I begin today’s Joyful Homes with this cheering testimony sent to me with pictures.

Patience Agbaheme has been consumed. Religious extremism and ethnic bigotry haven’t had their fill. Religious murderers and arsonists have for so long enjoyed unmitigated impunity. Soldiers of God. That impunity fortified the hedges of apparent legitimacy mischievous interpretation of religious duty built for a most wicked act. That ordinarily horrendous unconstitutional act of chasing and hacking to death suspected blasphemers. Sinners executing people for God. A Kano mob in the throes of religious passion, rejected all pleas and, smashed a woman’s skull. ‘Saints’ cleaning up ‘filth’ for God. But these murderers are neither perverts nor deviants. Despite all the ‘shock and horror’, they can’t even be described as daring. It had to be in broad daylight. It was nothing that sinister and didn’t have to be done clandestinely. Her husband and perhaps a thousand others were made to watch. Death for blasphemy in Kano? Why is it now so so shocking?

‘’You want me to do what the white man says, and go fight a war against some people I don’t know nothing about—get some freedom for some other people when my own people can’t get theirs? You want me to be scared of the white man, I’ll go and get two arms shot off and ten medals so you can give me a small salary and pat my head and say, ‘Good boy, he fought for his country.’ Everyday they die in Vietnam for nothing.’’

I took my eldest son for a haircut, on the insistence of his housemaster, near his school last Sunday. As we approached the barber’s shop, I saw youths clustered around the two shops on either side of the barber’s shop. Initially, I thought they were watching a soccer match, but then I remembered the European football seasons were over. As I moved closer, I said to myself, “I hope it is not what I think.” Yes, it was; both shops are betting shops, the young men came to wager.

The words above are not mine. They belong to Jorge Bergoglio, known world-wide as Pope Francis; also referred to within the Vatican as the ‘Pope for the poor’ or derisively by some powerful personalities in the curia as ‘the poor Pope’. This impassioned plea was made at a speech he gave on July 7, 2013 to about six thousand seminarians from 66 countries. In calling for the future religious to live lives that are consistent with their teaching and preaching, he said: ‘It grieves me to see priests and nuns with the latest model of cars… .You must not do this! It is better to cycle, or use a smaller car.’ That was when he used these words that have resonated with me: ‘Think about the children who are dying of hunger’.