Missionary Trip to Senegal

Reported by Joseph Meaney, May 2009.

Human Life International is pleased to announce that we have recently established our Seminarians for Life (SFL) program in Senegal. This French-speaking country on the northern edge of West Africa is wedged between the desert and the tropics. Islam dominates the religious landscape, but the first Senegalese president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, was a Catholic. He laid a solid foundation for his country in the 1960s and 1970s and chose to retire rather than become a "president for life," as so many African dictators have done who economically pillaged their countries.

Mr. George Wirnkar, HLI's regional coordinator for Francophone (French-speaking) Africa preceded me on this mission trip. He went south from the capital city of Dakar to the southern hub of Ziguinchor to visit a major seminary. He took a ferry boat because of one of the quirks stemming from the colonial past of the region. Namely, the English-speaking independent nation of Gambia bisects Senegal almost in two. Gambia was a British possession, and it snakes inland from the coast, following the river that gave it its name. If you take the ferry, you can avoid buying an expensive visa and waiting at the border just to cross a country that is only a few miles wide.

A general rule that holds true in most African nations where Islam enters the religious mix is that the southern regions have more Christians than the northern ones, which are concentrated with Muslims. Senegal follows this pattern, but they are fortunate that religious intolerance and persecutions are not a problem there like they are in other Islam-dominated places. Catholic parishes and monasteries are thriving in Senegal.

AFRICAN TREATY THREATENS TO UNLEASH ABORTION ON THE CONTINENT

The greatest threat facing Senegal at present is population control. The country made the grave error of signing and ratifying the justly infamous "Maputo Protocol" of the African Union-an inter-governmental organization. This international treaty is a poison pill full of radical feminist prescriptions, including eliminating legal protection for preborn children in the Continent of Hope, as Pope John Paul II called Africa.

HLI and the Catholic Church have made educating leaders concerning the dangers of this treaty a priority. One of our most effective resources in this task is a booklet entitled The Maputo Protocol: Clear and Present Danger. We have versions in French and English, and the latest revision incorporates the full text of the treaty. Our website, www.maputoprotocol.org, is also quite useful.

We have not yet detected any overt moves to strip Senegalese babies of the right to be born, but we must be vigilant. When Togo ratified the Maputo Protocol, they legalized abortion swiftly afterwards, as the treaty provides for this in Article 14: "States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to: protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus."

The Church and pro-life movement had hardly any time to mobilize opposition to legal abortion in Togo-a country with very weak democratic institutions. The Togolese legislature liberalized their ban on abortion only a few months after ratifying the Maputo Protocol. We are determined that this should not happen in Senegal or the many other countries that have accepted the Maputo Protocol but prohibit abortion.

POPULATION CONTROL FROM ABROAD

In our meeting with the Cardinal Archbishop of Dakar, His Eminence, Adrien Sarr, we underlined the international threats coming from the Obama administration and the African Union. He thanked us and promised to pass along our warnings and the pro-life materials we brought to the bishops of Mauritania, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, etc. Senegal is an important hub in this vast region. I was surprised to see that there are even direct flights from Dakar to Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will be implementing even more population control measures there now that Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State.

Senegal has a low AIDS infection rate of about 1% of the population. This means that the condom promoters have less leverage to conduct their joint population control and AIDS activities. The Muslim influence greatly reduces fornication and also makes it very difficult for anyone to get permission to put up billboards advertising condoms. Nevertheless, the anti-lifers are convinced that 13.7 million Senegalese is too many, and their birthrate of almost five children per family must be crushed to below replacement levels.

THE HOUSE OF MOSES

This HLI trip had special significance for me. My maternal grandfather, Joseph Philippe, after whom I was named, was an architect commissioned to design and build the Monastery of Keur Moussa in Senegal. In the early 1960s the famous Benedictine abbey of Solesmes in France accepted the request of the Archbishop of Dakar to send a group of monks to found an African community. "Keur Moussa" translates to "House of Moses." It is now a thriving religious house. They have even started a foundation of their own in neighboring Guinea. It is beautiful to see the sons of Saint Benedict putting down roots in the fertile soil of Africa.  

The father abbot, Dom Ange Marie Niouky, welcomed us with warm Benedictine hospitality. He invited us to lunch with the monks after Mass and washed our hands personally in a moving ceremony. These contemplatives have managed to make the desert bloom with many agricultural innovations. They gave me a tour of the buildings my grandfather designed and shared memories of him.

I was asked to make a presentation about HLI to the novices and monks. One of the fruits of the visit was a promise that they would start making the plaster models of 10 week-old preborn babies that HLI affiliates are now producing all over the world. They have a pottery shop for making clay figurines and the monk in charge of this was excited to get the baby molds we use to create them. They are a cloistered community, but it is also a cultural center where the faithful come from miles around for the sacraments and to make retreats. Their plan is to distribute these reminders of the humanity of the unborn child to as many people as possible.

SEMINARIANS FOR LIFE

George and I also met a priest of the Congregation of Saint John. This French order is expanding throughout West Africa. They wear a grey habit which has led to the nickname "les petits gris"-"the little grey monks." The priests and brothers of Saint John all have an excellent philosophical and theological formation. They have been entrusted with the youngest major seminary in Africa, founded this past year in Guinea. George Wirnkar visited them and founded an SFL chapter there for HLI only a few months after it began operating. The brothers of Saint John were very happy to receive this program to help future priests dedicate themselves in a special way to defending human life and the family.

Our visit to Lieberman major seminary in Senegal also went very well. Their SFL group is now quite active and sent a delegate to our regional HLI Seminarian Institute this summer. They received us with the traditional glass of water to welcome guests. We addressed the seminarians and professors and brought them a large amount of pro-life material including videos and St. Michael the Archangel prayer cards in French.

In our presentations, we emphasized the need to form oneself in the Gospel of Life and to preach it. The Church, through our shepherds, especially the popes, has made it clear that overcoming the culture of death must be a priority for all Her sons and daughters. There has never been a period in history with stronger attacks against life and the family.  Almost 2 billion children have died from surgical abortion in the last 50 years. Countless more have been the victims of abortifacient birth control, such as the Pill and the Intra Uterine Device (IUD). All of us have seen the devastation caused by easy divorce in industrialized countries. We told the Senegalese seminarians that all this will be coming to their nation soon if they do not prepare their people to resist it.

We left Senegal very happy with this latest African addition to the HLI family. It is remarkable how fast our outreach has grown and how many people we reach in Africa. I would like to take this opportunity to thank George Wirnkar and our HLI benefactors for making all this possible.