Pentecost this year has been both bitter and sweet. It is always sweet. The promise of the Holy Spirit is the fuel of our love and our experience of the presence of Christ. We continually pray, “Come Holy Spirit, kindle in us the fire of your love.”
The bitterness flows from the news that on 5 June 50 Christians in Nigeria were shot and killed at St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, in Ondo State that, as they celebrated the Pentecost Mass.
These deaths followed that of a teenage Catholic girl, Deborah Samuel. She was murdered by a mob of her schoolmates in Sokoto, also northern Nigeria, in May, with her body publicly burned, for arguing her school WhatsApp group should be restricted to academic matters and exclude Islamic proselytism. What do these murders signify? Do we use politics or metaphysics to weigh them?
