When the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper announced that the focus of the G8 Summit this year being hosted by Canada will be on Maternal and Child health, many Canadians were very happy. The issue of maternal and child health is one that is central to the church’s vision of human dignity, human wholeness, and the enjoyment of abundant life. In many parts of the world, especially in the global South the health of women and children is threatened by poverty, HIV/AIDS, water scarcity and poor sanitation, malnutrition, ignorance, and diseases. At the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, government leaders assembled together produced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): a set of time bound objectives aimed at reducing extreme poverty by 2015.

Although there has been progress on several of the MDGs, of all of these goals, according to the UNICEF, MDG four, to reduce child mortality, and MDG five, to improve maternal health, are the most seriously off course. We are only 9% off the way towards improving maternal health and 32% off the way towards achieving our goal of reducing child mortality. Each year, more than half a million women die from pregnancy-related causes - an astounding 1500 mothers die each day during pregnancy or because of complications during labour. Annually, 8.8 million children die before they turn five years old, which amounts to 29,000 children every day and 21 children every minute. Most of these children die from diseases or a combination of disease and malnutrition that could easily have been prevented or treated. For instance 300 African children die every day from Malaria which could be prevented with $10 provision of mosquito nets for children and families.

I admire Fr Ekissa’s passion for defending the Church, but found his logic very long in grammar and self and group adulation, but short in substance for the following reasons: (1) He fails to show contrary to my argument that clerical abuse of any kind within the Church is a problem that is structural, systemic and situational (or personal). Structural because the nature and structure of the church as it is today does not allow for transparency, accountability, and openness which will immediately identify abusing clergy and remove them from ministry or help them to reform their ways. A situation wherein the Pope or bishops are being called to account for offences committed by priests in local churches shows that a top-down approach to accountability in the church has not been effective in addressing not only the challenges of clerical abuse, but also in controlling the excesses of members of the clergy in many instances. The laity who are the primary recipient of the services of priests and bishops should play a more decisive role in holding the clergy to account.

“The Holy Father was ready to take on the embarrassment caused by others. He was very courageous. He listened to us individually, and prayed and cried with us…I will continue my battle now not against the Church but against paedophilia.”

A Maltese victim of clerical sexual abuse recounting his experience after meeting with Pope Benedict during his recent trip to Malta.

Fr Deogratias Ekissa’s recent piece and criticism of my opinion (refer to Catholic Information Service for Africa 038, April 27, 2010) and that of many others who have seriously condemned clerical sexual abuse and who call for a reform within the structure of the Church to stop these abuses demands some response on my part. His position could be summarized into three points, namely: (1) the media blitz and the analysis of clerical abuses in the mainly Western media and by some Catholics like myself amount to an attack on religion and particularly the Catholic faith; (2) clerical sexual abuse especially pedophilia is a problem of the northern hemisphere which should not be used to drown the message and credibility of the pope and the Catholic church in the western world and beyond; (3) the analysis of clerical sexual abuse and the call for interior transformation and for a more open structure of accountability within the Church, and a reappraisal of the practice of priestly ministry are wrong-headed approaches. He, therefore, calls for sharpened propaganda machinery within the Catholic Church to counter the negative PR which these supposed distorted interpretations have advanced against the Catholic Church.

I admire Fr Ekissa’s passion for defending the Church, but found his logic very long in grammar and self and group adulation, but short in substance for the following reasons: (1) He fails to show contrary to my argument that clerical abuse of any kind within the Church is a problem that is structural, systemic and situational (or personal). Structural because the nature and structure of the church as it is today does not allow for transparency, accountability, and openness which will immediately identify abusing clergy and remove them from ministry or help them to reform their ways. A situation wherein the Pope or bishops are being called to account for offences committed by priests in local churches shows that a top-down approach to accountability in the church has not been effective in addressing not only the challenges of clerical abuse, but also in controlling the excesses of members of the clergy in many instances. The laity who are the primary recipient of the services of priests and bishops should play a more decisive role in holding the clergy to account.

We began 2009 already aware of unusual life-course conjunctions. I'm thinking especially of celebrations centered on February 12, the date in 1809 when the well-to-do Darwins of Shrewsbury in Shropshire and the dirt-poor Lincolns of Hardin County, Kentucky, welcomed sons who left such a mark on the world. Now a conjunction of life endings has made Thursday, January 8, of this year a day to be remembered with sadness, reflection, and gratitude. In New York City, Richard John Neuhaus succumbed to complications from a recurrence of cancer; on the same day in Chicago, Ogbu Kalu died from complications arising from pneumonia.

Neuhaus was better known, at least in North America. Love him or loathe him, this larger-than-life figure had been an unmistakable force for more than forty years—from his efforts in 1964 at founding Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, to the posthumous "Public Square" column in the February 2009 issue of his journal, First Things. Since 2001, Kalu had served as the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at Chicago's McCormick Theological Seminary. This Nigerian scholar shared an expatriate status with Neuhaus, who had come to the United States from his native Ontario as a mid-teen. For those committed to understanding the dramatic worldwide spread of Christianity, Kalu's death is as devastating as Neuhaus' decease has been for those who joined him in seeking the right kind of Christian support for the right kind of public life.

Pope Benedict XVI will be in two African countries this March for his first trip to continental Africa as pontiff. It is surprising that this imminent visit has not generated any interest in both Africa and outside the continent. Whatever be the reason for this apparent lack of enthusiasm about this visit, like most papal trips one hopes that this visit will be significant coming more than a decade after the last one by Pope John Paul II to Africa in 2008. The highlight of this visit will be the publication of the Instrumentum Laboris for the 2nd African Synod coming up later this year in Rome, and the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the evangelization of Angola. This five days visit (17-23 March) is expected to draw attention to the state of the Catholic Church in Africa within the wider question of the African condition, and the role of the Church as an instrument of peace and justice. It will also highlight the great work that the Catholic Church is doing in Africa in the areas of health care, development initiatives, and the drive towards more prosperous and stable democracies in Africa. There is also the concern over how the Catholic Church in Africa is enhancing the agency of Africans in stimulating the needed response to change the contoured face of Africa. It is significant that the theme the Pope chose for the Second Special Assembly for Africa is, “The Church in Africa in Service to Reconciliation, Justice and Peace.” This no doubt underlies the prophetic role which the church is called to play in the very challenging contexts of faith practice in Africa.

The Church in Africa has come of age. The latest edition of church statistics published by the Vatican shows that the number of Catholics increased from 1.131 billion to 1.151 billion between 2005-2006, representing an increase of 1.4%.t.....

Once more Congo is burning and the world is watching. After five years of civil war (1998-2003) in which over 5 million people were killed and over a million dislocated, the war-weary people of Congo are facing the prospect of another preventable war. The Congo conflict is the longest and most devastating conflict in Africa. It is also central to resolving the horrors going on in Darfur because these conflicts have led to the weaponization of this African sub-region and the surrounding countries extending to Sudan and Chad. The vast and ungoverned territories of Congo, Angola, Sudan, and Uganda provide the route for the transportation of all kinds of weapons to the African hot spots in Uganda, Somalia, Congo, and Sudan. They are also providing fertile grounds for very angry and disinherited Africans who are veritable tools for burgeoning terrorist cells and rogue groups and militias.

General Nkunda’s rise as a main player in the conflict is not without reason. He is only a front for a constellation of ethnic, national and economic interests within and outside Africa, which is playing out in the murky waters of the bloody politics of this troubled African region. This self-proclaimed general of the Tutsi ethnic nationality claims to have a Messianic mission to purge Congo of the remnants of the Hutu ethnic group that perpetrated the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He is also claiming that he is a freedom fighter who will rid the region of dictatorial regimes who have mortgaged the future of the people of the Greater Congo basin to Western and Chinese economic interest. Since January 2008, Nkunda has made it clear that the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was wrong to have negotiated away a third of Congo’s resources to China. In that deal worth over 5billion dollars, China will control and exploit Congo’s resources over a given period, while in return China will build 2,050 kilometres of road in Congo as well as provide other infrastructures like schools and hospitals...