By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On Pentecost Sunday, at least fifty worshippers were killed, and some seventy injured, in an attack on St. Francis Catholic Church in Nigeria.
Attacks on Christians in Nigeria have become so common that they aren’t deemed “newsworthy” anymore. And to date the government of Nigeria has done little to respond.
Apologists for the killers insist that the attackers, Islamist terrorists, are merely “nomadic herdsmen” whose grazing areas are being destroyed by “global warming.”
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how all the myths of the Left seem to swarm like buzzards on a roadside carcass, each providing another excuse for oppressing Christians, the family, unborn children, and, ultimately, freedom itself?
But behind the banal barrage, the fact remains: Christians are being slaughtered by the thousands every year in Africa.
What is to be done?
Fight Global Warming!
That’s the Left’s narrative.
This time around, however, the truth broke through.
Arakunrin Akeredolu, the governor of Ondo State where the attack occurred, immediately responded. “I am deeply saddened by the unprovoked attack and killing of innocent people of Owo, worshiping at the St. Francis Catholic Church today. The vile and satanic attack is a calculated assault on the peace-loving people of Owo Kingdom who have enjoyed relative peace over the years,” he wrote.
The Islamic terrorist war against the Catholic Church is old news in northern Nigeria, but, as Governor Akeredolu observes, it has seldom penetrated the country’s south. Nonetheless, many fear to call it by its proper name.
The result? Silence. The slaughter of Christians worldwide is forbidden among international elites, and it is a disgrace.
A Pathetic Pattern Of Denial
A common ingredient of the Left’s worldwide truth boycott is a desperate attempt to avoid the facts.
We recall how a black racist terrorist intentionally drove into a Christmas procession in Waukesha last November, killing eight and maiming dozens more.
What was the national reaction?
There wasn’t any. An errant “SUV” had killed the hapless victims, that’s all. And the guilty vehicle was probably white.
With few exceptions, even America’s Catholic bishops — normally obsessed with “America’s Second Original Sin of Racism” — were silent about the killing of those Christian innocents.
It’s not that our shepherds aren’t capable of outrage at racist killings. When George Floyd was killed in 2020, over eighty bishops wrote pastoral letters or public statements condemning the incident. On cue, they cheered the anti-family, pro-abortion Marxist grifters at Black Lives Matter — and, of course, flaunting their customary insouciance, they condemned the “violence” of thousands of rioters and regretted the dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of damage they caused.
So the international blackout of news of murdered Christians is both intentional and a key ingredient of the Left’s narrative: disobey at your own risk!
This time around, Nigeria’s Federal Government disobeyed. According to Reuters, that government has publicly identified the Owo attack as the work of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terror group.
Corruption And Killing:
Peas In A Pod
Not everyone has been silent. Nina Shea, of Washington’s Hudson Institute, has been sounding the alarm for years.
Shea, one of America’s most intrepid observers of human rights worldwide, told Catholic News Agency last Sunday that “attacks against Catholics and other Christians are escalating in Nigeria. Yet most of this violence, until now, has centered in northern Nigeria, while the southwestern part of the country where Sunday’s attack took place has remained relatively peaceful.”
In other words, the Islamic terrorist campaign against Nigerian Catholics is expanding to new ground.
“This massacre in a church while filled with Sunday worshippers is an atrocity that we’ve repeatedly seen in northern Nigeria over the years,” Shea said, and she dares to mention the Forbidden Word: “Those were the work of Islamist extremists.”
And who’s protecting the Catholics from the Jihadis? Not the Nigerian government.
“While the facts are still emerging about today’s massacre, it is clear that large scale, war-like attacks on Catholics and other Christians are spreading in a system of impunity,” she continued.
Will Nigeria’s Buhari government now sustain its interest and protect Nigerian Christians over the long term? Bishop David Oyedepo, Founder of Living Faith Church Worldwide, isn’t very sanguine.
Bishop Oyedepo puts the matter in its proper context: Christians are incessantly kidnapped and harassed, he said last week, and the current government of Nigeria does nothing because it is “the most corrupt regime in the country’s history.”
Nina Shea describes the result.
“The Buhari government has allowed this to continue unabated and fails to protect Nigeria’s churches. This governmental passivity is being seen as a green light for extremists to target Christians.”
Target Africa
It’s no surprise that the Biden administration, in the person of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, is complicit in that “passivity” regarding the increasing attacks that Shea reports are targeting Christian villages in the north.
“Kidnappings and murders of priests and pastors, enslavement of Christian girls, and mob lynchings for alleged blasphemy against Islam” have intensified since the Biden administration removed Nigeria from the United States’ “Country of Concern” (CPC) list, identifying countries where egregious religious persecution is taking place, Shea told CNA.
“[Blinken] needs to address this crisis, stop making excuses for it based on a climate change narrative and designate Nigeria as a CPC. Anything less is unconscionable,” she said.
Well, maybe Blinken’s too busy promoting “Perverts’ Pride Month” to do his job.
But there’s more to this story: the U.S. State Department and its foreign aid arm, the Agency for International Development (AID), have for decades sought to reduce the population of Sub-Saharan Africa. As the U.S. government’s most staunch and strident advocate of population control for decades, they recognize that, if current birthrates continue, in another generation the population of Nigeria might well equal that of the United States.
So AID has for years attempted to foist on African women the rancid “family planning” programs that are a required component of every U.S. government program ostensibly designed to help Third-World communities with health care, clean water, and other basic amenities.
Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, first established in 1984, prohibited U.S. taxpayer funding of abortion abroad, and that provision has guided every Republican administration since.
Under Democrat administrations, however, and especially under Joe Biden, the most pro-abortion president in history, those programs include mandatory funding for abortion.
Unfortunately, America’s Catholic bishops routinely advocate full federal funding of those programs anyway, even when they fund contraception and abortion.
In 2010, afraid that the newly elected Republican Congress would reduce the billions of taxpayer funding that their NGOs receive every year, the USCCB, Catholic Charities USA, and Catholic Relief services joined dozens of secular organizations, among them abortion advocates, to form the “Circle of Protection.”
Arm in arm, the “Circle’s” members form a united front to lobby at the federal trough for full taxpayer funding of each other’s government grant applications, abortion funding included.
Why did the bishops’ conference and its NGOs join this pro-abortion scam?
Jim Wallis, the “Circle’s” leftist founder, recognized that the Catholic imprimatur was indispensable to the success of his lobbying campaign. So Wallis sealed the deal by recruiting the director of the USCCB’s Social Justice bureaucracy and naming him a co-founder.
And who was that USCCB director?
His name was John Carr.
Yes, the same John Carr who headed Jimmy Carter’s “White House Conference on Families.”
The same John Carr whom The Washington Post recognized as the most influential Catholic in Washington for a quarter of a century.
Please pray for the Catholics of Nigeria.
They’re on their own.
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