Harare Roman Catholic bishops marked Easter Sunday with an unprecedented message to President Robert Mugabe to end oppression and leave office through democratic reform or face a mass revolt.“The confrontation in our country has now reached a flashpoint,” said the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference in a pastoral message pinned up at churches throughout the country. “As the suffering population becomes more insistent, generating more and more pressure through boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and uprisings, the state responds with ever harsher oppression through arrests, detentions, banning orders, beatings and torture,” the nine bishops said. Although the Catholic bishops — especially Pius Ncube, the archbishop of Bulawayo — have criticised the government in the past, the tone of this year's pastoral message was the most strident since independence from Britain in 1980. In his traditional Easter address in the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI had also singled out Zimbabwe among the world’s troubled countries.
