PASTORAL WORKERS, PRIESTS,
RELIGIOUS AND LAY CATHOLICS
KILLED IN 2010 AROUND THE WORLD
Our world continues to be marked by violence, especially against the disciples of Christ.
- Pope Benedict XVI, 26 December 2010
Vatican City. Dec. 31, 2010 (Agenzia Fides) – Once again this year, Fides publishes an annual document of all the pastoral workers who lost their lives in a violent manner over the course of the last 12 months.
http://www.fides.org/eng/documents/Missionari_uccisi_2010_final_english.doc
(The document includes brief biographical notes of the victims and how they met their deaths.)
According to our information, during 2010, 23 pastoral care workers were killed: one Bishop, 15 priests, one male religious, one religious sister, two seminarians and three lay people.
Analysing the list for each continent, America had the most victims once again (15), followed by Asia *6), and AFRICA 92).
Fides's list includes all pastoral care workers who died violent deaths. We do not propose to use the term “martyrs” since it is up to the Church to judge their possible merits and also because of the scarcity of available information in most of cases, with regard to their life and even the circumstances of their death.
In this regard, we register, in this year coming to an end, the opening of the beatification process of the Fidei donum priest Fr Daniele Badiali, a native of the diocese of Faenza (Italy), killed in Peru in 1997, and the beatification of Polish Father Jerzy Popieluszko, martyr, killed in hatred of the faith on 20 October, 1984, near Wroclawek, Poland.
Martyrdom is “a form of total love for God”, founded “on the death of Jesus, on his supreme sacrifice of love, consumed on the Cross so that we might have life”, and the strength to face it “from the profound and intimate union with Christ, because martyrdom and the vocation to martyrdom are not the result of human effort, but the response to an initiative and a call from God. They are gifts of His grace, which enable them to offer their lives for the love of Christ and the Church, and thus the world” (Benedict XVI, General Audience, 11 August, 2010).
The scant biographical notes of these brothers and sisters killed help us to understand how they offered all their lives, almost always in the silence and humility of daily work, “for the love of Christ and the Church, and thus the world.”
Their radical and total commitment was the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, made not only with words but with the testimony of their lives, in situations of suffering, poverty, tension, violence... without discrimination of any kind, but with the sole aim of ensuring the Father's love and promoting the human person, created in the image and likeness of God.
Some were victims of that violence, fighting it or being willing to help others with the small everyday problems, giving their own safety last priority. This year too, many were killed in attempted robberies or kidnappings which ended badly, caught in their homes by bandits in search of imaginary riches. Others were killed in the name of Christ by those opposing love with hatred, hope with despair, dialogue with violent opposition, the right to perpetrate abuses.
“Our world continues to be marked by violence, especially against the disciples of Christ,” Said Pope Benedict XVI (Angelus, 26 December, 2010), recording that “the ground is bathed in blood” in various parts of the world, hitting even the Catholic communities gathered in prayer in places of worship.
The provisional list compiled this year by Fides, must therefore be added to the long list of many of whom there may never be news, who in every corner of the world suffer and even pay with their lives for their faith in Christ. They are the “cloud of unknown soldiers for the great cause of God” - in the words of Pope John Paul II - to whom we look with gratitude and veneration, for without knowing the faces, without which the Church and the world would be enormously poorer.
