Papal Baptism of the Conjoined Twins Was a Blessing — and a Puzzle

National Catholic Register, 12 August 2020

The fact that the 2-year-old girls were not baptized earlier, by someone else, suggests an inexplicable pastoral failure to heed Pope Francis’ stress on the supreme importance of the sacrament.

A remarkable story from Rome is both an astonishing tale and something of a pastoral puzzle. Pope Francis inspired the former and listening more carefully to him would have avoided the latter.

Conjoined twins Ervina and Prefina Bangalo were separated in a complex surgery at the Vatican’s pediatric hospital, Bambino Gesù, on June 5. The children’s mother, Ermine Bangalo, then expressed a wish to have the twins baptized by the Holy Father himself. Pope Francis did so in the chapel of his Santa Marta residence on the feast of the Transfiguration, Aug. 6.

“If we had stayed in Africa, I don’t know what fate they would have had,” Ermine said of her little girls. “Now that they are separate … I would like them to be baptized by Pope Francis, who has always taken care of the children of Bangui.”

The girls’ most delicate surgical separation in Rome had its roots in the Holy Father’s 2015 visit to Bangui in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries on the planet. As a fruit of his visit, Pope Francis asked that an initiative be taken to help the children of Bangui. Such gestures sometimes accompany papal visits; the Ephpheta School for the Deaf was started in Bethlehem after a request from Pope St. Paul VI, who visited the Holy Land in 1964.

The desire of Pope Francis led to a children’s hospital being established in Bangui, built with the help of Bambino Gesù in Rome. Mariella Enoc, president of Bambino Gesù, was visiting the Bangui hospital in July 2018 when she met the twins, born the previous month in a village about 60 kilometers (37 miles) away. She made the decision to bring the babies to Rome to explore the possibility of separation surgery.

The twins were joined at the back of the head and shared both cranial bones and veins. Three complex surgeries were done over the course of more than year to effect the separation. The final surgery in June 2020 took some 18 hours and involved an enormous team of specialists, surgeons and anesthesiologists.

It is expected that now the twins will be able to grow up in good health.

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