22 Catholic missionaries were killed worldwide in 2021, half of them in Africa, according to a report published by the Fides news agency and disseminated on Thursday by the Vatican press office.
Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, reported that of the 22 missionaries killed in 2021, 13 were priests, two were religious sisters, one was a religious brother, and six were laypeople. Half of the total were killed in Africa: seven priests, two religious sisters, and two laypeople.
In its report, the Fides Agency explains that its annual list "does not only include missionaries ad gentes in the strict sense, but has attempted to record all Catholic Christians engaged in some form of pastoral activity who died violently, not necessarily explicitly in hatred of the Faith."
According to the report, seven missionaries were murdered in Latin America, three in Asia, and one in Europe.
Also read | Two associations from the LGBT sect have filed a complaint against the Salon Beige
"In recent years, Africa and Latin America have alternated in the top position of this tragic ranking. From 2000 to 2020, according to our data, 536 missionaries have been killed worldwide," the report specifies.
The full report (in an MSWord document) provides a detailed list of all the missionaries; but summarizes the motives and various circumstances of their murder: "Pastors killed in their communities, in Africa and the Americas, tortured, kidnapped by criminals searching for non-existent treasures or lured by the mirage of easy ransoms, or to silence uncomfortable voices, who urged not to submit passively to the rule of crime; priests engaged in social works, as in Haiti, killed to deprive them of what was necessary to conduct such activities, or even killed by those they helped, as in France, or in Venezuela, where a religious brother was killed by thieves in the very school where he taught young people how to build a future for themselves."
"Religious sisters hunted down and killed in cold blood by bandits in South Sudan. And still many laypeople, whose number is increasing: catechists killed during armed clashes with the communities they animated in South Sudan; young people killed by snipers while attempting to bring aid to displaced persons fleeing clashes between the army and guerrillas in Myanmar; a lay missionary woman brutally murdered to steal her mobile phone in Peru."
The Fides report, however, avoids mentioning the number of Catholics in Africa, predominantly priests, killed by radical Islamists, particularly in Nigeria. The report only mentions that the victims were killed by "a group of armed men," without mentioning their connection to radical Islamist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa such as Boko Haram.
According to the Fides Agency, to this list, "must be added the long list of the many, whose names we may never know or will not even know, who, in the four corners of the planet, suffer and pay with their lives for their faith in Jesus Christ."