“Six hundred and ninety-eight, six hundred and ninety-nine, seven hundred”. Mathieu passes pebbles from one side to another. Seven hundred in all, one for each of the Hail Marys he has prayed that night. A night which to him feels like the evening in Gethsemane, in the Garden of Olives, where Jesus also felt alone, abandoned by His disciples, where He spent the night praying to the Father, presenting His pleas and asking for the strength to bear the suffering to the end, converting it into redemption.
Mathieu spent four months there, night and day, in the hands of terrorists, in some godforsaken Gethsemane between Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, in the company of his wife Pauline, five months pregnant at the time of their kidnapping. This made his Gethsemane even more terrible, marked by even more pain, uncertainty and fear.
The catechist told ACN his story during a visit to Burkina Faso. His wife did not accompany him because she finds speaking about the ordeal too traumatic.
When Mathieu decided to become a catechist, in 2003, he could not have known what was in store for him. People in the West rarely understand how important catechists are in Africa in general, and in Burkina Faso in particular. Couples prepare for four years to serve as catechists in very remote regions, where they accompany and lead the Catholic population in their daily lives, prepare them for the sacraments, lead the Sunday prayer services and act as a link to the nearest priest, who might be many kilometres away.
“I remember that we lived in peace, we worked the land and we owned some animals. In 2018, Baasmere, the community where we had been catechists since 2015, suffered its first attack. There was no school there, so my children were away, and only came back during the holidays. When we had first arrived, there was already some trouble in the area, but the terrorists only attacked the army and police stations”, Mathieu describes. The village of Baasmere belongs to the parish of Aribinda, and is part of the Diocese of Dori, in the north of the country. Its small Catholic community comprised about 150 to 200 people.
The first warning
“In 2018 a group came to my house and told me to stop praying and organising religious services. They didn’t carry weapons, and they were dressed normally. I recognised some of them. ‘If you continue to do what you are doing, bad things will happen to you’, they warned me”, Mathieu recalls, during his conversation with ACN.
Before leaving, they burned down the liquor shops, and the population was terrified. “I was afraid as well”, says the catechist and father of five, “but I thought: I cannot stop preaching the Word of God, that is why I am here. So, I continued with my ministry”. The group had also spoken to representatives of the other religious communities in the village. “They told us they don’t want the Christians praying here”, they told Mathieu immediately afterwards.
Then they came back a second time. “These I no longer knew, they accused me of continuing to pray, and leading services.” After this second threat, the catechists in the whole area met with the priest and with the bishop. They all decided to remain, although they also decided they should be discrete and try to stay off the extremists’ radar, holding their services earlier, for example. Mathieu sent Pauline with the children to a safer area.
The kidnapping
On Saturday before Pentecost his wife returned to Baasmere so that they could spend the feast together. It was 20 May 2018. After the Liturgy of the Word, the faithful returned to their homes. At noon Mathieu was resting at home when, suddenly, a group of ten armed and masked men burst in. “Why are you still here?”, they asked him. “I am a catechist, this is my duty”, he replied. They ordered him to the ground, blindfolded him and bound his hands and his feet. He could hear them destroying his property, and setting fire to it. Then they placed him on the back of a motorcycle, between two terrorists.
“I thought I was going to die”, Mathieu recalls. “My hands were so tightly bound that I couldn’t feel my wrists for a month, because the circulation had been cut.” Because he was blindfolded, Mathieu had not even realised that Pauline was also in the convoy. She had asked not to be bound, since she was five months pregnant at the time, but the terrorists ignored her request, and tied her hands and feet as well. “After the first night they removed the blindfold and untied me, and that was when I realised she was also there. It was awful. But they didn’t let me speak to her for the entire trip.”
And it was a long trip, after that first evening, they slept out in the open. Then they were on the move another full day, until they arrived at a spot where they were to spend a week. “Then they moved us again, this time in a jeep that had been stolen from the Djibo hospital, and took us to our final destination, where we remained for four months.” Until today, Mathieu still does not know where they kept him, or even what country he was in.
When he arrived at the final destination he was taken to the group’s leader, who was not a local, but an Arab. They demanded that he divorce his wife. “Every day they would tell me that they were going to kill me. ‘Normally we would slit your throat, but you can choose how you prefer to die’, they said. It was terrifying.”
Praying so as not to fall
They burned the few belongings and clothes he owned, and gave him a Muslim name and robes, teaching him Islamic doctrine. “During this whole period, I never stopped praying. I remember one night that I prayed seven hundred Hail Marys, I counted them out with pebbles. At that time, prayer was the only thing that sustained me. We never felt abandoned by God, praying the rosary every day gave me strength.”
Mathieu speaks of these four months with a serious, contained expression, and sums them up in a short sentence, because sometimes there are no words to describe what one experiences: “They did not treat us well, we suffered greatly”.
The catechist explains that after realising that they weren’t going to convert, the members of the group began to argue amongst themselves. “Some said they should kill us, others that they should free us. Finally, one day they told us we were free to go.”
Freedom… and pain
It took them a fortnight to trek back. After being left in the middle of nowhere, a shepherd helped them find a car that finally took them straight to the hospital. Pauline was seen but, sadly, the baby she was carrying had already died. Mathieu’s eyes tear-up with a deep, but serene sadness as he speaks about that moment, which left a lasting mark on them.
Despite the risks, Mathieu decided to return to his house in Baasmere. There was nothing left. However, amongst the ashes he did find two things: his identity card, and his Bible. “It was very moving, because this was the Bible that the bishop had given me when I was commissioned as a catechist”, Mathieu says, before falling silent, as if he could still feel God’s presence at that moment.
And then, comes the question that is on everybody’s mind at this point: Why not just convert? It would have made their lives much easier. The answer comes in the same steady, deep and thoughtful tone with which he spoke about his Gethsemane: “I could never lie to God, it is better to be faithful to God than to men. We must bear witness and preach about the One we follow, and be faithful to Him”.
Like Jesus at Gethsemane, Mathieu also suffered from fear, abandonment and darkness. But as with the disciples after the Resurrection, he didn’t leave it at that. When the Bishop asked him if, in light of all he had suffered, he would like to retire early, he objected that he wanted to continue to preach the Resurrection: “I don’t want to stop, I want to continue to serve my people.”
By Maria Lozano.
