Religious Freedom Week Focus: Nigeria

| 06/25/2023

By: The Good Newsroom

The Church is growing quickly in western Africa’s most populous nation, but faces violent attacks.

Flowers lie on caskets during a funeral Mass in the parish hall of St. Francis Xavier Church in Owo, Nigeria, June 17, 2022, for some of the 40 victims killed in a June 5 attack by gunmen during Mass at the church. Intersociety, a leading Nigerian human rights organization, issued a report May 21, 2023, with sobering statistics on summary executions, maiming, forced disappearances and illegal detentions carried out by security forces and allied militias in southeast Nigeria's Imo state over a 29-month period, from January 2021 to May 2023. (OSV News photo/Temilade Adelaja, Reuters)

Country: Nigeria

Population (% Catholic): 213.4 million (2021 estimate); 10-13% Catholic

Threats: Although 50 percent or more of Nigeria’s 213 million people practice Islam, western Africa’s most populous nation has been a growth area for the Catholic Church in recent years. The patron saint of Nigeria is St. Patrick.

Christians in general, and Catholics specifically, have faced violent attacks, sometimes characterized as struggles between Christian farmers and Muslim nomads.

Churches have been attacked, and both clergy and laypeople murdered. A priest was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen earlier in June.

“The Catholic Church in Nigeria is particularly under this attack by unknown gunmen and I feel it is deliberate,” said Josef Ishu, secretary of the Nigerian bishops’ conference Laity Office, in a recent interview.

The Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently offered assistance to the Archdiocese of Ordo in Nigeria.

“I met with Bishop Jude, now the shepherd of the Diocese of Ondo, Nigeria, who served here in the archdiocese as pastor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish, Elmsford.

“I gathered as well many priests from Nigeria who so generously serve here. Together, we listened as Bishop Jude described the ongoing persecution of the Church in Nigeria; priests and sisters taken hostage, tortured, and killed; faithful wounded and murdered; churches attacked and set aflame.

“Nigeria is a young, vibrant, growing, prominent Church. Along with the Philippines and India, it is the fastest-growing Church on the planet,” Cardinal Dolan wrote in early May.

“I presented Bishop Jude with $100,000 from you, the people of the archdiocese,” Cardinal Dolan said.

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