At least 20 Catholic Church workers were murdered or gave their lives for others in 2007, it has been confirmed.At the end of each year, a list of pastoral workers who died violently is published by Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.
The 2007 list was released on December 29. While Fides does not refer to the missionaries as martyrs – technically a term reserved for those the Church formally recognises as having given their lives for the faith – it said it was important to remember their sacrifices and to recognise that “each one of them, in a different way, contributed to the growth of the Church in various parts of the world.”
The list included Fr Ragheed Aziz Ganni – who was a former student of the Irish College in Rome – and three subdeacons who were shot outside a church in Mosul, Iraq, in June.
It also featured Fr Nicholaspillai Packiyaranjith, who was a diocesan priest working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Mannar, Sri Lanka. He was killed in September when a roadside bomb exploded as he was driving to a refugee camp.
Fides also highlighted the case of Sr Anne Thole, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Family, who died in April trying to rescue three patients trapped in a fire in an AIDS clinic in Ratschitz, South Africa.
The list included 14 priests, the three Iraqi subdeacons, a Marist brother, Sr Thole and a seminarian from the Society of St Paul. Besides the four killed in Iraq, two died in Mexico, three in the Philippines, two in Colombia, two in Spain, two in South Africa and one each in Brazil, Guatemala, Kenya, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.
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