Gang attack on convent reveals Haiti's 'desperate' situation, says Miami archbishop

(OSV News) — An attack on a convent and adjacent hospital in Haiti “shows how desperate” that nation has become “and will continue to be,” Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami told OSV News.

Members of the Missionaries of Charity are pictured in a file photo outside the cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On the evening of Oct. 26, 2024, armed gang members looted and then burned a convent and hospital operated by the Missionaries of Charity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. (OSV News photo/Eliana Aponte, Reuters)

On the evening of Oct. 26, armed gang members looted and then burned a convent and hospital operated by the Missionaries of Charity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

None of the sisters were injured, having been advised by police weeks earlier to abandon the site, due to intensifying gang clashes near the religious order’s compound, which was opened by the order’s founder, St. Teresa of Kolkata, in 1979.

The hospital, located in Port-au-Prince’s Bas Delmas section, was reported to provide free medical care to nearly 1,500 inpatients and 30,000 outpatients each year.

Archbishop Wenski — who is fluent in Haitian Creole, and whose archdiocese is home to an extensive and historic Haitian community in Florida — told OSV News in a Nov. 5 email that he had previously visited the sisters at several of their locations in Haiti, including the one that was attacked.

“The Missionaries of Charity working in Miami are in the same province (as) their sisters in Haiti,” said the archbishop. “Several of the sisters in Miami had worked in Haiti and other sisters who had worked in Miami are now in Haiti.”

OSV News has contacted the sisters for an update and is awaiting a response.

An unnamed member of the sisters’ Haitian community told the Miami Herald that “many houses were set on fire” during the attack.

“People had to leave their homes and lost everything,” the nun said. “This fight has been going on for a very long time, but nobody thought they would touch the sisters’ house because everyone in the neighborhood knew how much the poor people of the area benefited from the free service of the sisters, especially in terms of free medical care.”

According to several media reports, items from the sisters’ hospital — including medical supplies and beds — have appeared on the city’s black market for resale.

Father Thomas Hagan, an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales who has served in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince for close to four decades, told OSV News that the sisters “didn’t say too much” about the attack when they attended a Nov. 2 Mass he celebrated for them.

Multiple media reports stated that the Missionaries of Charity compound was targeted by gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former Haitian police officer who claims to be leading an armed revolution in Haiti, and who has been sanctioned by both the U.S. and the United Nations for alleged human rights abuses.

Father Hagan, who last year brokered a truce among Chérizier and several other gang leaders, told OSV News he was unsure if Chérizier was involved in the attack, but noted that “the gang (located) where the sisters are were fighting Barbecue’s group.”

The violence “is all over the country,” and “the gangs have just gotten out of control,” said Father Hagan, who in 1986 founded the nonprofit Hands Together to provide educational, pastoral and humanitarian development to Haiti’s largest and poorest slum, Cité Soleil.

Father Hagan — who spoke with OSV News Nov. 7 during a brief visit to the U.S. — said that “no one is protecting the people” of Haiti, which has experienced high volatility in government leadership for several years.

Some 5.4 million Haitians face “high levels of acute food insecurity” due to the armed gang violence, with 6,000 residents experiencing “catastrophic levels of hunger and a collapse of their livelihoods,” according to a report released in August by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

“The country is completely sick” and its people “exhausted,” Archbishop Max Leroy Mésidor of Port-au-Prince, president of the Haitian Catholic bishops’ conference, said in a widely circulated audio message released after an Oct. 3 gang massacre in the town of Pont-Sondé, just over 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, that saw at least 115 killed and more than 6,000 displaced. The attack ranks as the worst in Haiti’s recent history.

Father Hagan lamented the ineffectiveness of the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission to Haiti, which in October 2023 authorized some 410 soldiers from Kenya to contain the violence, and which was extended for another year by the U.N. on Sept. 30.

“These military people from Kenya have never left the airport,” said Father Hagan. “That’s kind of a big joke.”

Father Hagan told OSV News that the gangs are not the only source of the violence — people suspect cartels may be involved — but it is also “the politicians that want instability.”

In an Oct. 10 email to OSV News following the Pont-Sondé massacre, Archbishop Wenski also pointed to the deliberate exploitation of Haiti’s crisis at the expense of the populace.

The Haitian people “remain on the sidelines powerless to intervene in the apparent standoff between the ‘criminals in sandals’ (the gangs) and the ‘criminals in ties’ (the corrupted political class),” said Archbishop Wenski.

Describing Haiti as “a house on fire,” the archbishop also denounced in the same message ongoing moves by the U.S. and Dominican Republic governments to deport Haitians fleeing their homeland’s violence.

Such deportations amount to “sending (Haitians) back into the fire in violation of international treaties regarding non-refoulement of refugees,” said Archbishop Wenski in his Oct. 10 email.

Under international human rights law — such as the U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol — the fundamental principle of non-refoulement provides that refugees cannot be expelled to territories where substantial threats to life or freedom exist.

In his Nov. 5 email to OSV News, Archbishop Wenski invoked the intercession of St. Teresa of Kolkata for the Missionaries of Charity sisters in Haiti, asking the saint to “pray for them and the poor they serve.”