Nearly eight years after a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone, many people who fled the country have returned, although they struggle to survive amid a shattered economy, Archbishop Edward Tamba Charles of Freetown and Bo said. In an interview on Sept. 21, the archbishop described a country that is still recovering from a war that left tens of thousands of people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Among the surprising results of the war’s end is the growth of the Catholic Church, in part because of the conversions of people who relied upon the church for assistance during the war. “The church stood by them,” Archbishop Charles said, “and the experience of war brought some people to their faith.” Although Catholics make up only about 8 percent of the population in Sierra Leone, rebels considered the church a threat during the 11-year civil war. Priests and religious were expelled from the country, and church property was looted and vandalized.
Sierra Leone Struggles After Civil War
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Pope Leo said that if the teen “had come all the way to Rome, then (the pope) could come all the way to the hospital to see him.”
A Reflection for Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Molly Cahill
As emergency workers searched for survivors and tried to recuperate the bodies of the dead, Pope Leo XIV offered his prayers for people impacted by the latest shipwreck of a migrant boat off the coast of Yemen.
The Archdiocese of Miami celebrated the first Mass for detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Trump administration’s controversial immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.