Legal group highlights forced marriages, conversions on International Women’s Day

Schoolchildren in Tigray, Ethiopia, eat biscuits and tea provided by Mary’s Meals. / Copyright Mary’s Meals

St. Louis, Mo., Sep 3, 2023 / 05:00 am (CNA).

A Catholic charity providing thousands of free meals daily to schoolchildren in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, recently resumed operations after a brutal civil war precluded it from its mission for almost three years. 

Since 2017, Mary’s Meals has worked with the Daughters of Charity in Tigray to bring food to schoolchildren there. Pre-2020 they fed an estimated 24,000 children a day, but the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent commencement of the country’s devastating civil war halted the program. Mary’s Meals had every intention of reopening in the fall of 2020 following COVID, but the start of the conflict precluded those plans. 

“It was really heartbreaking to see that what we were expecting to be quite a joyous occasion in terms of the resumption of school feeding, children being welcomed back into schools and being able to return to what must have felt a bit more like normal life, suddenly being decimated by this terrible conflict,” Alex Keay, director of programs at Mary’s Meals International, told CNA. 

Today, as of late August, Mary’s Meals is able to serve high-energy biscuits and hot tea to approximately 10,000 children in 14 schools. Over the next few months, the group says, its program and menu will be expanded as cooking facilities that were destroyed or looted in the fighting are replaced. 

Keay called the resumption of the food distribution a “joyous occasion.”

“We’ve been able to restart school feeding just in the last couple of weeks. And more of those schools will be reopening and we will be able to get food to those schools, and we would like to be able to reach even more schools. We know the need is there,” Keay said, speaking from Mary’s Meals’ home country of Scotland.

“These school meals that we’re providing are a critical lifeline at this time, but also they are enabling the children to return to school after more than a three-year absence.”

Widespread starvation has been reported recently in Tigray, especially since U.N. and U.S. food aid has been disrupted in recent months due to revelations of corruption. Overall, more than 20 million people in Ethiopia rely on food assistance. A persistent drought has made food scarcity even worse. According to reports from the region, many mothers giving birth at local hospitals in Tigray have been unable to breastfeed due to their own hunger, and many malnourished children “near death” have been showing up at hospitals. 

It is estimated that 600,000 people have died in the conflict and there are reports of ongoing violence in various parts of Tigray. Though Ethiopia is extremely diverse overall, the Tigray region is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, at about 96%.

Keay said Mary’s Meals is focused on providing nourishing meals for children in areas where access to education is limited. The logistics are challenging, and the on-the-ground help of the Daughters of Charity is vital, he said. 

“They would sooner give away the food in their cupboard than have people come to their door hungry with nothing,” Keay said of the religious sisters. 

“Our model is a low-cost model, but I think a very efficient model whereby the community is taking a strong ownership and a really strong part in making sure that those programs operate successfully,” he added. “So they’ll be the ones that manage the local preparation of the meals, they’ll organize the volunteer cooks to come every day to cook the food and to make sure that every child that comes to that school gets fed. And then our role is that we’ll provide the food, the training, the monitoring, and the support to those communities so that that food is in the right place at the right time and that the children will all be fed.”

Schools provide a “beacon of hope” in an otherwise hope-starved country, and providing free meals at the schools helps to provide an incentive for students to get educated, he said. Major challenges remain, though, as many of the schools themselves have been shelled and looted amid the conflict. 

“The children came with a lot of energy and a lot of passion for education, a lot of determination to really engage in their schools and to try and get the best from their education. And we certainly see that in terms of the … high attendance rates … once school feeding had started. That’s not uncommon for us to see that all of a sudden more children are encouraged to go to school,” Keay continued, drawing on his own experience visiting the country this year. 

“The amazing thing is that the children were already coming back to those schools even though there was no furniture to sit on. Many of the teachers are still not back in their posts. A lot of the classrooms are actually damaged, the walls are damaged, or there’s holes in the ceiling. But the children are already coming back to those schools and are really, I guess, leading by example in their communities in terms of trying to get the schools back up and running.”

The conflict in Tigray stemmed in part from the outsized role the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the primary political party representing the region, has played in recent decades in national politics in Ethiopia despite Tigrayans’ status as an ethnic minority. The political coalition that the TPLF led was dissolved in 2018 by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed after he took office. The coalition’s ethnicity-based regional parties were merged into a single party, the Prosperity Party, which the TPLF refused to join. Tigrayan leaders have said they were unfairly targeted by political purges and allegations of corruption.

On Nov. 4, 2020, Abiy announced a military offensive in response to an alleged attack on a military base in Mekelle, the capital of Tigray. The conflict soon escalated into an all-out civil war in which mass atrocities have been reported. Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor to the north and former adversary, joined the side of the Ethiopian government early in the conflict. Some have accused Abiy’s government of ethnic cleansing.

For much of the war, Tigray was under blockade by the Ethiopian government, which halted all humanitarian aid and forbade aid workers and media from entering the region. The Ethiopian government and the TPLF signed a peace deal brokered by the African Union (AU) in November 2022, bringing the war to an end on paper.

The needs in Tigray over the past few years have been largely overshadowed by other major world events, such as the war in Ukraine. Keay said it is important that people take notice of the “huge, devastating humanitarian situation” in Tigray. 

“Tigray is a place that for the most part, people will be familiar with for probably quite negative reasons. There’s been terrible famines in that part of Africa, and a lot of those images, I think, have stuck in a lot of people’s minds. But it’s a very beautiful part of the world, with a real strong sense of identity and culture for the Tigrian people. They’re very distinctive in their culture, the way people dress. And there’s been a lot of work in that part of Ethiopia in recent years around development, and really a lot of progress has been made,” Keay said. 

The brutal war, Keay said, has “really set back the development that’s been happening in Tigray.”

“From a state that was really blossoming and a lot of really positive things were happening in terms of sustainable food being grown for the communities … to a situation where the vast majority of Tigrayans are now dependent on food, hand out food aid to be able to survive. And it’s going to take a long time, I think, to repair that damage.”

The BBC reported earlier this month that at least 1,400 people have starved to death in Tigray since food assistance from the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP), the global humanitarian organization addressing food security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was suspended about four months ago. The suspension came about after it was revealed by Tigrayan authorities that nearly 500 people had been stealing the food, including government officials and nongovernmental organization staff.

Keay said that from an accountability standpoint, the Daughters of Charity have developed a very “transparent and accountable system that meant that the food was being put directly into [needy people’s] hands.”

“Other organizations were having to suspend their programs because of concerns about food not getting to those that it was intended to. But it was very clear when we were there and being on the ground, seeing the food being distributed, that it is really possible to be able to put the food directly into the hands of those that we’re trying to serve,” he noted.

Mary’s Meals now operates in 18 countries, after its founding in Malawi in 2002. Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, a Catholic and founder and CEO of Mary’s Meals, was declared a “CNN Hero” in 2010 and has also been awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his work. The organization says it feeds 2.4 million children every day throughout the 18 countries where it is present, with the largest share of those children in Malawi.

Pope Francis has repeatedly called for peace in Tigray. In 2021, after his weekly Angelus, the pope prayed a Hail Mary for the people of the Tigray region.

[…]

Palm Beach, Fla., Jan 9, 2018 / 04:57 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- More people need to know about the Dutch priest Blessed Titus Brandsma and his heroic death in a Nazi concentration camp, according to a Florida priest who says Brandsma’s intercession led to a miraculous healing from cancer.
 
“He was bold. He was brave,” Father Michael Driscoll, 76, told CNA. “He knew when he was in the pulpit preaching that there were people in the congregations taking notes for the Nazis about what he would be saying. Yet he continued.”
 
Driscoll has faced his own struggles. He was diagnosed with advanced melanoma in 2004. Shortly after that, someone gave him a small piece of Brandsma’s black suit, which the American priest applied to his head each day.
 
He underwent major surgery, with doctors removing 84 lymph nodes and a salivary gland. He then went through 35 days of radiation treatment, the Boca Raton Sun-Sentinel reports.
 
Still, his cancer had a very poor survival rate, of only 10 to 15 percent after ten years.
 
“Doctors have stated Fr. Driscoll’s cancer is now gone and have said his good health over the past 12 years defies all odds,” the Diocese of Palm Beach said Dec. 13. “They have stated his healing and recovery from Stage 4 cancer cannot be explained medically.”

Driscoll recounted his doctor’s words three and a half years ago: “no need to come back, don’t waste your money on airfare in coming back here. You’re cured. I don’t find any more cancer in you.”

The apparent miracle could lead to the canonization of Bl. Titus Brandsma. The Palm Beach diocese, where Driscoll serves as a retired priest, sent its findings and evidence to the Vatican in December 2017.

Brandsma, a Netherlands-born Carmelite priest, was a professor and a journalist. He was a strong critic of Nazi ideology. After the Nazis occupied his country in May 1940, they persecuted Jewish citizens and laid increasing restrictions on others.

The priest defended freedom of Catholic education and of the Catholic press against Nazi pressures.

“He was a spokesperson for the Dutch bishops,” Driscoll said. “He got the message across against the Nazis and what they were doing against the Catholic press, the Catholic schools, the persecution of Jews, you name it.”

Due in part to Brandsma’s refusal to expel Jewish children from Catholic schools and because he opposed mandatory Nazi propaganda in Catholic newspapers, he was arrested by the Nazis in January 1942. He was was eventually sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, joining 2,700 other clergy. He faced inhumane conditions and abuse from his captors.

“He apparently was very kind to other prisoners, telling them to forgive the people who were persecuting them and punishing them in this prison, giving up little bits of his food to others,” Driscoll recounted.

Non-German priests weren’t allowed to celebrate Mass in the camp, where the majority of the priests were Polish.

Still, Brandsma carried out priestly duties.
 
“The German priests used to smuggle the Eucharist to him so he could distribute it to various prisoners, by an eyeglass case. That’s where he hid the Eucharist,” said Driscoll. “He would go around giving encouragement to other prisoners and giving them the Eucharist too, as best he could.”

Brandsma, who was always frail, was sent to the prison hospital.
 
“It is said that anybody who went to this prison hospital never came out,” Driscoll said. “Probably when he went there, he knew all sorts of things might happen to him.

The hospital’s doctors regularly engaged in human experimentation.
 
Driscoll said a nurse gave Brandsma a lethal injection on July 26, 1942 and he died immediately. His remains were likely cremated within a day. He was 61 years old.
 
A nurse on duty at the time of the priest’s death later testified that the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, had ordered his death.
 
“Before he died, he gave this person his rosary, which was a rather primitive rosary, made with some kind of beads,” Driscoll said. “He told her to pray the rosary. She objected that she didn’t understand how and wasn’t a believer anymore.”
 
“He said all you have to do is go from bead to bead and say ‘pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.’ And just keep saying ‘pray for us sinners, pray for us sinners’. And that’s enough,” the American priest recounted.
 
Brandsma was beatified in November 1985 as a martyr for the faith.
 
For Driscoll, the priest’s life teaches us “to preach the gospel boldly, forcefully, and not be afraid.”
 
“I think that’s one of the important issues,” he said. “Being kind to one another, as he was to his fellow prisoners, and try to console them when they fell down. I assume many of them were totally depressed by their condition. He encouraged people.
 
Driscoll also reflected on the nature of faith, sickness and healing. Those who suffer illness should “try their best… try to not lose hope.”
 
“It’s faith that heals. I believe, and that’s important,” he said. “I tell people ‘It’s not the touching of this piece of cloth to you. It’s faith that saves.’ You should not give up hope, but have faith. Jesus says ‘ask and you shall receive.’ You keep praying for that. Certainly everybody’s prayer is answered somehow. It may not be the way that you like, but it is answered.”
 
Fr. Mario Esposito, a Carmelite priest from New York, is a vice-postulator for the case. He told the Sun-Sentinel that he knows of no other miracles attributed to Brandsma that are under investigation.
 
“We hope this could be the one, but there are very exacting standards, and Rome is going to go over this case with a fine-toothed comb,” Esposito said.

[…]

null / Ball Lunla/Shutterstock

Washington D.C., Oct 6, 2021 / 10:40 am (CNA).
New guidance on issuing COVID-19 vaccine religious exemptions for federal employees insufficiently treats the matter of conscience, one Catholic bioethicist told CNA.&… […]