Stipulation 1: Liturgical dance in Africa isn’t lamebutt stuff like we get here; it’s actually solemn and makes sense as formal worship.
Stipulation 2: The guy who tried this was a Muslim Arab tribesman from the South, posing as a Catholic of the North.
Stipulation 3: As we all know, in Sudan there’s a lot of nasty Muslim factions killing off animists and Catholics and other Christians, partly because they like to keep up fear-based domination and partly because enslaving and selling Muslims is a bit harder sell for the local Muslim slave business. But mostly there’s a lot of North vs South Sudanese warfare. Aid to the Church in Need explains the whys and wherefores of this assassination attempt, much better than I can.
That said, on October 10, a guy posing as a liturgical dancer tried to run up onto the altar area and kill the Cardinal-Archbishop of Khartoum (a man by the wonderful name of Gabriel Zubeir Wako) with one of those nasty long daggers. The Mass’ master of ceremonies (that guy who stands next to the priest or bishop at big Masses and keeps everybody moving correctly) was looking around for problems, as liturgical MC’s are supposed to do. He spotted the assassin and disarmed him before any harm could be done, and handed him over to security before they or the police could do anything about it. The crowd offered to subdue the assassin some more, but the police got him out of there.
The Mass was an outdoor Mass on a temporary stage at the Comboni Playground, not at the Cathedral. This article has a little more info, from a statement released by the council of bishops in the area. Apparently, the liturgical dancers were leaving an area near the altar after dancing, right after the Gloria. The assassin mixed in, so as to get closer to the Archbishop.
The Mass was for the feast of St. Daniele Comboni. He was the only surviving son of eight children born to a poor family of Italian gardeners, but became a priest and a missionary to Central Africa. His missions strategy was “Save Africa through Africa”. After ten years’ work, he had come to the conclusion that Africa didn’t so much need foreign aid and foreign missionaries, as schools to teach Africans how to help their own people. For his good work, he was made bishop of Khartoum and sent back to do more. He died on October 10, 1881 in Khartoum, sick and exhausted at only 50 years of age, but having founded the Catholic Church in Sudan for the first time since antiquity, created two orders of native African missionaries, and served as the Bishop of Verona’s theologian at the First Vatican Council. He was canonized in 2003.
Via Jihad Watch.
