The Catholic church has said that about 90,000 of its members are still displaced as a result of the activities of Boko Haram insurgents in the North eastern part of the country.
The church made the assertion in a statement signed by the Director of Information, Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri, Borno State, Rev. Fr. Gideon Obasogie and dated Sunday, October 26, 2014, lamenting that the church had lost fourteen parishes, with twenty priests displaced as some members still had no knowledge of the whereabouts of heir family members in both Maiduguri and Yola, in Adamawa state.
Obasogie said: “A good number of those trapped around the Camerounian borders are gradually finding their way into Maiduguri. Counting their ordeals, some will tell you how they fed on grasses and insects. A group from Pulka community alone buried over 80 children who took ill in the bush and died.
“As a church, we are really going through a severe moment of persecution. Our ecclesiastical circumscription has faced a sharp disintegration. For now, situation is still as before, no improvement whatsoever since our people are still displaced and have no much hope of getting home.”
Obasogie said the church has spent more than N3 million on internally displaced persons as the church “the church must bear witness to the gospel both in word and deed.”
Obasogie said the visit to the IDPs was “a practical show of that authentic witnessing. They had over 200 sacks of maize, rice, cooking oil, blankets, mosquito nets, rubber buckets, mats, cartons of Maggi, beans, sugar among others.”
He also stated that the insurgens could not take two things from the church, their faith and their soul and both would not be given up even up to the point of death
The church insisted that there are two things the terrorists can never snatch from them: their faith and their soul. “These they must never give up even at the point of death.”
