The number last year dwindled to about 70.Īccording to a Council on Foreign Relations report cited by the U.S. The peak years for Boko Haram attacks were 20, with more than 350 throughout Nigeria. Our people have become unshakable in faith,” Bishop Doeme said. “As history shows, any time there is persecution, the church becomes more alive … and more vibrant. The diocese has an estimated 163,700 Catholics. “I am the living testimony of our Lord’s protection,” the bishop added. They would have slaughtered our children. (CNS photo/Boko Haram, Handout, Sahara Reporters via Reuters)īecause the diocese is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, “wonders have been happening. The group has now largely been driven out of several provinces in the region. The Islamic terrorist group, founded in northeastern Nigeria, killed 1,500 people in the territory covered by the Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri, Nigeria, between 20. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau speaks in front of guards in an unknown location in Nigeria in this still image taken from an undated video obtained Jan. It still retains control over some villages and pockets of territory and continues to launch deadly suicide attacks and abduct civilians, mostly women and children.īishop Doeme spoke of a positive outcome following a Boko Haram kidnapping of scores of children hiding in an Islamic seminary in Niger state in May 2021. The group has largely been driven out of several provinces in the region by the Nigerian military - with assistance from Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. His diocese, in northeastern Nigeria, is the birthplace of Boko Haram, and between 20, the terrorist group killed 1,500 people in the diocese. “They targeted our churches, our priests, our rectories and destroyed the structures in those places, ” Bishop Doeme said.
The webinar was titled, “Is Boko Haram defeated? Life under the perpetual shadow of violence.”įrom 2009 to 2019, according to ACN statistics, Boko Haram displaced 25 priests from their parishes, 45 nuns from their convents, and more than 100,000 Catholics. “With Mother Mary on our side, victory is ours,” Bishop Doeme added. About 100 are still missing, and one was found as recently as June of this year. “I dropped the rosary I was holding,” he recalled.Ĭhrist’s message, he said was “‘Boko Haram is gone.’ He said it three times and was gone.”īishop Doeme said he was “totally shaken” by the experience and didn’t tell anyone about it for a year, and when he told them, “they were very happy.”įifty-seven girls escaped from Boko Haram on the day of the kidnapping. He said Christ appeared “as a vision” at the right side of the altar. I went into my chapel, as I always do, to pray the rosary,” Bishop Doeme said during a July 26 webinar sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need, the international organization and papal charity that helps threatened communities of faith. 28, 2018, during a vespers service in the Crypt Church at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme of Maiduguri, Nigeria, gives a testimony about Christian persecution Nov.
WASHINGTON (CNS) - A vision of Christ helped give Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme of Maiduguri, Nigeria, hope for the eventual end of the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, after the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the remote town of Chibok in April 2014.
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