Top Vatican diplomat visits Mozambique’s violence hit Cabo Delgado

YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – In his visit to the Southern African country of Mozambique, Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin paid a risky visit to the war-ravaged town of Cabo Delgado where terrorism and natural disasters have brought untold hardship to the people.

The Vatican diplomat told victims that their sufferings, fears and anxieties, and hopes, “are in the heart of Mother Church and have a special place in the heart of the Successor of Peter.”

Parolin was speaking Dec. 8 at St. Paul Cathedral in Pemba as part of his December 5-10 visit to the southern African country.

Mozambique is a country nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, with Christians constituting 47 percent of the country’s nearly 35 million inhabitants.

Muslims are mostly concentrated in the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado, Nambula, and Niasa, and in Cabo Delgado where Parolin visited, Muslims are in the majority-constituting 60 percent of the population.

The province has been mired in violence and turmoil since 2017.

“The significance of Cardinal Parolin’s visit is highlighted by the evolution of the conflict. While the fighting that began in 2017 was initially disorganized, it has become an overtly ISIS-affiliated movement over the past three years,” said Johan Viljoen, Director of the Denis Hurley Peace Institute of the Southern Africa Bishops’ Conference in comments to Crux.

“The church is under direct attack, their missions have been burned down, people have been killed and so it is a place where the church is being persecuted severely,” he added.

Poverty, disputes over land, and competition for jobs have created fertile ground in the province for a local al-Shabab militia. Believed to have links to the Islamic State (IS), the group has exploited these local tensions, which are fueled by the government’s collaboration with multinational energy companies to explore the region’s rich offshore natural gas reserves.

In eight years of conflict, at least 6,500 people have been killed in the area and a million others displaced.

Bishop António Juliasse of Pemba says more than 300 Catholics have died in the past eight years, 34 of them in 2025 alone.

“I have come to tell you all journeying in Cabo Delgado, that you are not alone. The Holy Father and the entire Church, which is One and Universal, are with you,” Parolin said.

The cardinal spoke about the “heroic witnesses of faith of so many of our brothers and sisters who remained faithful to Christ in these times of pain and strife, and also of those who were killed without denying the name of Jesus.”

He also listened to testimonies of survivors, taking in the story of the Christian who lost three brothers and an uncle to the terrorists, of religious who risk their lives to spread the faith, and of those refusing to renounce their faith, even at the point of death.

“Cardinal Parolin greeted the displaced one by one, shaking their hands and blessing their children. It was as if he wanted to embrace each and every one of them, and touch their deepest wounds, so as to participate in their suffering and their hope,” said Juliasse in a message sent to Pontifical charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

Viljoen told Crux that despite the incredible hardship in Cabo Delgado, and Mozambique at large, “the church in Mozambique is very alive, it’s vibrant and alive and the people are faithful.”

Evidence of the vibrancy of the Church, he explained, can be found in the contrast between flourishing vocations in the Southern African country and the dwindling commitment to vocation in places as far apart as Europe and the United States.

“The seminary in Nambula, which is one archdiocese in Mozambique, has 220 seminarians, so that should give you an idea of how faithful people are, how seriously they take the church, and the church needs to be supported,” Viljoen told Crux.

That contrast makes Parolin’s visit all the more important, especially given Pope Francis’s constant reminder that the poor and the destitute must be the focus of God’s servants.

“Pope Francis constantly said we have to go to the peripheries, we have to go to the margins, and Cabo Delgado is amongst the poorest people in Africa if you look at the Human Development Index, but it’s also one of the most vibrant, active churches that we have, so I think it’s a wonderful thing that Cardinal Parolin went there. In fact, I would have wanted the Holy Father to go,[to Cabo Delgado] but we had a papal visit in Mozambique a few years ago, so it’s not likely to happen again, but I think it’s fantastic, and it’s given the church a lot of support,” Viljoen said.

He said Parolin visited a part of Mozambique where nothing other than faith gives people hope.

“People feel encouraged, and they have regained hope,” he noted, before wondering if the Church could fundamentally change the situation in Cabo Delgado.

“The whole thing [conflict] is being driven by the presence of vast reserves of oil, gas, and minerals, and with Total and ExxonMobil, and you know, everyone getting involved there and wanting a piece of the cake, the economic vested interests are too large, and we know that capitalist greed does not listen to our arguments about God, who is love, and about morality, and compassion, and that we as humans are all brothers and sisters,” he told Crux.

“It’s all about how much you can acquire for yourself, and that the full force of corporate greed and political opportunism has been unleashed on Cabo Delgado…I don’t know how much headway the church can make in a situation like that,” Viljoen said.