World Touch
MISSIONARIES: 18 Missionaries Killed In 2022
Eighteen missionaries lost their lives violently across the world last year: twelve priests, one brother, three women religious, one seminarian, and one lay person. Nine missionaries were killed in Africa, eight missionaries in the Americas, and one in Asia.
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Mar 2023The data was gathered by Fides Agency, the Vatican news agency which every year releases its annual report on the number of Catholic missionaries killed around the globe.
It uses the term “missionary” in a broad sense of “all the baptized engaged in the life of the Church who died in a violent way, not only ‘in hatred of the faith’”.
The highest number of murders has been recorded in the African continent, with nine missionaries in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Mozambique. In Asia, a Vietnamese Dominican priest was stabbed to death while listening to confessions by a mentally ill man. No missionary killings have been reported this year in Oceania and Europe.