1998 record so far (missionaries and clergy assaulted).

Africa

Rwanda

On January 7 and 8 a mob attacked a nuns' convent in Busasamana, Rwanda, on the border of the Congo republic. After battering down the door with machetes, the assailants killed five sisters and two lay people and wounded two more sisters before departing. One of them died later on.

Since the return of some one million refugees from the Congo in 1996, rebel Hutus who mixed in with them have formed marauding bands. In March one such band attacked the health centre in Gisenyi, 100 kilometres from the Rwandan capital Rigali, killed 20 lay persons and kidnapped seven nuns. Five of them were Rwandan who were set free the next day, while the two Spanish sisters, a doctor and a nurse, were kept several weeks longer to minister to injured members of the band. They, too, were set free. Throughout March and April marauders killed several hundred Rwandans.

Meanwhile, at the end of January a Croatian missionary, Father Vijeko Curic, 40, was assassinated with seven pistol shots near his parish in Kigali. Father Curic had made great efforts towards the reconciliation of Hutus and Tutsis in his parish. He had been in Rwanda since 1983. In 1994 Hutu extremists had threatened to kill him for supposedly "favouring" Tutsis. Father Curic was also in charge of a multi-million dollar construction project for houses for widows and orphans. The project is funded by Canada's CCODP and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Priests on trial

Also in Rwanda two Hutu Catholic priests were sentenced to death for allegedly masterminding the massacre of 60 Tutsi priests and nuns in the seminary where they were posted during the massacres of 1994 which killed 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus. According to the Rwandan Bishops' Conference, 10 Rwandan-born priests and four nuns are being held on genocide charges among the 130,000 people currently in prison for the same crimes.

Burundi

In Burundi, too, extremist groups continue to murder people every day. Father Paolo Cereda, who heads the Italian relief agency Caritas in the region, said on March 30 that the international boycott of Burundi is an unmitigated disaster, having cut off the medical supplies as well as food items while causing unemployment to rise rapidly.

It is well known that a number of UN agencies, as well as American foreign policy, are under the control of depopulationists who would like nothing better than to see to the population in the African Great Lakes area cut down to a tenth or a fifth of its current size. As with the boycott of Iraq, here too, the plight of the suffering populations has no impact on their thinking.

Elsewhere

On April 8, a Belgian nun was killed by marauders when she confronted 20 bandits who had broken into the convent of St. Therese in Nganza, Congo.

On the west coast of Africa, in turbulent Sierra Leone, renegade soldiers took some 25 Western missionary workers hostage. Five members of the Order of St. John of God - three Spanish, one Italian, one Austrian - were abducted from their mission in Lunsar, some 35 miles northeast of Freetown, the capital. They were set free two weeks later. Fifteen Catholic missionaries were freed by the Nigerianled intervention force on February 25. There has been no news of the others.

Asia

India

The investigation into the beheading of Jesuit Father A.T. Thomas in Bihar state last October has made no progress. The growing strength of the Hindu nationalist party, Bharatija Janata Party (BJP), has led Hindu fundamentalists to become bolder in attacking Christian missionaries. At the end of January, the police official investigating the Thomas murder was himself shot and had his leg amputated. On February 14, eleven workers of the Catholic Hospital Association (Centre in Nandurga), including one priest and two nuns, were "beaten with fists, kicked, and hammered with stones." The Centre serves 10,000 families in the region.

At the end of March a parish priest, Fr. James Beck and several workers in a Catholic church in Nawatanr, Bihar, were attacked and wounded. Fr. Beck was stabbed in the stomach. In the same week, Brother Luke Puttaniyil, 46, of the Missionaries of Charity (MC), was murdered while driving a truck-load of medicine and food for leprosy patients in Patna, Bihar state. He was found with his hands and feet tied and bullet wounds to the back and skull. Brother Luke was a joyful and cheerful worker, his co-workers said.

In Indonesia violence against Christians is becoming increasingly frequent. Fides reports that during the last two years 105 churches have been destroyed, making the total since the end of World War II 376. Muslims account for 88 percent of the population. There are roughly 5 million Catholics in the country served by 30 bishops and 1800 priests.

In Pakistan, also a Muslim country, attacks on individual Christians and churches continue. For example, after 20 months Daniel Neno, a Catholic, has given up trying to recover his daughter Nasreen, kidnapped at age 14 before her mother's eyes. The Muslim abductor is the son of a powerful local landowner and has police protection. In another case a Christian family's three young daughters were abducted and "converted" to Islam. A Pakistani area magistrate refused to have them returned on the grounds that this might lead to a sectarian clash.

Pakistan's ambassador in Canada is H.E. Dr. Farouk Rana, Burnside Building, 151 Slater St., Suite 608, Ottawa, ON., K1P 5H3.

A group of Indian Catholics criticized Pakistan at the end of March "for continued inaction" in restoring churches that were vandalized or burned down near the city of Lahore in February 1997. On March 17, 75 Pakistani Christians began a hunger strike in Lahore to draw attention to the continued injustice and the lack of compensation for the 14 churches razed by the Muslim mob. The attacks were triggered by rumours spread by a local government official suspended for victimizing members of the Christian community.

In China Father John Wang Zhongfa, 66, was sentenced to one year of re-education through labour in January for celebrating a (midnight) funeral Mass for an elderly nun. Fr. Zhongfa is not affiliated with China's government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Church. He was labelled "No. 1 Evil."

On April 5 two Catholic priests were arrested in Hebei province north of Beijing for saying private Masses, according to the Cardinal Kung Foundation in Stamford, Conn, USA. For up-to-date figures on the persecution in China, contact this foundation by email:[e-mail].

The Communist-approved Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association urged Pope John Paul II, on the eve of the opening of the Asian bishops Conference in Rome, April 20, to break off diplomatic ties with Taiwan and recognize Communist China. The Pope is not acknowledged as head by the state-sanctioned Church, only by the large underground Church which remains faithful but persecuted. No mainland Chinese bishops are attending the Asian conference in Rome.

In Vietnam, at the end of 1997, large protests involving hundreds of Catholics took place in the southern province of Dong Nai, but a veil of silence has descended over the area.

Latin America

In Paraguay, a priest was murdered for political/religious reasons early in the year. We have no further details.

In Colombia, Father German Urango Correa, 46, was assassinated near a sugar plantation in Andalucia, at the end of March. Police found his dead body with a gunshot wound to the head, his arms bound.

Two weeks later, a dozen parishes around Bogota, the capital, received gifts of cyanide-laced wine as Easter gifts to the parish priests. Father Jesus David Saenj and a nun whose name has not been disclosed died in the San Luis de Montfort Church. A sacristan and another woman were poisoned elsewhere and taken to hospital. The Colombian bishops' conference expressed outrage. The Colombian drug and guerilla wars have led to unprecedented violence throughout the country. In 1996, 26,642 murders were recorded, the highest in the world. In 1997 the number of victims rose to 31,808.

Mexico

The situation in Chiapas, Mexico, remains tense. In January thousands of Indians blocked highways and occupied government buildings, demanding an end to violence, an end to paramilitary groups and an end to the presence of the military in their communities. In February, the Mexican government expelled a French priest who had worked in Chiapas for 32 years, while again accusing the foreign media and visitors who have flocked to the region, of being sympathizers of the Zapatista rebels and intervening and fuelling the uprising, which started in 1993. Since 1995 over 200 foreigners have been expelled.

In mid-April Cardinals Norberto Rivera of Mexico City and Juan Sandoval of Guadalajara criticized Bishop Samuel Ruiz of San Cristobal for rejecting a government proposal to seek constitutional changes to improve the status of Mexican natives. Ruiz had called it a "mock legal initiative." The Cardinals pointed out that, as head of the National Mediation Commission, Bishop Ruiz should mediate and not take one-sided positions creating obstacles to proposed solutions.

According to Father Jean-Claude Trottier, president of the Canadian Religious Conference in Ottawa, Chiapas is a landmine ready to explode and Canada and other countries should intervene: "While in Chiapas, we saw the dramatic consequences of the free trade agreements in the misery and the violent repression of an entire people." Whether this is a well-founded explanation, we do not know.

Guatemala

On April 26, two days after presenting the report Never Again on Guatemala civil war casualties, Bishop Juan Gerardi was found beaten to death with a concrete block. Bishop Gerardi, 75, was the head of the Archdiocesan human rights office in Guatemala City. It had just concluded a three-year study of human-rights violations during the 30-year-long civil war which ended in 1996. The report blamed the army and paramilitary groups for 80% of the rights violations. Bishop Girardi is the first bishop slain in his country.

In Vatican City, the daily paper Osservatore Romano called the bishop "one of the most strenuous defenders of human rights during the bloody civil war." He survived an assassination attempt in 1980, and was forced into exile in 1982 and 1984.

Editor: Let us recall the words of St. James when he instructed Jerusalem Christians: "consider it pure joy . . . whenever you face trials of many kinds" (James 1:2).