23 pastoral workers killed in the Church in 2010

(December 31, 2010) According to the Vatican department that oversees the missionary activities of the Catholic Church, 23 pastoral care workers were killed during the course of 2010. The list compiled by Fides news agency of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples includes not only missionaries in the strict sense but all pastoral care workers who died violent deaths. The list includes a bishop, 15 priests, two religious, two seminarians and three lay people. Continent-wise, America led the list with 15, comprising 10 priests, a male religious, a seminarian and three lay people. Asia comes next with a bishop, four priests and a nun. In Africa a priest and a seminarian lost their lives. The bishop killed in Asia is 63-year old Italian Capuchin Bishop Luigi Padovese, the Vicar Apostolic of Anatolia and President of the Bishops’ Conference of Turkey, who was brutally murdered by his driver while he was at his home in Iskenderun. In India Father Peter Bombacha was killed by strangers in the ashram he founded in Baboola, about a kilometre from the residence of the Bishop of Vasai. Two other priests were killed in Iraq during the terrorist hostage in the Syrian Catholic Cathedral of Bagdad on Oct. 31. In China a priest and a nun were killed in Ningxia diocese.