Turkish Bishop Stabbed to Death

It is with great sorrow that I present this to you, for he was a good man. He was the Apostolic Vicar in Anatolia...read.....

A Roman Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in southern Turkey on Thursday, a day before he was scheduled to leave for Cyprus to meet with the pope, officials and reports said.


Catholic Bishop Luigi Padovese speaks during a service at Santa Maria Church in Turkey's Black Sea city of Trabzon in this picture taken Feb. 5, 2007. Padovese was stabbed to death in his home in southern Turkey on Thursday. (Umit Bektas/Reuters)

Luigi Padovese, the pope's apostolic vicar in Anatolia, was attacked outside his home in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun. Dogan news agency video footage of the scene showed the bishop lying dead in front of a building.

Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz, the governor for the province of Hatay, said police immediately caught the suspected killer.

He said the man, identified only as Murat A., was Padovese's driver for the last four and a half years and was mentally unstable.

"The initial investigation shows that the incident is not politically motivated," Lekesiz said. "We have learned that the suspect had psychological problems and was receiving treatment."

Meeting in Cyprus

Padovese, who is the equivalent of the bishop for the Anatolia region, was scheduled to leave for Cyprus on Friday to meet with the pope, who is visiting the island, and fellow bishops from around the region for preparations before the church's synod of bishops on the Middle East. The Synod is scheduled for October.

No one answered phones at his church in Iskenderun.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi told The Associated Press in Rome that the Vatican felt "immense pain, consternation, bewilderment and stupor" over the death and noted that it showed the "difficult conditions" that the Catholic community in the region lives in.

He said the pope's upcoming visit to Cyprus and the upcoming synod of bishops on the Middle East showed "how the universal church is in solidarity with this community."

Latest attack

The killing is the latest in a string of attacks in recent years on Christians in Turkey, where Christians make up less than one per cent of the 70 million population.

In 2007, a Roman Catholic priest in the western city of Izmir, Adriano Franchini, was stabbed and slightly wounded in the stomach by a 19-year-old man after Sunday Mass. The man was arrested.

The same year, a group of men entered a Bible-publishing house in the central Anatolian city of Malatya and killed three Christians, including a German national. The five alleged killers are now standing trial for murder.

The killings — in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit — drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.

In 2006, amid widespread anger in Islamic countries over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, a 16-year-old boy shot dead a Catholic priest, Father Andrea Santoro, as he prayed in his church in the Black Sea city of Trabzon. The boy was convicted of murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

In a 2006 telephone interview with The Associated Press, following another knife attack that injured another priest, Padovese expressed concern over the safety of Catholic priests in Turkey.

"The climate has changed," he said. "It is the Catholic priests that are being targeted."

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/06/03/turkey-bishop-murder-stabbed.html#ixzz0pq4W5Z9P

Though CBC was not the most reliable new source, it's what I could find. I am praying for the repose of the soul of the good Priest.