Pray for Justice and Peace in Sudan, Catholic Bishop Implores in Christmas Message

“I ask that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings may be offered for everyone, for kings and for all in authority, that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all devotion and dignity,” the Bishop of El Obeid Diocese who doubles as the President of Sudan Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SCBC) says in his Christmas and New Year 2022 message shared with ACI Africa. 

Praying for everyone, Bishop Trille says, “is good and pleasing to God, our savior who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.”

The Catholic Bishop Bishop who has been at the helm of SCBC that brings together heads of Dioceses in Sudan and South Sudan since January 2020 describes Christmas as “a spiritual festival of the renewal of faith, trust in God.”

He encourages the people of God under his pastoral care to “live loving God, by hearing the word of God who wants us to participate in making peace.”

“Christmas, we seek to love God and the other, because he who does not love, does not know God; God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God and God is in him. Christmas makes it possible, we feast peace with the Chief of Peace,” Bishop Trille says.

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He continues, “The celebration of Christmas is a time of giving, in which we exchange gifts, blessings and congratulations. It is the moment in which we think of others, a time of selflessness, where we forgive, and evaluate our lives, our behavior and our relationship with God and people to change and become a better person than we are now.”

In his Christmas and New Year 2022 message, the Catholic Bishop who has been at the helm of El Obeid since his Episcopal Ordination in April 2017 says the people of Sudan are in need of a country where they are all peaceful and free from any forms of discrimination. 

“We celebrate Christmas this year in the third year of the continuous revolution that bears the slogans of Freedom, Peace, Justice and Sudan that accommodates everyone and that looks forward to change and building a new Sudan in which everyone is equal, as one people and one nation; Sudan, which is for Sudanese without discrimination,” he says. 

The Catholic Church leader who will turn 58 next month notes that “discrimination, exclusion and marginalization were the approach of the new regimes that have ruled our country since independence and which has led to what we are in now.”

The nation that the citizens of the Northeastern African country are striving for is that of “Sudanese people who believe in God and in the value and capabilities of this great country”, he says, adding that it is “the right of every Sudanese to enjoy its wealth and capabilities, because it embraces everyone without discrimination.”

“It is noticeable that politicians and political entities have been preoccupied with political charters, tracks and assessments since the outbreak of the revolution, which has become threatening to dismantle the country on a tribal and ethnic or regional basis in the frantic struggle for power and the scramble for wealth, something that confuse the entire scene so that the citizen who has no hand in this political game wonders about where the country is heading,” Bishop Trille notes.

He further notes that tribal conflicts have become “a dangerous phenomenon that appears everywhere in the country.”

The Local Ordinary of El Obeid highlights the crises in Jebel Moon in Darfur, Abu Jubiayha and Kaluqi in South Kordofan and the Red Sea in Port Sudan and says the in these Sudanese regions violence “requires concerted efforts of all to stop bleeding because the most important thing is for Sudan to exist, while wealth and power will disappear.”

Last week, the Bishop emeritus of El Obeid Diocese bemoaned the instability in Sudan and South Sudan saying the people of God in the two neighboring countries are living “without love and without peace” and that the two counties have continued to rely on others for support.

In his Christmas prayer titled “People with guns bring suffering and death, Jesus brings peace and life”, Bishop Macram Max Gassis bemoaned the fact that in the two countries, “Many people were mowed down by that awful instrument of killing.”

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The member of the Comboni Missionaries (MCCJ) added that some of the people “live in abject need of food, clean water, medical services and the need of decent shelter. This has made us become beggars in many countries.”

Bishop Macram prayed that those who rule Sudan and South Sudan nations with cruelty receive conversion.

Magdalene Kahiu is a Kenyan journalist with passion in Church communication. She holds a Degree in Social Communications from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA). Currently, she works as a journalist for ACI Africa.