VATICAN (CNS): In situations of extreme poverty, war or civil tensions, 22 Catholic church workers were murdered in 2021, Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples reported on December 30.
Presenting its annual list of missionaries killed during the year, the news agency 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’.”
None of the 13 priests, one religious brother, two religious sisters and six laypeople “carried out striking feats or actions,” Fides said, but they gave witness to their faith “in impoverished, degraded social contexts, where violence is the rule of life, the authority of the state was lacking or weakened by corruption and compromises and in the total lack of respect for life and for every human right.”
The report said, “From Africa to America, from Asia to Europe, they shared daily life with their brothers and sisters, with its risks and fears, its violence and its deprivations, bringing in the small daily gestures Christian witness as a seed of hope.”
The 22 include Nigerian Father John Gbakaan Yaji of the Diocese of Minna, who was killed on 15 January 2021 by armed men who attacked his car; his body was found near the road, tied to a tree.
French Father Olivier Maire, provincial superior of the Montfort Missionaries, was killed on August 9 in the provincial house of Saint Laurent sur Sèvre, in France, by a Rwandan migrant to whom he had offered housing.
The women on the list are Sacred Heart Sister Mary Daniel Abud and Sister Regina Roba, who were killed in August, along with several other people, when their chartered bus was attacked on the road between Juba and Nimule, South Sudan.
In publishing the list, Fides said it was not looking only at Church workers killed in traditional mission territories and it was not proclaiming any of them as “martyrs” in the technical sense of having been killed out of hatred for their faith.
While not included in the count, the report also paid tribute to the 35 “innocent civilians, all of whom were Catholic,” who died on December 24, reportedly at the hands of the Myanmar military in Mo So village, Kayah state, as they fled fighting in the area. The victims, including elderly women and children, were shot and their bodies were burned.
“The fact that the bodies of those killed, burned, and mutilated were found on Christmas Day makes this appalling tragedy even more poignant and sickening,” said Charles Maung Cardinal Bo of Yangon. “As the rest of the world celebrated the birth of Christ with joy, the people of Mo So village suffered death, shock and destruction,” Cardinal Bo lamented.
