The bishop responsible for overseeing the area in which four Missionary Sisters of Charity were murdered on Friday, March 4 has said he is sure they died as martyrs.
“For me there is no doubt that the sisters have been victims of hatred – hatred against our faith”, Bishop Paul Hinder, who serves as apostolic vicar of the Arabian Peninsula, said in an interview.
The Yemen-based sisters “died as martyrs”, he said, clarifying that he believed they had died “as martyrs of charity, as martyrs because they witnessed Christ and shared the lot of Jesus on the Cross”.
The four sisters were members of the community founded by Blessed Teresa of Kolkata. Srs Margherite and Reginette were Rwandan, Sr Judith was Kenyan, and Sr Anselm was Indian. They were killed by gunmen in an early morning attack on their convent in the Yemeni city of Aden. Although the convent superior and those old and disabled people living at the community were unharmed, a total of 16 people were murdered in the care home, including the community’s driver and other community helpers and volunteers.
Torched
The Indian Salesian priest Fr Tom Uzhunnalil, who had been staying with the sisters since September, when Aden’s Holy Family Church was sacked and torched, appears to have been abducted. A cousin of his has claimed that after the sisters and others had been shot, the gunmen attacking the community took the priest from the chapel where they had locked him, handcuffed him, and took him away.
Sushma Swaraj, India’s Minister for External Affairs, has announced on Twitter that the priest was “abducted by terrorists” and that attempts are underway to establish his whereabouts.
While reluctant to speak of reasons “for an unreasonable act” he said it was difficult to see the attack as being motivated by something other than “a misled religious mind”. The sisters were a target, he speculated, because certain radical groups in Yemen “simply do not support the presence of Christians who serve the poorest of the poor”.
Pointing out that most Yemeni people appreciate the presence of the Missionaries of Charity and their “dedicated service” to the poor, he said that the perpetrators of such attacks as that of March 4, are – whether they realise it or not – “the devil’s agents”.
Pope Francis has called the attack an “act of senseless and diabolical violence”.
More than 6,000 people have been killed in Yemen’s civil war since March 2015. So far no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, it is believed it was committed by a group linked with either Al-Qaeda or ISIS.