Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
October 18, 2000
Documentary on Sudan to screen in Denver
Christians in southern Sudan still face serious persecution from the country's extremist Muslim rulers, stresses Sudanese Bishop Macram Max Gassis of El Obeid.
Bishop Gassis, whose outspokenness against the regime in Khartoum has made him a marked man, has visited the United States several times in recent years, and is currently in the United States again seeking aid for his beleaguered Catholic people.
Civil War claims 2 million lives
A brutal 17-year-old civil war in Sudan has claimed some 2 million lives.
Black African Christians and animists in southern Sudan have been resisting repression and forcible conversion by the Arab-Muslim North in a war that has raged on and off for more than 40 years, since Sudan gained its independence from Britain in 1956. The current conflict began in 1983.
Bishop Gassis has received vital support from William Saunders, a Catholic who founded Sudan Relief and Rescue in Washington, D.C.
"It gives [Sudanese Catholics] strength to know that people on the outside are thinking of them," Saunders said.
But Muslim attacks on the Christian-animist South continue, including an aerial bombing this past summer in which 52 persons were killed.
The bishop was in Rome for the Oct. 1 canonization of a former Sudanese slave, Josephine Bakhita, who died in 1945. "I want the Holy Father to see the horror of hatred, of racism, of religious intolerance, of genocide in Sudan — and no one is talking about it," the bishop said at the end of a recent homily.
Bishop Gassis believes the war being waged on the South is a "religious and ethnic persecution" and that Western companies mining oil in the region are helping the fundamentalist government carry out that war.
Catholics suffer for faith
The Arabs of the North have long tried to forcibly impose Islam on the entire country, he said. Since the country gained its independence in 1956, the rulers have confiscated mission schools, prohibited foreign missionaries and imposed strict Islamic law, which calls for the chopping off of hands of thieves and the public lashing of adulterers, among other things.
He said he has told Pope John Paul II that southern Sudan is a kind of Maginot line, and if it is broken through, "Islam will reach the heart of Africa in no time."
The bishop, who recently addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said he finds much sympathy in the nation's capital, but not from the Clinton administration. He pointed out that it has assisted predominantly Muslim regions like Kosovo. "Why not Sudan?" he asked.
Bishop Gassis, who baptized some 200 people in his mountainous diocese this past Easter, said that he is assisted by catechists but said that a lack of priests is "hampering our work." Missionary societies have told him that they cannot spare anyone.
He reported that the Dinka tribe in the South recently dug five artesian wells with a rig donated by the U.S. government, giving them much needed clean drinking water. And, the El Obeid Diocese this year has redeemed 660 persons who had been captured and sold into slavery.
Slave raids and kidnappings occur frequently in Sudan, tolerated by the Muslim central government to break the South's resistance and forcibly convert young captives to Islam.
Editor's note: For on-going information about the Church in Sudan, readers may contact: Mr. William Saunders, executive director, Sudan Relief and Rescue, PO Box 1877, Washington, D.C. 20013-1877. Or telephone toll free: 1.888.488.0348.
