Church blamed for evictions

LUANDA, Angola – Even as Pope Benedict XVI said Monday his heart cannot be at peace while people are homeless, critics used his visit to highlight the plight of thousands whom the Angolan government has violently evicted from land owned by the Catholic Church.

Amnesty International appealed to Benedict during his visit to the southern Africa country to press the Angolan government for full compensation for the families who have been forced from church land since 2004.

More than 2,000 families have been evicted since Angolan authorities began returning land to the church that had been seized by the former Marxist state, according to Muluka Miti, a researcher for Amnesty International. The London-based human rights group said people were detained and arrested arbitrarily and subjected to torture in some cases.

Mateus Damiao and his eight family members were evicted from their land in 2007 on the outskirts of southern Luanda in Wenji Maka, where a new Catholic church is planned. In an interview Monday, he described repeated attacks by police since 1998, sometimes with bulldozers, sometimes forcing people at gunpoint to leave.

“I hope that the pope’s message will be heard by our leaders and by the pope’s priests and bishops so that no more people are left homeless as I was,” said Damiao, who has received no compensation since authorities forced him from his land.

On Monday, the pope urged Angola’s leaders to make “the fundamental aspirations of the most needy people” their main concern.

“Our hearts cannot be at peace as long as there are brothers that suffer the lack of food, work, a house, and other fundamental goods,” the pontiff said in his airport departure speech.

When asked about Amnesty’s appeal, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi referred the question to Angolan Bishop Monsignor Jose Manuel Imbamba. The prelate denied anyone had been evicted or houses destroyed.

“We help the poor; we don’t send them away,” Imbamba said Saturday at a news conference.

It was impossible to get any response, including numbers of those evicted, from the Angolan government. Jacinto Sampaio, a senior official at the government press center, claimed he did not know the name of the government spokesman.

The government of Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled for 30 years through elections marred by fraud and corruption, has had rocky relations with the Catholic Church.

Angola’s government banned freedom of religion after 1975, when Portugal hastily gave its colonies independence and civil war broke out, reminding people that the Catholic Church had been an ally of colonizers who sent tens of thousands of Angolans into slavery in Brazil and the U.S.

After a rapprochement with the church, dos Santos in 1998 gave back lands seized by the state that had become occupied by ordinary Angolans. Human rights groups say the government started evicting people from Catholic Church land in 2004, two years after the country’s long civil war ended.