11 minute read
FEATURES
by CNEWA
Remembering “Brother Joe”
In February, a member of the CNEWA family, Brother Joseph Loewenstein, F.S.C., entered eternal life at the age of 95. In the 1980s, the man affectionately known as “Brother Joe” served as the director of our regional office in Jerusalem. He also served as the first vice chancellor of Bethlehem University and the university’s second president. As the university described him, he was “a permanent fixture [at the university] for most of its existence, educating thousands of teachers, civil society and business leaders, parents, nurses, scientists and church workers.”
Brother Joe has been recognized by many for his devoted work in Palestine, particularly with those living in refugee camps as he spent more than 42 years in Bethlehem. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, in an email to CNEWA, he summed up his life: “My philosophy is ‘helping others’ — be they students, the poor, anyone in need.” It is a philosophy he lived out beautifully and passionately.
May his memory be eternal.
Iraq Trip
As this edition of ONE goes to press, Pope Francis has just returned to Rome from his historic apostolic trip to Iraq, 5-8 March, making him the first bishop of Rome to visit what was ancient Mesopotamia, whose diverse peoples today struggle to rebuild their homeland after more than four decades of war, displacement and persecution.
The pope’s itinerary included meetings with priests and religious men and women in Baghdad, an interreligious meeting in Ur, the hometown of the prophet Abraham, a courtesy visit with Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husaymi al-Sistani in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, and visits with the faithful in Mosul, Erbil and Qaraqosh — all of it documented on our blog: cnewa. org/blog.
As CNEWA’s president, Msgr. Peter I. Vaccari, said recently, “In visiting Iraq, Pope Francis is also visiting us — seeing firsthand the loving work that CNEWA has undertaken, along with our partners in the field, to make Christ present in Iraq. In a special way, we share in the excitement and joy of this moment, a moment that bears witness to the Good News so many are hungry to hear!”
95 Years of Service
March 2021 marks another milestone for CNEWA, as this special agency of the Holy See commemorates its 95th anniversary. Since its creation by Pope Pius XI on 11 March 1926, Catholic Near East Welfare Association has become the leading Catholic agency for its pastoral and humanitarian support of the Eastern churches in the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India and Eastern Europe.
As CNEWA moves closer to marking a century of service, accompanying the Eastern churches in ways that, as our mission statement puts it, “build up the church, affirm human dignity, alleviate poverty, encourage dialogue — and inspire hope,” “we intend to share the stories of the remarkable witnesses of the Gospel who have offered their lives in service to all the people of God through this remarkable agent of good,” said CNEWA’s Msgr. Vaccari.
Bringing CNEWA to You
Beginning with the New Year, CNEWA has expanded its family of print and digital resources for donors and readers. “People, Look East,” whether in its email, blog or magazine form, offers readers insights into the world of the Eastern churches, the communities of the faithful that CNEWA is privileged to serve. This series — the magazine version of which is launched in this edition with Atonement Friar Elias Mallon’s
article, “Catholicism: The One and The Many” — joins our newsletter, “CNEWA’s World,” which launched last year and delivers to your inbox a weekly news summary with important developments around the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India and Eastern Europe.
Together with ONE, our website and our blog, these tools provide timely updates that can bring CNEWA’s world into your world. Visit cnewa.org to see more.
Lebanon Update
In early February, Lebanon marked six months since the massive blast that devastated Beirut left hundreds of thousands homeless. The Holy See’s Congregation for Eastern Churches has charged CNEWA and L’Oeuvre d’Orient, a Parisbased Catholic charity that has long partnered with CNEWA, to coordinate worldwide Catholic aid for Lebanon.
As of early February, individual benefactors and donor agencies had provided CNEWA with more than $4.2 million in assistance for food distribution, repair to damaged homes, and the rehabilitation of hospitals and clinics. CNEWA has also worked with six congregations to repair and restore 16 facilities damaged by the blast that offer programs and services to families. The need remains dire, and efforts to help Lebanon recover will continue for years.
“The people of Lebanon are living the experience of Calvary,” CNEWA’s Msgr. Vaccari said. “They cannot be abandoned in solitude.”
Ethiopia in Crisis
Ethiopia has been facing a severe humanitarian crisis since violence erupted in the country’s northern Tigray region in early November. In January, a delegation of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia traveled to Tigray to meet with Bishop Tesfaselassie Medhin of the Eparchy of Adigrat and to assess the situation of the faithful and the local church.
The delegation said the bishops and his priests had been shuttered since the end of November and had experienced “unspeakable intimidations, sufferings, refutations, frustrations and loneliness.” The people have mostly fled their homes for rural areas in search of safety, they said.
“Many people, in particular children, the elderly and women are in critical need of food supply, medicine, water, shelter and psychosocial support,” said Argaw Fantu, CNEWA’s regional director in Ethiopia. Early estimates indicate that some 4.5 million people in the Tigray region have been affected by the fighting, and that $37.6 million are needed to provide food, water, shelter and medical care.
COVID Aid Distributions
In December, the Holy See’s Congregation for Eastern Churches reported that its COVID-19 emergency fund — which included CNEWA’s major contributions — distributed more than $11.7 million in aid, including food and hospital ventilators in 21 countries where members of the Eastern churches live. More than 3.4 million euros ($4.1 million) were allocated to people and institutions in the Holy Land and included the provision of ventilators, COVID-19 tests and other supplies to Catholic hospitals, scholarships to help children attend Catholic schools and direct food aid for hundreds of families.
In Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, funds purchased rice, sugar, thermometers, P.P.E. and other vital supplies. The fund also helped some eparchies to purchase the equipment needed to reach parishioners remotely with livestreamed liturgies and spiritual programming, after gathering onsite was prohibited due to quarantines and lockdowns.
There is even more on the web
Visit cnewa.org for daily updates
And find videos, stories from the field and breaking news at cnewa.org/blog
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When Truth Dies, People Die
by Laura Ieraci
The main highway to Adigrat from Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, is relatively clear, except for the ruptured tank treads that litter the tarmac. Scorched tanks, damaged military vehicles and expended artillery lie abandoned by the side of the road.
Villages along the way are mostly ghost towns. Buildings, littered with broken glass and bullet holes, tell of the looting and violence that have taken place. Charred matter remains where some buildings once stood.
“It’s very clear there was conflict there,” says John Shumlansky, country representative for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the emergency relief and development agency of the United States Catholic bishops, which has played a major role in the emergency distribution of food in the northeast African nation for decades.
In February, Mr. Shumlansky made his third trip into Tigray to assess humanitarian efforts since the region was sufficiently secured for re-entry. He says he counted about 15 burnt tanks and a couple of “bombed out” buses on his return drive south to his home base in Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital.
The Sudanese village of Um Rakuba is host to a refugee camp for some 20,000 Ethiopians who fled the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, has been under siege since 4 November, when the Ethiopian government mounted a military response against the armed Tigray People’s Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.), a dominant political party that the national government had accused of treachery for attacking a national army base in the region. And so, the months-long Tigray War began. At the time of publication, lasting peace in Tigray had not yet been achieved.
One of the issues underlying the war is the legitimacy of power. The T.P.L.F., which has long held power in the federal parliamentary republic, claimed the prime minister was no longer the legitimate leader of the country, after he had postponed federal elections, initially set for May 2020, to an unnamed date in 2021 due to COVID-19. The prime minister, in turn, declared the regional elections held in Tigray in August 2020, in defiance of the federal government, to be illegal and its T.P.L.F.-led government to be illegitimate. An interim government is in place in Tigray currently.
CRS’s John Shumlansky says that while many areas he drove through in February seemed rather calm — including Mekele, where spotty phone service has been restored and businesses have reopened — other areas are “still a bit tense.”
“There are still reports of some conflict or skirmishes here and there, mainly off the beaten path,” he explains from Addis Ababa during a Skype call in late February. He shares a text message he received moments before the call, with news that electricity was just restored in Mekele. “That’s a good sign,” he says.
Tigray’s civilian infrastructure, including power and water systems, was damaged early in the war, leaving the
People have fled to the countryside for safety, although the refuge they hoped to find has been fleeting. … most face serious food shortages and the threat of ongoing violence.
local populations vulnerable. The damaged communications infrastructure made the assessment of the crisis and the coordination of humanitarian efforts very difficult.
Within weeks, the United Nations warned the situation could become dire quickly due to the lack of access to the region; it reported the region had been severed from food and medical aid. Rising hunger and malnutrition were “extremely concerning” due to the lack of food, exacerbated by drought and locust infestations earlier in the year, the U.N. said.
The international community expressed regret and horror at the level of human suffering reported from Tigray. Within the first week of the conflict, several countries, including Canada and the United States, had urged restraint and a de-escalation of hostilities. Pope Francis, too, appealed for prayers for Ethiopia on 8 November and for “the parties to the conflict to stop the violence, to protect all lives, especially those of civilians, and to restore peace to the people.”
The Interreligious Council of Ethiopia and other religious groups in Ethiopia also called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and for both parties to seek a resolution through dialogue.
However, the appeals were ignored and, months later, both sides have been accused of committing war crimes. As is often the case in times of war, eyewitness accounts of mass killings and ruthless destruction also have emerged. Since journalists have been unable to verify the information firsthand, having been blocked from entering Tigray by government officials, some dismiss these accounts as fictional.
The number of civilian and military deaths caused by the war is also in dispute. However, the U.N. and the Ethiopian Catholic Church have reported with confidence that the conflict has devastated an estimated 4.5 million people. Of these, more than two million have been displaced within Tigray, a region that was already host to tens of thousands of refugees from neighboring Eritrea.
The small towns in the region now are mostly deserted, the people having fled to the countryside for safety, although the refuge they hoped to find has been fleeting. The U.N. says most face serious food shortages and the threat of ongoing and unpredictable violence. Tens of thousands of Tigrayans have taken refuge along the western border in neighboring Sudan.
Adelegation of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia flew to Mekele from Addis Ababa in mid-January. From there, they drove to Adigrat to visit with the local bishop, Tesfaselassie
Nearly 60,000 Ethiopians have sought refuge in Sudan. At left, an Ethiopian man at the Um Rakuba refugee camp displays his tattoo. Above, an elderly Ethiopian woman sits in a camp in Kassala.
The CNEWA Connection
War. Interethnic violence. Refugee crises. Environmental change. Drought. Locust infestations. The coronavirus pandemic. Ethiopia is confronting enormous challenges even as it lifts out of poverty its burgeoning population.
Although Catholics constitute a small minority in Ethiopia, Catholics worldwide have contributed greatly to the advances made in Ethiopian society since the demise in 1991 of the military junta that once controlled the nation. CNEWA has long focused its efforts in Ethiopia in the support of child care programs, from kindergartens to schools, health care programs to university chaplaincies. In addition, CNEWA has sponsored formation programs for clergy, religious and families, all toward building the leaders of tomorrow, equipping them today with the tools they will need as the country evolves.
