Five families of ethnic indigenous Catholics are in a frustrating and helpless situation over an attempted eviction by a church’s officials in northern Bangladesh.

Officials of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Musroil village of Rajshahi District have been pressuring the families to leave the land and property they have been living on for years.

They want to use the land to set up a convent for a congregation of nuns, local sources say.

St. Peter’s Church, which is under Rajshahi Diocese, was elevated to a parish in 2018 and has about 1,300 Catholics, mostly indigenous people. The parish was previously under Good Shepherd Cathedral Church of Rajshahi.

Hundreds of poor and landless Catholics in the area were provided with land and housing more than a decade ago during the time of parish priest Father Paolo Ciceri, an Italian missionary from the Milan-based Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME).

Father Ciceri served in Bangladesh from 1973 to 2017, mostly in Rajshahi. He returned to Italy due to poor health in 2017.

The housing project was funded mostly by Father Ciceri’s family, relatives and friends in Italy. Although the church has ownership rights of the land, the families had verbal permission to live there permanently.

http://www.hlrn.org/news.php?title=Bangladesh:-Church-Evicts-Indigenous-Families&id=p3BobA==#.X3Zry1l7nOQ

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