Bishops try to unify Congo amid strife
'Let us wage the only war that leads to peace'
Congolese bishops are aiming to bring together divided politicians to discuss how to end a resurgent conflict in the east of the country.
Msgr. Donatien Nshole, general secretary of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO), said that following a Feb. 3 meeting with President Félix Tshisekedi, the bishops would “meet the other stakeholders” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Church announced the initiative following the occupation of the eastern city of Goma by Rwandan troops backing a Tutsi rebel movement known as M23.
The fighting in occupied Goma has left more than a hundred people dead and nearly a thousand wounded, according to a count by the French news agency AFP, based on hospital reports.
Goma’s Bishop Willy Ngumbi Ngengele told Vatican News that shelling hit the neonatal unit of the Maternal General Charité Hospital, which “caused the death of newborns.”
He added that windows at a newly inaugurated diocesan administration office building were also damaged.
Thousands of residents have fled their homes in Goma, which has an estimated population of around 2 million people, including roughly a million displaced by conflict.
Hundreds of thousands of people require urgent humanitarian assistance, according to Bernard Balibuno, country director for Cafod, the aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
“The city has been forced into shutdown by the fighting, and hundreds of thousands of people are displaced with many reduced to begging on the streets,” he told Vatican News.
Goma’s four main hospitals have been overwhelmed by hundreds of injured people seeking treatment. According to the Red Cross, which runs one of the hospitals, civilians arrive by bus or motorbikes bearing bullet or shrapnel wounds.
“The three surgical teams work tirelessly to treat patients who are sometimes lying on the floor due to lack of space,” Myriam Favier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross subdelegation in Goma, said earlier this week.
Speaking at the end of a meeting of Catholic and Protestant leaders with President Tshisekedi, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu said the bishops were troubled by the plight of Goma’s residents.
He said: “As pastors, we are troubled by the situation that our brothers and sisters in the east of the country are currently experiencing. We cannot understand what these people have done to deserve such unworthy treatment of human beings that has lasted for three decades. For us, it is incomprehensible.”
“This is why we, as pastors, while taking our responsibility to go towards each other to seek solutions, we want first to express our compassion, our closeness and also our solidarity with our brothers and sisters affected by this situation, who live in Goma, Bukavu, Beni, and Butembo.”
Ambongo, the Archbishop of Kinshasa, stressed that people in the east were not alone.
“We wish them courage. You are not alone, you are always at the heart of our prayers, of our concerns in the hope of the faith of our religious convictions. We take our responsibility to see how to find a solution together,” he said.
In a Feb. 3 statement signed by CENCO president Archbishop Fulgence Muteba Mugalu, Congolese bishops expressed “great sadness” at the deterioration of the security situation in the eastern North Kivu and South Kivu provinces.
They underlined their support for the “Social Pact for Peace and Living Together in the DRC and the Great Lakes,” created in collaboration with the Church of Christ in the Congo (ECC), a union of 62 Protestant denominations. The pact presents a roadmap for peace in Africa’s Great Lakes region.
The Catholic bishops said: “We reassure all our brothers and sisters in the affected provinces of our communion in their sorrows and of our spiritual closeness. We therefore invite all faithful Catholics and all people of goodwill to intensify prayers for the advent of lasting peace in our country.”
Earlier, Congolese Catholics welcomed the words of Pope Francis, who visited the country in February 2023, celebrating Mass with a congregation of around a million people in the capital, Kinshasa.
“As I pray for the swift restoration of peace and security, I call on local authorities and the international community to make every effort to resolve the conflict through peaceful means,” the pope said at his Jan. 29 general audience, urging all parties to cease hostilities and safeguard civilians in Goma and surrounding areas.
The pope also referred to riots in Kinshasa, as protesters stormed embassies of countries they accused of complicity in the conflict. He called for an end to “all forms of violence against people and their property.”
The recent offensive in Goma is part of a decades-long conflict that is estimated to have claimed 6 million lives. The First Congo War, fought in 1996-1997, involved many of the country’s neighbors, prompting it to be called “Africa’s First World War.” The Second Congo War, which raged from 1998 to 2003, was also described as the “Great War of Africa.”
At stake in the conflict is the control of mineral-rich areas of eastern Congo. One of the most highly prized substances is coltan, an ore from which tantalum is extracted. Tantalum is an essential component of smartphones and other hi-tech devices.
Commenting on the conflict, Fr. José Mpundu, a Kinshasa priest who serves as a chaplain to Catholic intellectuals and executives, recalled Pope Francis’ first speech in the DRC.
He told The Pillar: “When Pope Francis, in his first speech during his visit to the DRC, said: ‘Take your hands off the DRC,’ he was addressing the ‘so-called international community,’ which is nothing other than an ‘international political and financial mafia’ which at the Berlin Conference in 1885 sealed the fate of the Congo, which is considered a ‘no man’s land,’ a land without a master, where everyone can come and draw without compensation for the dehumanized Congolese people.”
“If I were in the pope’s place, I would have added, this time addressing the Congolese, ‘Free yourselves from their hands,’ ‘Cut the umbilical cord of slavery and neo-colonization.’”
“Indeed, the ‘masters of the world,’ or those who consider themselves as such and to whom we have submitted for centuries, have no reason to withdraw their hands from our country which they consider and treat as a land of things to exploit and not a land of men.”
The priest added: “Let us therefore not expect from this ‘international community’ any salvation, any liberation. Let us unite to wrest our true sovereignty and our true independence to be a ‘great people, free people forever,’ as we sing in our national anthem.”
“Let us wage the only war that leads to peace, which is the war against ourselves, against our greed and our selfishness which eat away at our hearts and minds, against the pride and tribalism which destroy our country, against the corruption and theft which work like gangrene in our society.”
I am always impressed by the Pillar, but your coverage of this story is outstanding.
It is a desperate situation but the Congolese are majority Catholic, so perhaps someone will listen to the bishops and there will be a space for resolving the issues.
Thank you Mr. Lokongo for covering such an important story. The exploitative relationships between the world's economic superpowers and the DRC + its neighbors must be rectified; any coverage of that fact especially because, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of the populations of those economic superpowers have no idea the way their nations take advantage of these nations.