BISHOP RELISHES ROLE IN A LAND WHERE A MILLION CATHOLICS LIVE
▶ Paul Hinder tells Roberta Pennington how he helped to free a priest kidnapped in Yemen
Bishop Paul Hinder will never forget September 12, 2017 – the day the Indian priest Tom Uzhunnalil was freed after being held by terrorists in Yemen for 18 months.
For the period the priest was held hostage, Dr Hinder worked tirelessly behind the scenes from his Abu Dhabi home to help secure Father Uzhunnalil’s safe release.
“We didn’t know for many months what had happened to him,” Dr Hinder said. “Of course, we hoped he was alive, we worked on it.”
As Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia, Dr Hinder is the highest ranking Roman Catholic official in a jurisdiction covering the UAE, Oman and Yemen. The area is home to 992,000 Catholics, including about Catholic 65 priests and 55 nuns working in 15 parishes.
Father Uzhunnali was kidnapped on March 4 last year, after gunmen stormed a care home for the elderly in Aden, killing 16 people, including four nuns.
“It is not easy for a bishop to get a phone call one morning, ‘We just received news that four sisters have been killed and 12 of their collaborators’,” Dr Hinder said. “I felt responsible because the sisters were there or remained there because of me.”
Aden had once served as the administrative headquarters for the Roman Catholic Church in Arabia. It was there that the vicariate was established in 1888 by Pope Leo XIII. As political tensions began to rise, the office was moved to Abu Dhabi in 1974 – currently in the St Joseph’s Church complex in Al Mushrif.
Of the 22 nuns who recently worked across four parishes in four cities in Yemen, only seven remain there. Most have been moved from the country since the care-home massacre, Dr Hinder said.
“Those in Aden have been killed, except one, and those from Taiz had to be removed. Those in Hodeidah had to be moved to Sanaa,” he said. No priests are left in Yemen. “I’m regularly in touch with the sisters still working in Sanaa in the situation of the war,” he said. “I hear them in their serenity, they don’t complain, they say, ‘No, no, it’s OK. Sometimes we hear bombing but until now it [is far away]’. These are people who in a broken world are living in integrity, they are not perfect, but it’s a drop of peace that is falling into a world of conflict.”
At 75, Dr Hinder has dedicated 50 years of his life to the priesthood. He was the youngest of four sons raised in a “good, practising Catholic family” on a small dairy farm in Switzerland. He said he felt a “kind of calling” to join the friary.
“The simplicity of the life, the simple life of the Capuchins had an appeal,” he said. “For me the step was not so extraordinary because even back home we had a very simple life, I was used to that.”
Before being appointed bishop, he had a long career working as a general councillor in Rome for the worldwide Capuchin Order. The council was charged, in part, with proposing new candidates to fill the role of bishop of Arabia.
“It was a very difficult situation because it’s not evident to find the right man for this complex situation,” Dr Hinder said.
Then, one day a letter arrived from the office of the ministry of the pope himself. It read: “We understand that it’s very difficult to find the right man (for the role of bishop of Arabia) but I invite you to propose a new list of three people.”
That was paragraph one, said Dr Hinder.
“Paragraph two: ‘I want to see on this list the name of Paul Hinder’.”
Although he never harboured aspirations to become a bishop, or to leave Rome for Abu Dhabi, Dr Hinder said he dutifully accepted the assignment.
“When you join a religious community like the Capuchins, then you make a vow of obedience and you go where you are told to go,” he said.
Dr Hinder moved to Abu Dhabi in 2003 and was appointed auxiliary bishop of Arabia. The following year, he took over from Monsignor Bernardo Gremoli, who retired.
Although fluent in German, French and Italian, language posed one of the biggest early challenges for him in the UAE, he said.
“English I didn’t know very well, that was a terrible challenge, especially for the preaching and the homilies,” Dr Hinder said. “Oh my God, I’d sweat. And still now, by the way.”
During those 14 years, the number of parishioners more than doubled in southern Arabia, new churches have been built and some older ones renovated. Land has recently been secured for a new Catholic school in Ras Al Khaimah and a new church in Ruwais.
While these are certainly the bishop’s most visible accomplishments, he said they are not necessarily his biggest.
“I would say to feed spiritually the people that is the main purpose and main achievement and I hope that this partly I have done, until now, what I could,” he said.
The role he played in securing the release of Father Uzhunnalil is something he said he will never forget.
“I would say, finally, on the 12th of September when he was released, that I had also worked hard behind the curtain for that,” Dr Hinder said.
“These are experiences you won’t forget, but they are not necessarily things you put on the wall because for me the most important thing is that the man is now free.”
At his age, most bishops enter retirement. And while he has offered his resignation to the pope, he was told he is still needed here.
“I reminded the holy father in October in a private audience. I said, ‘look you know I am now past 75’. Then he laughed and said ‘yes it’s OK, you continue’,” Dr Hinder said.
“So I am expecting within maybe two years, three years we will see somebody else is found.”
Looking back at his career as a bishop in Arabia, he described it as “very challenging and interesting”.
“I have to admit, I liked it,” he said.
“I would say there are probably not many bishops who have had such an interesting life as I have in the Gulf, with all the challenges and that’s also something which is – it’s a kind of gratification.
“It’s not the essential but it helps you also to overcome certain particulars and meticulous problems we have. You have always to put them in the big frame of the essential.”
I would say there are probably not many bishops who have had such an interesting life as I have in the Gulf