Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I askpardon for all my defects.
In their declaration, prompted by the pope's pre-millennium call to local churches to ask for pardon for misdeeds committed during the course of the church's history, the French bishops seek to place the church's actions between 1940 and 1945 in a historical context.
"In my view, it is better to fling open the gates of all our prisons and ask all the inmates to walk out into the warm embrace of their relatives than pardon those who force otherwise decent Nigerians to take to crime as a way of life, " Mr Aturu is quoted as saying.