VATICAN (CNS): Twenty missionaries died violent deaths in 2020 and were witnesses of the gospel, said Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.
Presenting its annual list of missionaries killed during the year, Fides explained, “We use the term ‘missionary’ for all the baptised, aware that in virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples.”
The 2020 list includes eight priests, six laypeople—including two girls, 10- and 12-year-old sisters, who were members of the Holy Childhood Association in Nicaragua—three women religious, two seminarians and a religious brother.
From 2000 to 2020, Fides said that 535 pastoral workers, including five bishops, were killed.
As when first began publishing the list—and still today, Fides focuses primarily on foreign missionaries or pastoral workers in mission lands, but also “tries to record all the baptised engaged in the life of the Church who died in a violent way, not only ‘in hatred of the faith,’” the agency explained. While the word martyr literally means witness, the agency does not use the term for the missionaries killed “in order not to enter into the question of the judgment that the Church might eventually deliver upon some of them, after careful consideration, for beatification or canonisation.”
The murdered missionaries shared the life of the people with whom they lived and, in too many cases, shared the same kind of violent death, Fides said.
They include 18-year-old Michael Nnadi, one of four seminarians kidnapped in Nigeria from a seminary in Kakau. Over a period of two weeks in late January 2020, three of the seminarians were released. Nnadi’s body was found on February 1.
Police arrested Mustapha Mohammed, alleged leader of a gang that specialiwed in stopping cars and robbing the drivers, Fides reported. Mohammed confessed to killing Nnadi because “he kept preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ” to members of the gang.
The girls on the Fides list, Lilliam Yunielka Gonzalez and Blanca Marlene Gonzalez, were murdered with machetes September 15 in Mulukuku, Nicaragua. Their mother had already told police that Lilliam, the older girl, had been harassed. Bishop Pablo Schmitz Simon, said their deaths were part of a widespread pattern of violence against women and girls and urged Catholics in the diocese to report to police “anything that puts their physical, psychological and spiritual integrity at risk.”
While most of the people on the list were killed in places many people would think of as mission lands, Fides included 51-year-old Father Roberto Malgesini, a priest of the Diocese of Como, Italy, who was stabbed to death on September 15 by a mentally ill homeless man whom he was helping.
Eight of the 20 victims on the list were killed in Central or South America, seven were killed in Africa, three in Asia and two in Italy; in addition to Father Malgesini, 78-year-old Camillian Brother Leonardo Grasso was beaten and then died in a fire set at the community for recovering addicts that he ran in Riposto.
Fides also noted that the numbers would be much, much higher if one considered the number of priests, religious and laypeople who died after contracting Covid-19 while serving others as doctors, nurses or chaplains. The Council of European Bishops’ Conferences had reported in late September that at least 400 priests had died in Europe after contracting the virus.
