Bishop John MacWilliam, a former British Army officer, is about to take charge of a diocese that is 10 times the size of Great Britain. It has a population of some four million people, of whom only a few hundred – at most – are Catholic. And it is a place of which, I suspect, few readers of the Catholic Herald have ever heard.
The Diocese of Laghouat covers the whole of the southern part of Algeria, which is dominated by the Sahara desert. The few Catholics are mostly missionary priests or Sisters, with some expatriates from the Philippines or elsewhere who are working in the oil industry.
