Catholic Church sends tiny delegation to DR Congo president’s inauguration

A bare minimum. While the Catholic Church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was indeed represented January 20 in Kinshasa at the inauguration ceremony of Felix Tshisekedi, re-elected president in the December 20 election, this presence was far from as significant as it could have been.

During the ceremony held at Martyrs Stadium — gathering about 80,000 people, including 19 African heads of state and delegations from dozens of other countries — only three Catholic bishops (including one emeritus) were present. As for the National Episcopal Conference of the Congo (CENCO), itself, it was only represented by its second assistant general secretary, Father Georges Kalenga, who also concluded the prayer segment.

This tiny representation reflects the distrust of CENCO and the Catholic hierarchy in the DR Congo after the electoral process, described as a disaster  by the bishops who monitored it. Meeting in Kinshasa from January 15-16 to assess the electoral process, 13 bishops of CENCO, delegated by their provincial episcopal assemblies for electoral monitoring, published a message titled: He who engages in fraud will not dwell in my house . In this text, they state that alas, today the [Congolese] people is disillusioned and traumatized by the way these elections were organized and by the conditions in which they were conducted in many places .

The Church’s participation in question