#BreakingNews 4 Catholic Nuns of Mother Teresa's Order and 2 Priests are Stranded in Afghanistan - Please Pray!
After 20 years of help from the USA, the country and its capital fell to the extremist group called the Taliban. Hundreds of thousands are trying to flee the country as chaos escalates at the Kabul airport. The Four Missionaries of Charity (MC) nuns will hopefully be moved to their home countries, UCA News reported.
“Our two priests are stuck in Afghanistan and are waiting for their evacuation,” said a Jesuit priest based in the Indian capital New Delhi explained. “We have also suspended our mission in Afghanistan indefinitely as we are not sure when the situation will improve,” he said.
A senior nun at the Missionaries of Charity headquarters in eastern India’s Kolkata city confirmed that four of their nuns are in Afghanistan, including an Indian. She gave no details of the other three, fearing for their safety. The Missionaries of Charity, which St. Teresa of Kolkata founded in 1950, arrived in Kabul in 2004 for humanitarian work.
Father Sequeira, who works for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), had gone to Kabul airport to take a flight to India. “It resembled a chaotic railway station,” he told Matters India August 16 evening, speaking from “a secure place” in the city.
He said he came to the country in 2006 and never in the past 15 years has he seen such a breakdown of system.
The other Jesuit Father Robert Rodrigues from southern India’s Karnataka state is stuck in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. He managed to get inside Bamiyan airport in the evening on August 15, checked in and was awaiting a United Nations flight to land, which would fly him to Kabul some 25 minutes away. But he was unable to make this flight as the situation changed.
Saint Pope John Paul II established a mission sui juris for Afghanistan on May 16, 2002, and entrusted it to the Barnabite fathers. Two years later the Jesuits came to the country to help the Afghan people rebuild their war-ravaged nation through education.
The Jesuits have trained more than 300 young teachers and through them were educating more than 25,000 children in four provinces.
Even before the radical Islamic Taliban came to power, the Christian community was very small, because Afghans are ostracized or even confronted with violence and death if they profess their Christian faith. In 2018 there were an estimated 200 Catholics in the country, they have a single Catholic church, which is located in Kabul.
Edited from Caritas/VaticanNews and AsiaNewsIT
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