(ZENIT News / Kaduna, Nigeria, 03.22.2023).- TWO Catholic students seized from a seminary in north-west Nigeria have opened up about the events that led to the martyrdom of one of their classmates.

Pius Tabat and Stephen Amos were abducted from the Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna along with Peter Umenukor, and Michael Nnadi who was murdered by their captors.

Speaking at an online conference organised by Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the two men described being awoken by gunshots when their kidnappers raided the seminary complex on the night of 8th January 2020.

Mr Tabat said: “When we reached the door, a gun was pointed at our heads. The gunman took our phones, gadgets and valuables and asked us to go out.

“They took us over the fence and moved us from the site so that we would not be seen by the security forces. We went into the bush that very night.”

The group of four seminarians were made to walk for three to four hours before being told to climb onto the backs of motorcycles for the remainder of their journey.

The seminary student continued: “They called us later to communicate with our parents, to inform them we had been kidnapped. They beat us during those phone calls.

“We were crying with the tension, while our parents listened over the phone. This routine continued for about two weeks. Every time we made the call, they beat us.”

They were relentlessly beaten by their captors “every day, with no pity”. In the evening they were told to sing Christian songs and chants while their abductors continued to strike them.

“One of our brothers [Peter Umenukor] fell very ill, almost at the point of death. They took him and left him by the wayside, and told somebody to go and pick him up. Fortunately, he survived.”

Eighteen-year-old Michael Nnadi was murdered, according to his killer Mustapha Mohammed, for preaching the Gospel. Gang leader Mohammed was eventually arrested in late April 2020.

Mr Tabat said:

“During those days one of the kidnappers started asking questions, and Michael tried to explain our Christian faith to him. It got to a point where he asked to be taught the ‘Our Father’, and Michael taught him. It may have gotten out that this is what was happening, or the boy himself told them. We were sitting there blindfolded and they came and fetched him… Later that night, the leader of the gang told us that they had killed our brother, and that if they were not paid by the following morning, they would kill us as well. That was one of the longest nights of our life. In the morning they called us and gave us our cell phones to call our parents to say goodbye before they killed us. We did so and went back to our tents, leaving our lives in God’s hands. But we were not killed that day.”

Three days later they were finally released. “We do not believe it is a coincidence that we were released four days after he was killed. It was like his blood set us free, he paid the price for our freedom.”

The seminarian added “[H]e was martyred in cold blood, his only crime was being a Christian and a Catholic seminarian.”

Pius Tabat and Stephen Amos believe that the attack on the seminary may have been prompted by their kidnappers’ hostility towards the students’ Faith.

Mr Tabat said: “Our kidnappers were Fulani herdsmen, they spoke the Fulani language. We cannot say what their motive was, but the people we met in captivity were mostly Christians, so it is not out of place to say it is mostly an attack on our Christian Faith. Muslim places of worship or leaders are never attacked in our area, so it seems that we were targeted for our Catholic Faith.”

Valentina di Giorgio

At the end of the General Audience, the Pontiff made reference to the blessed bell, specifically in his message to the Poles present in the Square. 

“This Saturday we will celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord. In your homeland, it’s also the Day of the Sacredness of Life. As a sign of the necessity to protect human life from conception until natural death, the “Yes to Life” Foundation dedicates to Zambia “The Voice of the Unborn” bell, which I blessed this morning. May its sound carry the message that every life is sacred, every life is inviolable. I bless you from my heart.”

Bells of the same type and sense exist in Poland, Ecuador and Ukraine. 

The oil was consecrated on Friday morning, March 3 in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, during a Rite presided over by the Greek-Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III and the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem and the Near East, Hosam Naoum. It will be used on May 6 to anoint the head, chest and hands of the Sovereign, who is also head of the Anglican Church. The ceremonial calls for the Queen Consort, Camilla, to receive the anointing also after her husband. 

The oil was obtained in an oil press near Bethlehem, pressed fruit of two olive trees of the Mount of Olives, included in the properties of the Monastery of the Ascension and of the Russian Orthodox Magdalena Church, outstanding for its golden onion domes, just above the Basilica of the Agony, where King Charles’ paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, is buried. The chrism is perfumed with orange blossom buds and sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, musk and amber essences, in keeping with a formula in use for centuries in the English Court. A similar oil was used to anoint Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. 

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Today we will listen to the “magna carta” of evangelization in the contemporary world: Saint Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi (EN, December 8, 1975). It is topical, it was written in 1975 but it is as though it were written yesterday. Evangelization is more than just simple doctrinal and moral transmission. It is, first and foremost, witness — one cannot evangelize without witness — witness of the personal encounter with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word in which salvation is fulfilled. An indispensable witness because, firstly, the world “is calling for evangelizers to speak to it of a God whom the evangelists themselves should know and be familiar with” (EN, 76). 

It is not to transmit an ideology or a “doctrine” on God, no. It is to transmit God who is living in me: this is witness, and moreover, because “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (ibid., 41). The witness of Christ, then, is at the same time the first means of evangelization (cf. ibid., and an essential condition for its efficacy (cf. ibid., 76), so that the proclamation of the Gospel may be fruitful. Being witnesses.

It is necessary to remember that witness also includes professed faith, that is, convinced and manifest adherence to God the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, who created us out of love, and redeemed us. A faith that transforms us, that transforms our relationships, the criteria and the values that determine our choices. 

Witness, therefore, cannot be separated from consistency between what one believes and what one proclaims, and what one lives. One is not credible just by stating a doctrine or an ideology, no. A person is credible if there is harmony between what he or she believes and lives. Many Christians say they believe, but they live something else, as if they did not believe. And this is hypocrisy. The opposite of witness is hypocrisy. How many times we hear, “Ah, this person goes to Mass every Sunday and then he lives like this, or that”: it is true, it is counter-witness.

Every one of us is required to respond to three fundamental questions, posed in this way by Paul VI: “Do you believe what you are proclaiming? Do you live what you believe? Do you preach what you live?” (cf. ibid.). Is there harmony: do you believe in what you proclaim? Do you live what you believe? Do you proclaim what you live? We cannot be satisfied with easy, pre-packaged answers. We are called upon to accept the risk, albeit destabilized, of the search, trusting fully in the action of the Holy Spirit who works in each one of us, driving us ever further: beyond our boundaries, beyond our barriers, beyond our limits, of any type.

In this sense, the witness of a Christian life involves a journey of holiness, based on Baptism, which makes us “sharers in the divine nature; in this way they are really made holy” (Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 40). A holiness that is not reserved to the few; that is a gift from God and demands to be received and made to bear fruit for ourselves and for others. Chosen and beloved by God, must bring this love to others. Paul VI teaches that the zeal for evangelization springs from holiness, it springs from the heart that is filled with God. Nourished by prayer and above all by love for the Eucharist, evangelization in turn increases holiness in the people who carry it out (cf. EN, 76). At the same time, without holiness, the word of the evangelizer “will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man”, and “risks being vain and sterile” (ibid.).

Therefore, we must be aware that the people to whom evangelization is addressed are not only others, those who profess other faiths or who profess none, but also ourselves, believers in Christ and active members of the People of God. And we must convert every day, receive the word of God and change our life: every day. And this is how the heart is evangelized. To bear this witness, the Church as such must also begin by evangelizing herself. If the Church does not evangelize herself, she remains a museum piece. Instead, it is by evangelizing herself that she is continually updated. She needs to listen unceasingly to what she must believe, to her reasons for hoping, to the new commandment of love. The Church, which is a People of God immersed in the world, and often tempted by idols — many of them — and she always needs to hear the proclamation of the works of God. In brief, this means that she has a constant need of being evangelized, she needs to read the Gospel, to pray and to feel the force of the Spirit changing her heart (cf. EN, 15).

A Church that evangelizes herself in order to evangelize is a Church that, guided by the Holy Spirit, is required to walk a demanding path, a path of conversion and renewal. This also entails the ability to change the ways of understanding and living its evangelizing presence in history, avoiding taking refuge in the protected zones of the logic of “it has always been done this way.” They are the refuges that cause the Church to sicken. 

The Church must go forward, she must grow continually; in this way she will remain young. This Church is entirely turned to God, therefore a participant in His plan of salvation for humanity, and, at the same time, entirely turned towards humanity. The Church must be a Church that dialogically encounters the contemporary world, that weaves fraternal relationships, that generates spaces of encounter, implementing good practices of hospitality, of welcome, of recognition and integration of the other and of otherness, and that cares for the common home that is creation. That is, a Church that dialogically encounters the contemporary world, that dialogues with the contemporary world, but that encounters the Lord every day, and dialogues with the Lord, and allows the Holy Spirit, the agent of evangelization, to enter. Without the Holy Spirit we can only publicize the Church, not evangelize. It is the Spirit in us that drives us towards evangelization, and this is the true freedom of the children of God.

Dear brothers and sisters, I renew my invitation to you to read and re-read Evangelii nuntiandi: I will tell you the truth, I read it often, because it is Saint Paul VI’s masterpiece, it is the legacy he left to us, to evangelize.