Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Baku (Fides Service) – Catholics in Azerbaijan are a small community, 150 people, but they are deeply committed to fighting poverty and restoring hope among orphaned and abandoned children and homeless people. The Baku Missio sui iuris is under the guidance of Mission Superior Father Jozef Kapla.
This year the local Church is expecting a special gift. In fact the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples has decided to donate the proceedings of the annual Charity Auction organised in the Vatican (this year will be held on 11th December) to the Catholic Church in Azerbaijan. Mission Superior Father Kapla and his little flock are very grateful and they welcome this unexpected Christmas gift which will help support assistance to some of the many orphans and the homeless people in Baku. Some of the funds will go towards the construction of a new church. Work will start in the new year and the church will be built in the style of the one destroyed under the Stalin regime.
Every Christmas the local Catholic community makes a special effort at solidarity distributing Christmas parcels to the most needy families. The little Azer Church plays an important role in social assistance for many orphaned children and homeless people the assistance from the Catholic community is the only means of help. In collaboration with the Muslim (Red Cross) Red Crescent organisation it runs a soup kitchen mainly for immigrant families who have fled situations of war in the Caucasus, Nagorno Karabak or Chechnya. In Baku there are war orphans, children who have been abandoned, street children forced to beg or sell their bodies to survive, many are caught in the web of drug addiction.
Assistance offered by the Catholic community also helps to counter currents of radical Islam which find fertile soil in Azerbaijan with its poverty and economic problems especially among the young in search of spiritual values, meaning to life which fundamentalist Islam is all too ready to supply. To meet this visible need among young people the local Church intends to give special attention to Youth Pastoral. (PA) (Fides Service 9/12/2003 Lines: 30 Words: 380)
