St. Joseph's God's TYM (Total Youth Ministry) at 10 Croton Falls Rd., Croton Falls, NY 10519 US - Why Have You Forgotten Us?

Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore posed the question, which he told his fellow bishops had come originally from a young Sudanese boy during this summer's World Youth Day gathering in Rome. "Why have you forgotten us?" the youngster asked. The question was perfectly reasonable. Sudan, where an unending civil war has left 2 million people dead and forced twice that number to flee their homes, has been the scene of unspeakable horror and suffering for nearly two decades. And yet it has escaped the world's attention. Cardinal Keeler was one of several speakers at last week's meeting of the U.S.bishops in Washington, D.C., who endorsed a statement attacking the "slavery,torture, executions and religious persecution" carried on by the Sudanese government, much of it directed at the African nation's Christian minority. "The violence and repression in Sudan cannot be allowed to continue," said the statement,which the bishops unanimously adopted. Many who spoke in support of the statement lamented the near-total lack of attention paid to the Sudanese crisis by U.S. television and newspapers. "This is one of those worldwide tragedies that remains quite invisible in this country," said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles. Archbishop Theodore E. McCarrick of Newark, N.J., agreed, and offered a possible explanation. "There's no press on this," he said, "because the Sudanese have no constituency here." As if to underscore their point, The New York Times relegated the bishops' hard-hitting statement to a lone sentence in the final paragraph of a wrap-up story on their meeting. "The bishops also urged the United States and other nations to increase their efforts to end a long civil war that has killed two million people in Sudan," it read. As it turns out, the bishops did a good deal more than that. They laid the blame for the reign of terror squarely at the feet of the Sudanese Islamic government, which has brutalized both Christian and animist people in the country's southern region. Specifically the bishops criticized the "indiscriminate bombing of churches, hospitals and schools" and the "systematic destruction and expropriation of property and resources." They criticized the oil revenues that will "fuel the war" rather than hasten its conclusion. Nor are Christian refugees who are forced to abandon their homes in southern Sudan likely to find safety in Khartoum or other northern cities. Last year tens of thousands of refugees from the south were rudely evicted from the makeshift villages they had put together on the outskirts of Khartoum and were herded back into the desert--all on the basis of a government decision that ruled there were to be "no stable settlements" of refugees. Archbishop McCarrick was right to liken the government campaign against Christians to the Holocaust, since it constitutes a genocidal program aimed at the eventual extermination of a people. The young man overheard by Cardinal Keeler wondered why the world had forgotten Sudan. The U.S. bishops gave him their own answer last week, and it was this: "Not if we can help it."

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