Catholic Church in Somalia
The Catholic Church in Somalia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. Overview. There are very few Catholics in Somalia, with only about one hundred practitioners as of 2004. The whole of the country forms a single diocese, the Diocese of Mogadishu. During the pre-independence period, there were, at its peak in 1950, 8,500 Catholics in the Diocese of Mogadishu (0.7% of the nation's population), almost all of whom were expatriate Italians. History. Catholicism was introduced in Italian Somaliland in the late 19th century. Initially , it was only practiced by the few Italian immigrants in Mogadishu and the Shebelle River farmer areas, thanks to some missionaries of the "Trinitarian Fathers". In 1895, the first 45 Bantu slaves were freed by the Italian colonial authorities under the administration of the chartered Catholic company "Filonardi". The former were later converted to Catholicism. Massive emancipation and conversion of slaves in Somalia only began after the anti-slavery activist Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti informed the Italian public about the local slave trade and the indifferent attitude of the Italian colonial government toward it. After obtaining Jubaland from the British, the  Italian colonial administration gave land to Italian settlers for the production of cash crops that would then be exported to Italy. Requiring labor to work these plantations, the Italian authorities attempted to recruit Bantu ex-slaves, singling out the latter community for this purpose. However, the Italians soon also had to resort to forced labor (essentially slavery) when they found that volunteers, many of whom found it more profitable to work as free yeoman, were not forthcoming. This forced labor came from the Bantu populations that were settled along the Shebelle River, and not from the nomadic Somalis. Slavery in  southern Somalia lasted until early into the 20th century, when it was finally abolished by the Italian authorities in accordance with the Belgium protocol and with the Diocese of Mogadishu. After World War I, many Bantus, the descendants of former slaves, became Catholics. They were principally concentrated in the Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi and Genale plantations. In 1928, a Catholic cathedral was built in Mogadishu by order of Cesare Maria De Vecchi, a catholic governor of "Somalia italiana" who promoted the "Missionari della Consolata" christianization of Somali people. The cathedral, the biggest in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, was  later destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s. The Bishop of Mogadishu Franco Filippini declared in 1940 that there were about 40,000 Somali Catholics due to the work of missionaries in the rural regions of Juba and Shebelle, but WWII damaged in an irreversibly way most of the catholic missions in Italian Somalia. Most were somali Bantu, but some thousands were illegitimate sons of Italian soldiers and somali girls (who received Italian citizenship when baptized). In the 1950s Indro Montanelli wrote on Il Borghese that Italian Mogadishu in 1942 after the arrival of the British was an African capital  where most of inhabitants were Catholics: he indicated that of the 90,000 inhabitants more than 40,000 were Italians, while inside the 50,000 Somalis there were nearly 7,000 Catholics (including the many illegitimate sons of Italian soldiers and Somali native girls who were baptized in order to get Italian identification). From this he concluded that nearly 3 out of 5 Mogadiscio inhabitants were Catholics. Since the end of the colonial period and the departure of the Italians, Catholicism has experienced a nearly complete disappearance in Somalia. The Diocese of Mogadishu estimated that there were only 100 Catholics in Somalia in 2004 , down from 8,500 practitioners in 1950 during the height of the colonial period.