Mugabe Ally Escalates Push to Control Anglican Church

By CELIA W. DUGGER
May 29, 2011

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Religion, like politics, is often a dangerous business in this country.

As President Robert Mugabe, 87, pushes for an election this year, the harassment of independent churches seen as hostile to his government has intensified.

Truncheon-wielding riot police officers stormed a Nazarene church here in the capital last month to break up a gathering called to pray for peace. Days later, the authorities in Lupane arrested a Roman Catholic priest leading a memorial service for civilians massacred in the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s decades in power.

Mr. Mugabe, a Roman Catholic, recently denounced black bishops in established churches as pawns of whites and the West, singling out for special opprobrium Catholic bishops who have “a nauseating habit of unnecessarily attacking his person,” the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported.

But it is leaders of the Anglican Church, one of the country’s major denominations, who have lately faced the most sustained pressure. Nolbert Kunonga, an excommunicated Anglican bishop and staunch Mugabe ally, has escalated a drive to control thousands of Anglican churches, schools and properties across Zimbabwe and southern Africa. the rest

"Anglican leaders here who have refused to submit to Mr. Kunonga’s authority say they have been subjected to death threats, spied on by state agents and blocked from worshiping in their churches or burying the dead in Anglican cemeteries.

Godfrey Tawonezvi, bishop of Masvingo, described a visit from two men, who told him that Mr. Kunonga had instructed them to “eliminate” the five bishops who stood in the way of his controlling the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe. “They had all our phone numbers, our home addresses,” Mr. Tawonezvi recalled."