Thursday 2nd June
THE ASCENSION OF THE LORD- SOLEMNITY (Holy Day of Obligation)
ASCENSÃO DO SENHOR- SOLENIDADE (Dia de Obrigação)
7:45am – with the Dominican Convent School
10 horas – em Portugês Schoenstatt Bedfordview
3:30pm – Children’s Mass (All welcome)
6:30pm
Go to our website for map and directions
Readings are proper to the solemnity.
(Adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament after the School Mass)
A massacre in a Roman Catholic mission compound in the heart of the Ivory Coast’s cocoa-producing region could come to be seen as a crucial moment in the West African state’s escalating civil war.
Reports are mounting of atrocities by both sides in the conflict − those loyal to head of state Laurent Gbagbo, besieged in his presidential residence in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s commercial capital, and those who follow northern leader and president-elect Allasane Ouattara.
Events at the Italian Salesian Roman Catholic mission in Duekoue increasingly echo a notorious church massacre during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Early reports suggested that more than 800 people, largely from the Gbagbo-supporting Gueré tribe, were killed in a single day at the sprawling Salesian Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus mission in Duekoue, 300 miles west of Abidjan towards the Liberian border. The attackers seem to have been largely soldiers descended from Burkina Faso immigrant Muslim families loyal to Ouattara.
Late yesterday the Roman Catholic charity Caritas said more than 1000 people were massacred in Duekoue. A Caritas spokesman said Caritas workers visited the town and reported seeing a neighbourhood filled with bodies of people who had been shot and hacked to death with machetes.
More than 5000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus sheltering in the Roman Catholic church at Nyarubuye were massacred by Hutu militiamen on April 12, 1994. Nyarube became the supreme symbol of the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 people were murdered in just a hundred days.
The Duekoue massacre seemed to have stiffened the resistance, at least temporarily, of Gbagbo. His 10-year grip on power in Ivory Coast looked as though it was in its final hours on Friday after Outtara’s New Forces (NF) northern army encircled both his residence and the presidential palace, battling to unseat the man who has refused to recognise his defeat in last year’s election.
But yesterday forces loyal to Gbagbo – a southern Roman Catholic who has vowed not to step down in spite of being narrowly defeated by Outtara in a presidential election last November – put up stiff resistance to the New Forces and re-established control of the headquarters of the state TV station, RTI. It went off the air for 24 hours after it fell to Outtara’s soldiers, but by yesterday was again broadcasting pro-Gbagbo propaganda, calling on people to “resist the enemy”.
With control of RTI back in the hands of Gbagbo and updated reports being received intermittently from Duekoue, human rights organisations raised fears of widespread killings in a situation described in a United Nations document obtained by Reuters as “one of generalised chaos”.
Corinne Dufka, senior Africa researcher of Human Rights Watch, said: “We’re extremely concerned about the potential for mass atrocities.” She added: “Given Gbagbo’s prominent use of violent militia groups and the state-controlled media’s incitement to violence, we are asking UN peacekeepers to do everything in their power to protect non-combatants.”
However, the early evidence reported by Italian media from Duekoue suggests the Saint Teresa mission massacre was carried out by Outtara’s NF forces. “The incident is particularly shocking by its size and its brutality,” said Dominique Liengme, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Ivory Coast.
“Red Cross representatives themselves have seen a huge number of bodies [at the mission station],” said ICRC spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas in Geneva. “There is no doubt that something on a large scale took place in this city, on which the ICRC is continuing to gather information. Everything indicates that this was inter-ethnic violence.”
Duekoue was one of the many centres overwhelmed by the NF as its soldiers, wearing “magic” amulets, neckbands and masks, swept through the country last week in a well-organised assault, bringing more than 80% of Ivory Coast under fragile control.
For days the national army, under Gbagbo’s control, put up almost no resistance and its head, General Phillippe Mangou, fled to the home of the South African ambassador with his wife and five children. However, after several days of easy progress, the NF is now facing Gbagbo’s most reliable fighters, the roughly 2500-strong elite Republican Guard, clustered in Abidjan along with remaining regular army troops.
Tens of thousands of people have fled the fighting around Duekoue and Oxfam reports more than 120,000 people from the area have crossed the nearby border with Liberia in the last week-and-a-half.
At times the Saint Teresa mission station in Duekoue has housed as many 20,000 refugees fleeing the fighting. Since late last year there have been innumerable killings in the area prior to the recent slaughter, with hundreds of shops in the city centre set ablaze.
The cocoa economy around the city has collapsed as a result of an embargo imposed by the European Union following Gbagbo’s refusal to accept the presidential election result. According to official figures, Ouattara won with 54% of nearly five million votes cast nationally. But the head of the Constitutional Council alleged vote-rigging in the Ouattara-controlled north and declared Gbagbo the victor with 51% of the votes cast. The country then returned to civil war after enjoying a tenuous peace since 2005.
The inter-ethnic violence around Duekoue that has driven the Gueré tribal people into the mission station mirrors the kind of ethnic tensions that prevail throughout most of Ivory Coast. The Gueré ancestors had possessed the land for centuries before people from the arid north and from neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali began settling there 40 years ago, seeking work as cocoa prices boomed on world markets. Ivory Coast historically has produced more than 40% of the world’s supply of beans for production of the developed world’s chocolate products.
Ethnic tensions and xenophobic killings began when the world price of cocoa nosedived in the 1990s and some five million immigrant workers were suddenly perceived as a burden. The southern-dominated Government introduced a new xenophobic concept of “Ivorité”, or Ivorianess. Vigilantes began killing “foreigners” – the majority of them Muslims and many of them third-generation immigrants – on plantations and in shanties on the edges of the towns as the country, once the richest in West Africa, descended into civil war.
The mission killings began the day after Outarra’s fighters overwhelmed the town. A thousand UN peacekeeping soldiers, mainly from Pakistan and Vietnam and based in Duekoue, did nothing to stop the killing, according to aid workers. The aid workers spoke by phone to news agencies on condition of anonymity for fear of endangering relations between the NF forces and the UN.
Outtara yesterday issued a statement in Abidjan blaming the killings on retreating Gbagbo forces, a version of events contradicted by aid workers and missionaries. Spokesmen for Gbagbo in turn rejected Outtara’s allegations.
Krimitsas said: “There is a risk that this kind of event can happen again and hope that by calling today again for protection for the civilian population, we hope that such events can be avoided in the future.”
Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: “We’ve had unconfirmed reports of quite serious human rights violations committed by the pro-Ouattara forces.”
A spokesman for the Saint Teresa Salesians said so many refugees were arriving at mission compounds it was impossible to provide them all with shelter from seasonal rains.
Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC, said Duekoue was an important strategic gain for Outtara as it sits along a major north-south transit corridor linking the cocoa heartland with the cocoa exporting port of San Pedro. It also controls access to northeastern Liberia which has supplied men and arms to Gbagbo’s forces, he said.
As heavy fighting continued yesterday for a third day in Abidjan, Africa’s sixth largest city with more than four million people, Gbagbo’s location was unclear. The heaviest fighting seemed to be around the Gbagbo-controlled Agban military base in the city centre.
A soldier accompanied by a dozen members of Gbagbo’s Defence and Security Forces, appeared on RTI-TV and read a statement calling for the mobilisation of troops to protect state institutions, asking for “all the staff of the armed forces” to join five units in Abidjan.
The broadcast suggests forecasts of Gbagbo’s imminent defeat and exile are wide of the mark.
Residents of Abidjan said yesterday they are scared to leave their homes. Many reported running out of food, with shops closed and widespread looting. Valerie Bony, a correspondent for the BBC in Abidjan, reported: “In all districts of Abidjan there is sporadic gunfire. There is a lot of looting going in the city.”
She added that young, pro-Gbagbo supporters in several districts have been armed by Gbagbo forces, according to witnesses.
VATICAN RADIO Following the midday Angelus prayer this Sunday (27th March 2011), Pope Benedict XVI launched the following urgent appeal: "Faced with the increasingly dramatic reports from Libya, my trepidation for the safety and security of civilians and my concern for the unfolding situation, currently signed by the use of arms, is growing. In times of greatest tension, the need to put to use all means available to diplomacy becomes increasingly urgent and to support even the weakest signs of openness and willingness on both sides involved, for reconciliation in search of peaceful and lasting solutions. In view of this, as I lift my prayer to the Lord for a return to harmony in Libya and the entire North African region, I also appeal to the international bodies and all those in positions of military and political responsibility, for the immediate start of dialogue and the suspension of the use of weapons”. "Finally, my thoughts turn to the authorities and citizens of the Middle East, where in recent days there have been several incidents of violence, so that the path of dialogue and reconciliation be privileged in the search for a just and brotherly coexistence".
Shortly after 11am Lebanon time (5am ET), the bells began tolling at the Bkirki "conclave," with word emerging that Archbishop Beshara Rai of Jbeil, 71, had been elected head of the 3 million-member Maronite church, the Middle East's largest Catholic community.
According to the wire, the 77th patriarch of Antioch and the Whole Levant -- the first religious elected to the post in some time -- "is known as a moderate" who enjoys "good relations with all Lebanese factions although he is seen by some as being a supporter of the Western-backed coalition." (Rai is shown above entering a nationally-televised Mass today that followed his election and the Synod's emergence from a week of seclusion.)
In a statement, President Michel Suleiman said that Rai made for "the best successor to the best predecessor" -- a reference to the retiring patriarch, 91 year-old Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir -- while a former head of state praised the choice as "a man of unity."
His name meaning "sponsor of the good news" in Arabic, the patriarch will be formally enthroned on 25 March.
We wish congratulate our Maronite parishioners as we do the Parishes of Our Lady of Our Lady of Lebanon and Our Lady of the Cedars.
Witches can and should be converted to Catholicism, according to a robust new booklet from the Catholic Truth Society that portrays spell-casting as spiritually empty, exhausting and immoral. Instead of “seeking to change God’s mind or violently alter his plans through circle-casting”, it says, Wiccans should be encouraged to surrender this often frightening burden and accept the love of Christ.
In other words, come to Mass, leaving your broomstick at the door.
Actually, I should make it clear that Wicca & Witchcraft: Understanding the dangers by Elizabeth Dodd doesn’t make any silly cracks about broomsticks. But I can’t resist. There’s no eco-bore like a Wiccan eco-bore. I’ve met a few and, believe me, you need to be under a spell to sit through a three-hour whinge about Mother Gaia from a practitioner of white magick. It makes one long for the days when witches restricted themselves to a quick cackle before riding off into the night. (Just kidding, witches and pagans! Seriously, last time I had a go at them they reported me to the Press Complaints Commission, which proved resistant to their magick.)
Ms Dodd is reasonably polite about Wicca/paganism, but she’s not buying any of its bullshit about being descended from prehistoric totemic and animist religion via the Pharaohs, Rosicrucians, Cunning Men, Illuminati etc. “Modern Wicca’s origins lie in Victorian occultism,” she says (also finding room to mention the movement’s early links with Aleister Crowley). “Wiccans are encouraged to develop their own pantheon of gods and goddesses with whom they are comfortable to work – a religious ‘dream team’ … There are no limits to the creativity Wiccans can employ when creating their religious pantheons: it would not be uncommon to come across a Wiccan who worshipped Odin, Poseidon and the Buddhist Bodhisattva Kawn-Yin simultaneously.” (And was willing to talk about it in detail, I’ll bet.)
As for the overlap between white and black magic, Dodd makes this point: “Whether or not a Wiccan can successfully communicate with the dead or summon a spirit, whether spellwork is effective or not, has no bearing on the psychological damage that can be done to a young person who is convinced that they have summoned the dead, or have performed a spell that has hurt or injured another. Wicca has no hierarchy or support structure in place for these vulnerable young people … The use of magic, the practice of witchcraft, offends God because it is rooted in our sinful and fallen nature. It attempts to usurp God.”
You wouldn’t read anything this feisty from the Bishops’ Conference, but that’s typical of CTS, which stopped watering down its Catholicism years ago and is thriving as a result. Whether Dodd’s tips for evangelising witches actually work I can’t say – you’re supposed to emphasise that Christianity frees us from the self-centredness of Wicca and to find common ground over ecology (though even here Dodd is combative, accusing Wiccans of worshipping creation itself).
One thing’s for sure: should a group of right-on Wiccans convert to Catholicism, they’d be welcomed a damn sight more warmly by certain south coast bishops than the members of the Ordinariate. There’s always room for female eco-fanatics in the episcopal bureaucracy. Especially if they’re already members of a magic circle.
