Vatican

Vatican honors murdered missionaries, kidnapped priests, Ebola victims

By Catholic News Service
Jan 11, 2015 8:30:00 PM

Vatican City (CNS) — In addition to its annual report on church workers murdered during the year, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples highlighted the sacrifice of pastoral workers who died of Ebola contracted while caring for others and reminded Catholics that the fates of five kidnapped priests remain unknown.
Fides, the congregation’s news agency, reported Dec. 30 that 26 pastoral workers were killed in 2014, most during robbery attempts: 17 priests, one religious brother, six religious women, a seminarian and a layman. Even if most of the murders were committed during robberies, Fides said many of them were carried out with such “brutality and ferociousness” that they are signs of intolerance and “moral degradation” as well as “economic and cultural poverty.”
But the agency also drew special attention to the four members Hospitallers of St. John of God, the religious sister and 13 lay workers who died at Catholic hospitals in Liberia and Sierra Leone after contracting Ebola.
The 18 “gave their lives for others like Christ,” said Father Jesus Etayo, prior general of the order.
For years, the Fides’ list focused only on priests and religious killed in the church’s mission territo-ries, but it now focuses on “all pastoral workers who died violently.” The agency said it does not refer to them as “martyrs,” which is a formal recognition by the church that the person was killed in hatred for the faith, but as “witnesses” to Christ.

Topics:

  • vatican
  • catholic news service
  • ebola
  • missionaries
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