21, October 2018
US: Voices of concern for Southern Cameroons at a New Jersey Church 0
Silva Munuza was describing the deadly conflict back home in Cameroon to Cliff Jones, his pastor in Laurel Springs.
A 38-year-old accountant who lives in Clementon and has a young daughter, Munuza talked about the brutality of the security forces, the burning of villages, and of the dead. And then his voice broke.
“Silva couldn’t keep on speaking,” Jones recalled. “He knows people who have been killed.”
The effect on the pastor was profound.
“When I saw a brother in Christ break down four times in the space of five minutes,” he said, “I realized that we need to do something.”
That’s why St. Paul’s Presbyterian, a cozy church on a pretty street in small-town Camden County, is praying for Cameroon, a West African nation where six complicated decades of tension between the English-speaking minority and the French-speaking majority threaten to erupt into civil war.
The pastor, Munuza, and others in the church hope to educate the congregation and the public about the situation in that riven, faraway land, and are exploring other ways to help. A good number of the 200 people in the English-speaking Cameroonian community that has taken root in South Jersey during the last 20 years are Presbyterian, and belong to St. Paul’s.
I met Munuza there during services on a recent Sunday, and later sat down with him and five other Cameroonians in Fellowship Hall at the church.
Until I started working on this column, pretty much all I’d known about Cameroon was that the Sixers’ amazing Joel Embiid is from there. I’ve since been reading news stories online and watching YouTube clips about the turmoil, and I’ve seen some of the awful images — a man on his knees being beaten, a charred body in a ruined, roofless house, entire villages reduced to cinders — that have been widely disseminated on social media. I’ve also visited the website of the self-described “interim government” of an envisioned English-speaking, independent Cameroonian state to be called the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.
But nothing prepared me for the conversation around the table.
“My brother died on the spot, and a neighbor who was like a father to me had just left his home and also was killed,” said Ernest Awa, 40, a health-care worker who lives in Lindenwold. “I lost those two people,” he said softly.
Awa was describing the events of Sept. 1 in Pinyin, a village in the northwestern portion of the English-speaking part of the country, where many of the Cameroonians in South Jersey have family. Witnesses posted videos charging security forces the government claims are seeking to quell a separatist rebellion with shooting civilians at will.
At the table, a young Cameroonian woman who lives in Camden County and asked not to be identified because she feared for her family’s safety said she hasn’t been able to reach her father back home for the last two weeks. He’s in his 70s and escaped an attack near Pinyin by hiding in the wilderness, she said.
“I don’t know when I will be able to go back there,” said Valerie Mouthchia, 45, a project manager who lives in Clementon. She has become an American citizen and said the U.S. should not support the government in Cameroon, which she said is responsible for human rights violations there.
The people around the table described the conflict as a colonial legacy made worse by the authoritarian rule of longtime francophone President Paul Biya. The results of a contentious Oct. 7 presidential election are expected to be made public Oct. 22, with some media in the country predicting Biya will win.
Despite the rising numbers of casualties, displaced persons, and refugees — thousands of Cameroonians have fled across the border into Nigeria — Americans generally know little about Cameroon or its escalating crisis.
Nevertheless, “Americans can become more aware,” Munuza said. “They can call their representatives. They can tweet. They can call for an end to the genocide.”
I asked the pastor of St. Paul’s how even a faith-filled, 360-member-strong congregation could realistically expect to have an impact on a complicated human tragedy so far away.
“For us, prayer is important,” Jones said. “Knowing people who are going through this, whose immediate family members have been killed, brings this to a much more personal level. We need to do something, and not just in words.”
Source: The Inquirer
26, October 2018
Vatican: Bishop Andrew Nkea says Africa offers synod an example 0
While European bishops discuss how to bring young people back to the Church at the 2018 Synod of Bishops, one bishop from Cameroon said that he has the opposite problem.
“My churches are all bursting, and I don’t have space to keep the young people,” said Bishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Mamfe said at a Vatican press conference Oct. 24. “And my shortest Mass would be about two and a half hours,” he added.
A study by Pew Research Center in August 2018 found that church attendance and prayer frequency was highest in sub-Saharan Africa and lowest in Western Europe. Four out of five Christians in Cameroon said that they pray everyday.
“People ask me, ‘Why are your churches full?’” the Cameroonian bishop said. For Bishop Fuanya, it all comes down to family, community, and traditional values.
“Coming from Africa, the family is a very, very strong institution,” Fuanya said. “We come from a culture in which tradition normally is handed from one generation to the other.”
“Our traditional values still equate to the values of the Church, and so we hand over the tradition to our young people undiluted and uncontaminated,” he continued.
When asked about the potential inclusion of so-called “LGBT” language in the synod’s final document, the bishop reiterated that point.
“I wouldn’t vote for any article that has LGBT.” Fuanya said, explained that “99.9 percent” of the young people in his diocese would “stand at my door and say, ‘What’s this?’”
“With matters of doctrine that the church teaches, it is not like in this synod we are trying to invent new teaching … Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life … we cannot be taking positions that contradict the Gospels,” he added.
On that point, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, told the press conference: “Quite honestly I don’t remember that we had discussed this issue in Germany so I can’t acknowledge that there is a specific conversation on this.”
“This is not a synod on sexuality. It is a synod on the young,” Marx added. Fuanya suggested that two of the key ways in which the faith and teaching of the Church is handed over to younger generations are through the family and community. In these, he said, the African Church was setting an example.
“Church as community. Church as family is very strong for us,” said the bishop. A strong sense of community in the Church is something “very important that Europe can learn from Africa,” Fuanya said.
In Africa, “there’s still a lot of things we do as community. That is the difference. What we are trying to do in these small Christian communities is to fight the increeping of individualism,” he added. There are significant demographic differences in family size in Europe and Africa.
A 2010 USAID report on the number of children desired by people in various parts of the world, showed that the desired number of children is highest among people in western and middle Africa, ranging from 4.8 in Ghana to 9.1 in Niger and 9.2 in Chad, with an average of 6.1 children for the region.
In the European Union, 47 percent of households with any children only have one child, only thirteen percent have three or more children, according to 2017 data.
While the differences between Europe and Africa could provide helpful lessons, Fuanya noted that the synod was about seeking a universal perspective.
“It is not like Africa has come to help Europe solve their youth problem, it is the Church that has come together to see how to solve the problem of the youth,” Fuanya said.
“When we are looking at things in the synod, we are not solving problems of particular continents or particular local churches. We are looking at the Church from a global point of view.”
“We reflect on the empty churches, but at the same time we reflect on the poverty situation. We reflection on migration. We reflect on all those things that show the Church from a holistic point of view,” Fuanya said.
For Cardinal Marx, one global issue that needs to be addressed is the sexual abuse crisis. “The discussion on sexual abuses in the past few months … drew global attention. I believe it is an important global matter that needs to be discussed,” Marx said in German.
“It is the Church that needs to change … the youth have said this,” he continued. “We need to do this together in the theme of accompaniment.”
Source: Catholic News Agency
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