Thinking of the many missionaries who have offered their lives to the point of martyrdom, this year our thoughts go especially to the three Italian Xaverian confreres: Bro. Vittorio Faccin, Fr. Luigi Carrara and Fr. Giovanni Didonè, who will be beatified on August 18 in the cathedral of Uvira (DR Congo - Africa), along with Fr. Albert Joubert, originally from Saint Louis de Mrumbi-Moba (formerly Belgian Congo). They were all killed within a few hours in Congo, in the South Kivu Province, 60 years ago.
It was November 28, 1964, around 2:00 PM, when a military jeep stopped in front of the church of Baraka and Abedi Masanga, a leader of the Mulelist rebels who had been occupying the area for months, got out of it. Abedi invited Brother Vittorio Faccin to get on the jeep, and upon his refusal, he shot him in the chest, killing him. Upon hearing the shots, Fr. Luigi Carrara, who was hearing confessions, went outside the church. Abedi ordered him to get into the jeep, but Carrara, seeing his fellow brother dead, knelt before his body and died there with a bullet to the head. Their bodies were horribly mutilated, and one of Bro. Faccin's arm was carried as a trophy around Baraka by a young member of the rebel command, who later converted.
After these killings, Abedi's jeep set off towards Fizi, where it arrived in the evening. Here - against the advice of the Mulelist leaders who controlled the mission and protected the Xaverians missionaries - it went to the parish and called the missionaries. Fr. Giovanni Didonè opened the door along with Fr. Albert Joubert.
At the sight of the weapons, Didonè barely had time to make the sign of the cross when Abedi shot him in the forehead. Immediately after, he also shot the abbé, hitting him in the chest. Fr. Joubert, wounded, tried to move away but was fatally hit by another shot in the back.
Congo, independent since 1960, was going through a difficult socio-political transition. The democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba, who was pro-Soviet (Russia), was executed in 1961 by Colonel Mobutu.
In 1963, Pierre Mulele, a former minister in Lumumba's government, returned to Congo after a period of ideological indoctrination and military training in China, leading a revolt against the government structures and any European presence. In this atmosphere, while Europeans and many missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, were leaving Congo, the Xaverians paid with their lives for the choice to stay.
This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the barbaric killing of the three Italian Xaverian sisters Olga Raschietti, Lucia Pulici and Bernardetta Boggian, which occurred on September 7, 2014, in Bujumbura (Burundi). Three women, three religious sisters, three missionaries, who had dedicated themselves tirelessly to the advent of the Kingdom of God in the Great Lakes region of Africa, between Congo and Burundi. They clashed with the power of evil; they had proclaimed the power of love. All the wickedness of the world seems to have poured onto their bodies between the afternoon of September 7 and the night of September 8, 2014.
The mutilated bodies of the three Xaverian sisters and the three Xaverian missionaries were buried, or rather "sown," in African soil on the outskirts of Bukavu (Congo), like Easter sprouts: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24).
