Vatican City, Feb 26, 2018 / 12:27 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Rebecca Bitrus, who was a prisoner with Boko Haram for two years, is a stark reminder that behind all the rhetoric about promoting peace and helping persecuted Christians, there are real people who have suffered unimaginable atrocities.
In Bitrus’ case, these atrocities include losing her unborn child as a result of her captivity; watching her three-year-old son be killed because she refused to convert to Islam; and being raped and forced into a marriage with a Boko Haram fighter.
Stories such as this are commonplace in Nigeria, where Boko Haram militants since 2002 have killed tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims who don’t share their extremist ideals.
Based in northern Nigeria and active in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, Boko Haram has been responsible for multiple deadly attacks on villages, schools and churches, often using children in suicide bombing missions as parts of territory controlled by the group have come under attack by local forces seeking to reclaim the area. In 2015, they pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Yet despite all of the suffering she was forced to endure at the hands of her captors, Bitrus has also learned to forgive, pointing to the mercy of Christ as a model.
Speaking to EWTN Feb. 23, Bitrus said she was abducted by Boko Haram in August 2014, when late one evening the militants invaded the small town where she and her husband lived with their two small children, Zachariah and Joshua. At the time, Zachariah was five, and Joshua was three.
Bitrus tried to flee, but she and her sons were abducted by Boko Haram and taken to the group’s camp in the forest.
Forced to take the name “Miriam,” she said that she was immediately put to work in a labor camp. She said she had been pregnant with her third child at the time of her abduction, but lost the baby due to the strains of her captivity.
After arriving in the camp, she said the fighters wanted her to convert to Islam. Having been raised a devout Catholic, Bitrus refused. As a result, she said the militants grabbed her youngest son, Joshua, and threw him into a river.
“I have lost him,” she said, explaining that after the incident, she went through the motions and pretended to accept the Muslim faith, “but never did.”
Each time they were forced to recite the Muslim prayers, Bitrus said she would instead pray the rosary, asking God to free her “from the hands of this wicked people.”
“I was never convinced about Islam. I kept my trust in the Lord and I was praying the rosary with my fingers,” she said. “I am convinced that the prayer of the rosary saved me from captivity.”
Bitrus said that at one point, she was forced into a marriage with a Boko Haram fighter, and – like many of the other female prisoners – subjected to repeated rape. She eventually became pregnant and gave birth to a child on Christmas day, whom she named Christopher, in honor of Christ.
After two years in captivity, Bitrus and her two living sons were able to escape when the militants fled as Nigerian troops closed in on the encampment. Amid the chaos, a group of prisoners fled into the forest, where they spent nearly a month with almost no food or water, she recounted, adding that mosquitoes constantly attacked them and she developed severe rashes that have left scars on her body.
With the help of a local community, they were eventually pointed in the direction of the Nigerian army. The troops initially didn’t believe that Bitrus was Christian, and thought she was a member of Boko Haram. However, after reciting several prayers, including the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, they believed her and sent her to a nearby hospital for treatment.
Afterward being discharged, she was sent back to her hometown of Maiduguri, where she was reunited with her husband. For the two years prior, they had each believed that the other had been killed.
When she first escaped, Bitrus said she struggled to accept her youngest child, who was six months old at the time, because he reminded her of the atrocities she had suffered. However, the local bishop, Oliver Dashe Doeme, talked to her and encouraged her to both “accept and love” the child, saying he could grow up to be “an important person in life, a person who could help me.”
She voiced gratitude to Bishop Dashe Doeme, saying he “cared for my needs and I grateful for that.”
Although it was not easy, Bitrus said she was eventually able to forgive Boko Haram for everything she endured.
“I am convinced about Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness,” she said, noting how Jesus himself was tortured, treated unjustly and condemned to death.
However, “even on the cross Jesus forgave those who inflicted pain to him; he said ‘Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing,’” she reflected.
Bitrus was able to tell her story to Pope Francis during a private Feb. 24 audience at the Vatican. Joining her were Ashiq Masih and Eisham Ashiq, the husband and daughter, respectively, of Asia Bibi, who has been on death row in Pakistan since 2010 on charges of blasphemy.
The meeting was organized by Aid to the Church in Need, a papal foundation dedicated to supporting persecuted Christians. On Saturday, the organization hosted an event in which Rome’s ancient Colosseum was illuminated red in order to raise awareness of anti-Christian persecution throughout the world and commemorate the modern martyrs who have died for their faith.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Tonight the colosseum in <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Rome?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Rome</a> is illuminated red in honor of persecuted Christians throughout the world <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/ColosseoRosso?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#ColosseoRosso</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/acn_int?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@acn_int</a> ???? <a href=”https://twitter.com/dibanezgut?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@dibanezgut</a> <a href=”https://t.co/9QlK0pQtaB”>pic.twitter.com/9QlK0pQtaB</a></p>— Elise Harris (@eharris_it) <a href=”https://twitter.com/eharris_it/status/967463801451892736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 24, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
In comments to EWTN Feb. 23, Ashiq Masih said that although his wife is still in prison, she is doing well and is “a symbol of faith.”
“We hope she is going to freed one day, by the grace of God,” he said, explaining that the ordeal has been difficult for the family to endure, because “we are missing her and she misses us.”
Bibi’s daughter, Eisham Ashiq, told EWTN that she wanted Pope Francis and all of Europe to pray that her mother would be released soon.
[…]
I am not sure I can agree with him that every child who arrives is a gift from God. I was raised Catholic by my adopted parents but am the illegitimate daughter of a Lutheran and a Baptist. The Baptist raped the Lutheran and that is how I was conceived. This is the truth as I have known it for the last 24 years of my life. By the statement about children all being gifts from God, it would seem that God felt my bio mother received me as a gift for being raped? That is how it comes across no matter how someone is going to try and tell me to interpret it. I don’t think I can get behind that kind of thinking. Pregnancies are not always a gift. And before someone comments that I should be grateful that I wasn’t aborted or that my bio-mom chose adoption over abortion, y’all should know that she did go for an abortion but happened to be farther along than she thought – which is the only reason an adoption happened. I am not trying to inflame or upset anyone but the truth of some situations does need to be acknowledged.
Jessica,
Thank you for your comment and your vulnerable honesty.
My wife and I are parents of three children, all adopted; there is a lot of pain and bad “stuff” involved in their background. For example, one of our children was, at the age of 18 months, simply dropped off at the Human Services office; the birth mother was done. (We had two other adoptions that did not come to fruition, for reasons difficult to explain or discuss.) We adopted him when he was two years old.
What I can say, as a father, is that I am thankful that each of our children were born and found their way into our family. It’s not easy; not even close. Secondly, as a Catholic, I believe and know that all life is a gift from God, even when the those involved try to thwart it—or never intended it in the first place. The value of the gift is not rooted in those intentions, but in the simple truth that life is good and is from God.
I recognize that in a perfect world there would be no adoption. And so adoption would seem, in a real way, to be a sign of failure or a lack of love. But adoption is (or should be) the response of love to a situation that can appear hopeless, damaged beyond repair, impossible to handle. In that way, adoption reflects in some small but real way the love of God, who became man so that we can, by His grace, “become God” (CCC 460). You are a true child of your adoptive parents.
(For a bit more of my thoughts on this, see my essay “Abortion and Adoption: Some Personal Reflections”.)
I’ve admired your writing and contributions to Catholic witness for years, not I admire you more as a man. I’ve performed some counseling over the years, but never committed to adoption. My late wife was physically very weak. Nonetheless we should all take solace from these words of the late Henry Hyde:
“When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God — and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world — and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him, because he loved us!”
Life is the gift, not the assault.
While these words do not heal, it is still very good to know absolutely that each human soul is infused directly by a creative God, and not biologically by the physical parents nor by others under other (damnable) circumstances.
The full meaning of personal Redemption is that, ultimately, God is the Lord and in charge of everything (or else there is no God…). Moment-by-moment He starts here and now in our fallen world with ever new beginnings. Each of us, without exception, is from the start a totally new beginning, nothing less. And then to be drawn forward, not dragging an anchor from behind.
This might be the biblical meaning of David in the Old Testament, who still was chosen by God–despite the fact that he had stolen the wife of another and then had the husband, Uriah, abandoned and killed on the battlefield.
On the larger scale (if there is a larger scale), Pope Benedict gives us at least a clue when he teaches broadly that “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution [or of…?]. Each [!]of us is the result of a thought of God.”
God will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7) by His own creation(s)…