By Quinton Amundson, The Catholic Register

[Canadian Catholic News] – Fr. Oliver Ortese has a message for Catholics and Christians around the world who stand in solidarity with persecuted Nigerian Christians.

“I would encourage Christians to pray for us and to speak out for us because we have no voice,” said the chairman of the International Advisory Board for Makurdi diocese in Benue State. “The government is suffocating us and suppressing us — they don’t want us to be heard.

Emeka Umeagbalasi, a criminologist and researcher for the International Society (Intersociety) for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, reported in August that an average of 30 Christians have been murdered each day of 2025 in Nigeria, a total of 7,087 fatalities between Jan. 1 and Aug. 10. Intersociety also found that 15 priests have been abducted this year and over 15 million people are presently displaced from their homes.

It is all too rare for Nigerian Catholic bishops to have an opportunity to directly beseech the government, led by President Bola Tinubu, to clamp down on this campaign of violence largely waged by militant Fulani Muslim herders and the Boko Haram Islamist jihadists. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), from Sept. 11 to 19, used one of those scarce opportunities to directly address the Tinubu government officials who accepted the bishops’ invitation.

Archbishop Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji of the Owerri diocese lamented on how “many towns and villages across the nation have become communities of fear, flight and funerals.” The CBCN president also decried citizens “being daily kidnapped, extorted, dehumanized, killed or forced to flee their ancestral homes, abandoning their sources of livelihood to seek refuge in makeshift camps, exposed to extreme weather conditions, often without food and water.”

Ortese said much of the Fulani violence is purposely orchestrated in small villages and rural areas because there is a lack of police presence compared to towns and cities.

“Those who survive now move into the town, and they live with their relatives, and that puts pressure on the families,” said Ortese. “That’s the effect. Those in the town are living their normal lives — wake up and go to work, but they wake up and they hear they (Fulani) have visited this village.

“They are attacking in the rural areas, in the interior areas where there are not even roads to (drive fast). That’s what they do. Twenty-five parishes have closed down. The police cannot live there because the Fulanis are attacking.”

Ortese marvelled how “the people are incredible and are standing strong” amid all the terror being unleashed upon them.

Mario Bard, the head of information for Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) Canada, said the international organization has directed some of its financial aid toward “supporting the purchase of safer means of transportation” — jeeps, for example — to make it more difficult to kidnap a priest or other Church personnel.

ACN has also purchased a Toyota Highlander on behalf of the Handmaids of the Holy Child religious sisters so they can reach and support as many internally displaced people as possible. The organization has also trained multiple priests and sisters in leading healing initiatives for communities traumatized by violence and terror.

Echoing Ortese, Bard would like to see Canadians become informed on the attacks against Nigerian Christians, pray to God and “begin to speak about it in parishes or in groups.”

As for a government response, Bard expressed hope the “Canadian government is monitoring the situation right now and could at least request more security from the government for the people of the north.” He emphasized that while he is predominantly speaking about Christians, there are “moderate Muslims who live their religion like Catholics, who are not extreme, and they’re being attacked.”

Ortese believes that if the Canadian and the United States governments, among others, “begin to talk to our government, things might happen.”

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