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**2004’s Martyrs for the Faith
****Vatican Lists 15 Missionaries Who Suffered Violent Deaths
**VATICAN CITY, JAN. 1, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Seventeen missionaries – priests, religious and laity – lost their lives in 2004 at the hands of robbers or assassins.
The Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples published statistics about the missionaries and ecclesiastical personnel who were killed or who sacrificed their lives last year, aware of the dangers they faced in carrying their apostolates and witness to the faith.
Africa registered the greatest number of deaths: five priests, and a man and woman religious. In the Americas (in Mexico, Guatemala and Chile) at least three priests died, in addition to a priest slain in Colombia.
Asia “seems to live in a special way fundamentalist tensions,” the Vatican dicastery said. It said that three Catholic Pakistani youths were beaten to death under false accusations or under pressure to make them renounce the faith.
In India, a priest was found dead after suffering threats for visiting Hindu families, where he had been well-received, the congregation said.
The victims paid "a heavy price of blood … for the growth of the Church in the world, a price that rarely made it into the news, said Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, prefect of the Vatican congregation.
“We don’t know all the motives that caused their death,” the cardinal added. But “among some of them the causes for the faith were clear, which determined their witness.”
“Nor can we forget the long list of slain Catholics in Iraq or the many ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in all corners of the world, of those who perhaps will never make news,” the dicastery said through the Fides agency.
This was the list of slain missionaries:
– Brother Ignacio García Alonso, headmaster of the College of the Brothers of Christian Schools, in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, was killed with a machete in his office Feb. 6.
The 63-year-old Spanish religious had spent more than 40 years as a missionary in Morocco, Niger and Burkina Faso.
– Father César Darío Peña Garcia, 43, a parish priest at Raudal in Valdivia, Colombia, was kidnapped March 16 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On July 30 the diocesan vicar of Santa Rosa de Osos affirmed that the local Church was certain that the priest had been killed while in captivity.
– Comboni Father Luciano Fulvi, 76, was found dead with a stab wound March 31 in his room at the Catholic Mission of Layibi, in the outskirts of Gulu, Uganda.
The Italian missionary had been in Uganda from 1956 to 1964 and then since 1990. He was mainly involved in education and more recently in vocation work.
****Vatican Lists 15 Missionaries Who Suffered Violent Deaths
**VATICAN CITY, JAN. 1, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Seventeen missionaries – priests, religious and laity – lost their lives in 2004 at the hands of robbers or assassins.
The Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples published statistics about the missionaries and ecclesiastical personnel who were killed or who sacrificed their lives last year, aware of the dangers they faced in carrying their apostolates and witness to the faith.
Africa registered the greatest number of deaths: five priests, and a man and woman religious. In the Americas (in Mexico, Guatemala and Chile) at least three priests died, in addition to a priest slain in Colombia.
Asia “seems to live in a special way fundamentalist tensions,” the Vatican dicastery said. It said that three Catholic Pakistani youths were beaten to death under false accusations or under pressure to make them renounce the faith.
In India, a priest was found dead after suffering threats for visiting Hindu families, where he had been well-received, the congregation said.
The victims paid "a heavy price of blood … for the growth of the Church in the world, a price that rarely made it into the news, said Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, prefect of the Vatican congregation.
“We don’t know all the motives that caused their death,” the cardinal added. But “among some of them the causes for the faith were clear, which determined their witness.”
“Nor can we forget the long list of slain Catholics in Iraq or the many ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in all corners of the world, of those who perhaps will never make news,” the dicastery said through the Fides agency.
This was the list of slain missionaries:
– Brother Ignacio García Alonso, headmaster of the College of the Brothers of Christian Schools, in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, was killed with a machete in his office Feb. 6.
The 63-year-old Spanish religious had spent more than 40 years as a missionary in Morocco, Niger and Burkina Faso.
– Father César Darío Peña Garcia, 43, a parish priest at Raudal in Valdivia, Colombia, was kidnapped March 16 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On July 30 the diocesan vicar of Santa Rosa de Osos affirmed that the local Church was certain that the priest had been killed while in captivity.
– Comboni Father Luciano Fulvi, 76, was found dead with a stab wound March 31 in his room at the Catholic Mission of Layibi, in the outskirts of Gulu, Uganda.
The Italian missionary had been in Uganda from 1956 to 1964 and then since 1990. He was mainly involved in education and more recently in vocation work.