Father vu tweeted January 11, “Praying for Archbishop Gabuza and for all the sick. May Lord hear our prayers and heal those who are most in need of his love and mercy.”
Christopher Walters indicates, in his Tweet, that he has already offered prayers for the Archbishop in ICU and adds, “+Gabuza was my parish priest in Lyttelton half a life time ago.”
“With the help of the Holy Spirit the Lord the giver of life he will be healed. We pray and believe,” Vicky Mekute posted in a tweet.
The hospitalization of the 65-year-old Archbishop comes at a time when Catholic Church leaders in South Africa are expressing serious concerns about the new COVID-19 variant.
The new wave of COVID-19 has claimed the lives of six Catholic Sisters from the Daughters of Saint Francis in Port Shepstone, Marianhill Diocese who succumbed “within a period of a week, from 10-17 December 2020,” the Conference of Catholic Sisters in the country reported.
“This is a very painful reminder that the scourge of COVID-19 is yet to lessen its devastation to communities and society at large,” officials of the Leadership Conference of Consecrated Life (LCCLSA) said in their December 18 statement shared with ACI Africa.
Following the death of the Sisters, LCCLSA’s leadership called on “all religious congregations and communities to be extra vigilant and cautious in light of the deadly and subtle Second Wave of the pandemic.”
“None of us is immune to this pandemic,” LCCLSA President, Sr. Nkhensani Shibambu said and added, “We remain our own best defense against the virus and the least we can do is to continue adhering to the safety protocols of COVID-19 prevention and containment.”
To protect Catholic Sisters from the pandemic, the Justice and Peace Commission of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) has collaborated with the United Nations in distribution of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) to various convents across the country.
In a January 9 Facebook post, the leadership of the Commission announced that it had already distributed “truckloads of PPEs” to Catholic Sisters in the Gauteng and Free State Provinces and that plans were underway for similar deliveries to Sisters in Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Kwazulu Natal.