gideon Para-Mallam, an evangelical leader who helped to organize the rally, the attacks also left 15,000 people displaced without homes.
Among the demands being made by the protestors, Para-Mallam said that they asked for an “urgent humanitarian relief material response by the state and federal government” and for the arrest of the perpetrators of the Christmas massacre, which he called a “genocidal,” “terrorist” attack.
Thousands of Christians peacefully and prayerfully march to a rally in front of the Nigerian Plateau state governor’s office building in protest of the 2023 Christmas massacre that left over 200 Christian Nigerians dead, Jan. 8, 2024. Credit: Photo courtesy of Rev. Dr. Gideon Para-Mallam, photo by Plateau State Government Media Team.
The attack marks the latest instance of terrorists targeting Christian Nigerians on significant Christian feast days. In 2022, on Pentecost Sunday, 39 Catholic worshippers were killed at the St. Francis Xavier Owo Catholic Parish in Ondo Diocese.
Religious freedom advocates believe that militant Muslim Fulani herdsmen were responsible for the Christmas attacks. In Nigeria as a whole, at least 60,000 Christians have been killed in the past two decades. An estimated 3,462 Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021, or 17 per day, according to a new study.
Due to continued attacks, Nigeria is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a Christian, according to a 2023 report by the advocacy group International Christian Concern.
Para-Mallam told CNA that Nigeria’s middle belt region, of which Plateau state is a part, has “suffered sustained attacks for over a decade now with destruction of lives and properties.”
The thousands of protestors at the rally, he said, were “mournful, angry, but surprisingly joyful.”
Their “central objective,” he explained, was “to ask for an end to the killings not just in Plateau but Nigeria and seek justice for the people.”
Just-In: CAN Plateau State Chapter is having a Peaceful Walk to Government House pic.twitter.com/YbFRqtFI9J
“Above all, it was very peaceful and prayerful,” he added. “The old, the young all together felt that we had to do what we had to do to get our message across.”
According to Para-Mallam, the crowd numbered about 5,000 and included both Catholics and Protestants. Together, he said, they peacefully and prayerfully marched, ending in front of the governor’s office building in the city of Jos. Archbishop Matthew Ishaya Audu of Jos and several Catholic priests also took part in the march and rally, according to Para-Mallam.
The demonstration was “mournful, angry, and surprisingly joyful,” according to Rev. Dr. Gideon Para-Mallam. Credit: Photos by Nigerian multimedia journalist Jœy Shèkwônúzhïbó, used with permission.
The rally was organized with the help of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), a coalition of Nigerian Christian Churches and groups that includes the Catholic Church in Nigeria.
Para-Mallam said the purpose of the demonstration was to “mourn in solidarity” with the devastated communities as well as to show them that the Church “cares” and “identify with them in the moment of suffering and mourning.”
A secondary purpose for the rally, Para-Mallam said, was to “get the Church on the Plateau to unite and to speak with one voice around the issues of social justice” and to “create awareness nationally and globally about the Christmas season attack.”
Para-Mallam said that Plateau’s governor, Caleb Mutfwang, addressed the crowds at the rally and was “sympathetic and understanding and spoke well on the pains of his people.”
Mutfwang condemned the attacks shortly after they occurred in a Dec. 26 statement in which he said: “This has indeed been a gory Christmas for us.”
“He promised to relay our concerns to the president and committed to work with the president to end the killings in the Plateau state,” Para-Mallam said.
Despite the governor and president voicing their support for the impacted communities, several religious freedom advocates have been critical of the lack of government response to the growing terrorist attacks.
Maria Lozano, a representative for the papal relief group Aid to the Church in Need, told CNA after the attacks that tangible government support was largely absent after the Christmas massacre and that a “lack of response from the government” over the years has worsened the situation in the region. The absence of government support, Lozano said, has forced Christian churches to take on the “primary responsibility of providing assistance.”
Para-Mallam asked for Christians outside of Nigeria to help by offering prayer, advocacy, and humanitarian intervention.
“We also want fellow believers to encourage policymakers to encourage the Nigerian government to do more to end the killings in general and particularly those targeted at Christians,” he said.
For several years now, religious freedom advocates have criticized the U.S. government for failing to include Nigeria in the State Department’s “Countries of Particular Concern” list, which some consider to be America’s most effective tool to encourage foreign governments to address the persecutions in their countries.
“There is no justification as to why the State Department did not designate Nigeria or India as a Country of Particular Concern,” said U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom chair Abraham Cooper and vice chair Frederick Davie in a Jan. 4 statement.
Cooper and Davie mentioned the Christmas massacre as “just the latest example of deadly violence against religious communities in Nigeria.”
Speaking on “EWTN News Nightly” on Monday, Davie said that the decision to leave Nigeria off the list was “particularly” concerning and a “huge mistake.”
Davie told EWTN that “there are some who are saying that the government [of Nigeria] if it is not actively participating in some of this religious persecution is actually standing by and not doing what it can to prevent it.”
“We just believe,” Davie explained, “that by designating Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, the United States puts itself in a position to work more closely with the government of Nigeria to address some of those fundamental security issues that are going unattended to.”
Despite this, the State Department has left Nigeria off the Countries of Particular Concern list since 2021.
Kaduna, Nigeria, Jan 20, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- A Nigerian seminarian who was abducted this month was freed by his kidnappers after 10 days in captivity. Three seminarians kidnapped with him remain in captivity.
The freed seminarian, who has not yet been identified, is being treated at a Catholic hospital in Kaduna, Nigeria. The extent of his injuries is unclear, but he is being treated in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
“From the time of the abduction, this seminarian was stubborn to the abductors; he could hold on anything he could find, resisting the kidnapping,” a source close to Good Shepherd Major Seminary in Kaduna told ACI Africa, CNA’s African news partner.
“The seminarian was beaten up badly resulting in some fractures of his body parts, yet they took him still,” the source said of the Jan. 8 kidnapping.
The seminarian, still suffering injuries from his abduction, was dumped by kidnappers Jan. 18 on the side of Nigeria’s Kaduna-Abuja highway. He was taken to the hospital after being found by passing motorists.
The seminarian might have been freed and dumped along the road “because the abductors felt the boy could not survive in their hands,” a source told ACI Africa.
The students, Pius Kanwai, 19; Peter Umenukor, 23; Stephen Amos, 23; and Michael Nnadi, 18, were abducted on the night of Jan. 8 in a 30-minute operation that saw the kidnappers, dressed in military uniform and armed with guns, force their way onto the Catholic seminary campus, which is home to 268 seminarians.
Since Jan. 11, the abductors have been making contact with family members of the seminarians to discuss ransoms for their release, a source in Nigeria told ACI Africa Jan. 12.
According to a Sunday news report, Archbishop Matthew Man’oso Ndagoso of Kaduna has cautioned against speculation about the abductors’ demand for ransom for the safe release of the seminarians.
“We have streamlined discussion with the kidnappers, it is only one person that is communicating with them, we can’t disclose any discussion with them,” Archbishop Man’oso told local media. Good Shepherd Seminary is located just off the Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria Express Way. According to AFP, the area is “notorious for criminal gangs kidnapping travelers for ransom.”
The news agency said that schoolgirls and staff from a boarding school also located near the highway were kidnapped in October, and were later released.
Kidnappings of Christians in Nigeria have multiplied in recent months, a situation that has prompted Church leaders to express serious concern about the security of their members and to call on the government to prioritize the security of its citizens.
A version of this story was first published by ACI Africa, CNA’s African news partner. It has been adapted by CNA.
Peace is possible among people of good will worldwide.