Catholic Church in Somalia
The Roman Catholic Church in Somalia is part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope and curia in Rome.
There are very few Catholics in Somalia: may be only a hundred as of 2004.[1]
Characteristics
The whole of the country forms a single diocese - the Diocese of Mogadishu.
During the colonial period, there were, at its postwar peak in 1950, 8,500 Catholics in the Diocese of Mogadishu (0.7% of the population), almost all of whom were expatriate Italians.[1]
Bishop Filippini of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mogadiscio declared that in 1940 there were 40,000 catholics between the native Somalis, mainly because of the Catholic missions in the agricultural areas of the Shebelle river.
History
Catholicism was introduced in the part of Somalia that was called Italian Somalia in the late 1800s. The other areas with Somalian people (namely former British Somaliland, French Somaliland, Ethiopian Ogaden and Kenya north-eastern provinces) practically had no catholic presence.[2]
Initially catholicism was practiced only by the few Italian colonists in Mogadishu and the Shebelle river farmer areas. But after WWI many Somalians become catholics: most of them were former black slaves, called Somali Bantu, in the Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi and Genale plantations.[3]
In 1895, the first 45 slaves were freed by the Italian colonial authority under the administration of the chartered catholic company "Filonardi" and converted to catholicism. Massive emancipation and conversion of slaves in Somalia [4] only began after the antislavery activist father Robecchi Bricchetti informed the Italian public about the slave trade in Somalia and the indifferent attitude of the Italian colonial government toward the trade.[5]
Slavery in southern Somalia lasted until early into the 20th century, when it was abolished by the Italian Somalians authorities in accordance with the Belgium protocol and with the diocese of Mogadishu.
In 1928, a Catholic cathedral was built in Mogadishu. The cathedral, the biggest in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, was later destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s.
The Bishop of Mogadishu, Franco Filippini, declared in 1940 that there were about 40,000 Somali Catholics due to the work of missionaries in the rural regions of Juba and Shebelle, but WWII damaged in an irreversibly way most of the catholic missions in Italian Somalia.[6]
Since the end of the Italian colonialism, catholicism has experienced a nearly complete disappearance in Somalia: actually remain only one hundred Somali catholics.[7]
The last Bishop of Mogadishu, Salvatore Colombo, was murdered in 1989.[8] This was followed by the murder of an Italian nun, Leonella Sgorbati, in 2006 and the full persecution of the remaining catholic and christians in civil war ridden Somalia.[9]
Notes
- ^ a b Catholic Church in Somalia
- ^ Gresleri, G. Mogadiscio ed il Paese dei Somali: una identita negata. p. 45
- ^ Gresleri, G. Mogadiscio ed il Paese dei Somali: una identita negata. p.71
- ^ Tripodi, Paolo. The Colonial Legacy in Somalia. p. 65
- ^ History of Somali Bantu
- ^ Tripodi, Paolo. The Colonial Legacy in Somalia. p. 66
- ^ Gresleri, G. Mogadiscio ed il Paese dei Somali: una identita negata. p.96
- ^ The murder of Bishop Colombo
- ^ Even desecration of Christian graves in contemporary Somalia
Bibliography
- Gresleri, G. Mogadiscio ed il Paese dei Somali: una identita negata. Marsilio editori. Venezia, 1993
- Tripodi, Paolo. The Colonial Legacy in Somalia. St. Martin's Press. New York, 1999.
See also
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