“We are traumatized; we have lost our joy as a people; the only consolation we have now is the joy that we belong to God and God will never abandon us,” the Local Ordinary of Kafanchan said during the October 24 interview.
He added, “That is why any opportunity like this is given to us, we want to speak it out so that whoever is listening to us, whoever that can help us come out of this, please let him or her help us.”
“We need peace and we are a loving people; we are not trained for war; we delight in having visitors in our midst but we are still not at peace because many communities are constantly being harassed and attacked and burnt down. That is our plight today,” Bishop Kundi said,
Despite the security challenges, the 54-year-old Catholic Bishop said that candidates to the Priesthood had increased in number.
“Our lives are not that of lamentation because God keeps blessing us with vocations. This year we have over hundred young people who brought themselves wanting to be trained as Priests,” the Nigerian Catholic Church leader said.
He added, “We have to turn down some of them because we don’t have the resources to train them.”
“This is another pointer to the fact that God has not abandoned us because we have that faith that we will pick up strongly and we are going to saturate the whole of southern Kaduna with Priests since Kafanchan diocese is blessed with the gift of vocations,” Bishop Kundi who has been at the helm of Kafanchan Diocese since his Episcopal Consecration in February 2020 said.
He continued, “In the last few years of me being the Bishop of Kafanchan diocese, I have ordained 55 Priests and I have created 20 parishes and I hope to create more Parishes.”
“It is a vow that we have made, both the Clergy and the Laity working together we will achieve this. Let's saturate the whole region with the people of God as a response to the hostility and to the harassment,” the Catholic Bishop said.
He added, “The human family is under siege; the human family is under attack; we are in a war with ourselves; people are traumatized. It is the responsibility of the church to bring solace to the people, news of healing, news of forgiveness and of course news of peace.”
