Browse Items (1118 total)

Merchants sell religious trinkets to the thousands of Catholics who attend the service.

A few hours before the sunrises, Catholic worshipers receive the Holy Spirit and begin flailing on the red earth. The ground was littered with the lost sandals and headdresses of the mostly women worshipers convulsing in the dirt.

An impassioned Catholic cries out as more than a hundred of her fellow Nigerians feels the spirit.

More than 20,000 Nigerians packed what Father Mbaka calls the Adoration Grounds. Most stayed until sunrise. This type of healing service is offered as a way to keep Catholics from attending Protestant churches.

Father Mbaka cites scripture to the crowd, most of whom have brought their personal Bibles. 'The time of miracles has not passed,' Father Mbaka tells his followers, promising hundreds would be healed through Christ's power by night's end.

Father Ejike Mbaka is a regular Catholic parish priest by day. But every Wednesday, tens of thousands of Nigerians congregate in a vacant lot behind his Christ the King Church to witness his healing powers. While much of Father Mbaka's service evokes…

It’s not what many think of when they imagine a Catholic Mass, speaking in tongues, rolling on the ground in a trance, instant curing of diseases. But in Nigeria, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and traditional African faiths overlap. Father…

Ground zero in the 9th Ward shows where the level broke.

Ground zero in the 9th Ward shows where the level broke.

A child’s tricycle sits embedded in a fence.