Gassis was in Toronto in early May and spoke with The Catholic Register May 9.

Sudan’s second civil war lasted from 1983 to 2005, killed 1.9 million civilians, displaced approximately four million, enslaved 200,000 Nuba women and children and deepened a vast rift between Arabic-speaking Muslim Sudanese and ethnically African and mostly Christian Sudanese who dominate in the south and the Nuba Mountains.

Gassis has been in exile since 1990 when he left his diocese for medical treatment and was told it was unsafe to return. He angered Sudan’s Stalinist-Islamist regime by speaking about human rights abuses to the United States Senate. He spent years sneaking across the border from Kenya to visit his diocese, always in fear of his life.

Last year he found himself chatting with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum. Gassis is the only Arabic-speaking member of the Sudanese bishops’ conference, and he went with his brother bishops on an official visit to present their concerns to the president who once directed a campaign of ethnic cleansing on the Christian minority and tried to impose Sharia punishments in the legal code. Bashir met the line of bishops, shaking each prelate’s hand as he walked down the line, said Gassis.

“He held my hand and he said good morning, and then there was a pause,” recalled Gassis. “He looked up and saw me and forgot even to call me bishop. He embraced me and said Macram Max Gassis welcome back, how is your health, and all this. Jokingly he said, ‘How did you come into the country without my permission?’ ”

Gassis is not much taken in by the old field marshal’s good humour. He sees what is happening in Darfur as the continuation of what his own people suffered through 20 years.

“My heart aches for my people in Darfur,” he said. The Darfurians are mostly Muslim and not technically the bishop’s people. What the new war and the old war have in common is a fight over oil and mineral wealth dressed up as an ethnic and religious conflict, and mostly carried out by autonomous factions and militias on both sides.

“It is a question of interest — interest in the wealth of the area,” said Gassis. “Even in the so-called industrialized world, people will fight like wolves when it comes to interest, where there is money involved.... There is a lot of oil. There is a lot of copper. And the funny thing is the good Lord gave this wealth in the areas inhabited by Africans. Maybe it’s a sort of a compensation for their poverty.”

While war rages in western Sudan, Gassis’s diocese of El Obeid has been gradually rebuilding since the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a peace agreement in 2005. At the urging of provincial officials Gassis and his diocese have managed to establish two referral hospitals, start a teacher training program along with training for catechists, build schools and dig 250 wells.

But building peace is not  simple. “I bear a lot of anger within me because of what I have seen,” said Gassis. “And yet the words of Christ when He says ‘Love even your enemies’ at times is so easy to preach from the pulpit but when it comes to the actual life it is like being made to sweat blood.”

With the help of German Missionary of Africa Father Ludwig Peschen, a doctor based in Kenya, Sudan’s bishops have set up a program to help the church recover from collective post-traumatic stress disorder. The program is called “Heal the Healers.”

Gassis greeted the 2005 peace agreement with an urgent plea to his own people to be part of the healing of Sudan. In a pastoral letter, he urged Nuba Mountain Catholics to take on the responsibility to protect the weak and the vulnerable, the traumatized and the broken.

The responsibility to protect doesn’t begin as a principle in international law, but rather as a spiritual value, said the bishop. “If they (governments) were given authority, as we read in the Gospel the authority comes from God,” he said. “A government is obliged, not is invited, to protect its citizens.”

The responsibility to protect doctrine is now an official policy of the United Nations governing when the international community must step in with military force to protect citizens who aren’t protected by their government. It originated with Canadian diplomacy at the UN following General Romeo Dallaire’s revelations about the failures of the international community in Rwanda, where Dallaire was posted to the UN during the genocide of the mid-1990s.

Though Dallaire and others have campaigned hard to invoke the doctrine to protect vulnerable people in Darfur, responsibility to protect doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that Canada or other Western powers should send troops  into the region to keep militias at bay.

“Specialists on Darfur basically see it as counterproductive to talk about the military, because they don’t see it happening and they don’t see how it’s feasible in an area that big,” said Tom Weiss, interim director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at City University of New York.

Though Canada gave birth to the doctrine,  the current government seems unwilling to put it into action, said Weiss.

The responsibility to protect basically reframes the traditional Christian just war theory in modern diplomatic language, said Weiss. Among the just war criteria is the likelihood of success, and in Darfur success seems quite unlikely, he said.

But if the international community can’t use it to help Darfur, that doesn’t mean the doctrine is a dead letter, Weiss said. It is significant that Pope Benedict XVI dedicated almost a quarter of his recent address to the United Nations to the responsibility to protect.

“It suggests the extent to which the framing of the issue in those terms has really now moved from the fringes to the mainstream,” Weiss said.

For Gassis, on his way home after one last tour of North American donors, responsibility to protect shouldn’t just be about the military option. We can protect people with our aid dollars, our prayers and our will to heal the broken hearted. But it has to include everyone.

“You take all these girls who were raped at the age of 13 and are carrying babies and that baby is not the fruit of love it is the fruit of hate, of violence. If this would happen in Canada to a young girl or to a woman you would see things moving so fast.”

Gassis doesn’t want anything special for his people, just the counselling, psychological services, medical treatment that we would provide our own daughters in the rich West.

The bishop’s ongoing appeal for help continues on his web site, www.bishopgassis.org.