In a prominent front-page article in its May 13 edition, L’Osservatore Romano drew attention to the brutal Islamist insurgency in Mozambique.
“Recent violence in the north of the country has targeted missionaries and civilians—often farmers or miners—setting fire to homes and causing thousands of new displacements,” the newspaper reported.
Citing a Le Monde article, Ilaria De Bonis wrote that “the targets are exclusively the defenseless—specifically small village churches, missionaries living alongside the impoverished and their families, and society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members.”
“Nevertheless, the root cause of this violence—as our missionaries in Mozambique have maintained for years—is not religious hatred per se (though that certainly serves as an aggravating factor),” De Bonis added. “Rather, it stems from a complex mix of economic and political motives—not least the destabilization triggered by the foreign appropriation of the region’s surface and subsurface natural resources.”