When Floribert Bwana Chui Bin Kositi was asked in 2007 to permit spoiled rice from Rwanda to be transported across the border to the eastern Congo city of Goma, he knew the risks of resisting corruption, especially as a government employee. He refused nonetheless.
It didn’t take long before he was kidnapped; days later, his body was found by colleagues on the Office Congolais de Contrôle, the agency that monitors the standard of products. Nearly twenty years after his death, he’s being celebrated within the central African country and beyond following Pope Francis’ recent approval of his beatification. It’s a step toward possible sainthood, a standing nobody from Congo has ever achieved.
In the conflict-battered Goma, where years of war have increased desperation and corruption, Kositi’s designation as a martyr has eased among the pain brought on by his death.
“Floribert was murdered in very difficult circumstances,” said Yack’s Jean Jacques, his former colleague in Goma. Jacques recalled the injuries in Kositi’s body once they found him after a dayslong search.
“He left us a fight that we must all proceed as Christians, as people, as young people within the province of North Kivu,” said Jacques, referring to the war-ravaged province where Kositi lived most of his 25 years before being killed.
Pope Francis recognized Kositi as a martyr late last 12 months, setting him on the trail to beatification. The move suits into the pope’s broader definition of martyr as a social justice concept, paving the best way for others deemed to have been killed for doing God’s work, to be considered for sainthood.
The Rev. Francesco Tedeschi, an Italian priest who’s spearheading the beatification cause because the postulator, said the Vatican decree of martyrdom indeed recognizes Kositi died out of hatred for the religion, because his decision to not accept the spoiled food was profoundly inspired by the Gospel.
“How much spoiled food, how much expired medicine, what number of discarded things are sent to those places because there’s this conception that these lives there aren’t as worthy?” Tedeschi said. “And yet Floribert, in his Christianity, desired to put the worth of the lives of those people, and above all of the poorest, at the middle.”
Tedeschi, who knew Kositi’s through their work along with the Sant’Egidio Community, said he was a model for today’s young people in Congo, who’re consistently tempted by corruption in a rustic ranked among the many poorest on this planet. At least 70% of its people lived on lower than $2.15 a day in 2024, in keeping with the World Bank.
Kositi “could have earned a number of money and made a pleasant life. Instead, he selected to be a witness to the Gospel,” Tedeschi said. If previously the Catholic Church identified martyrs who refused to kneel right down to false idols, “the idol to which he refused to kneel down was the idol of cash.”
Tedeschi confirmed that Kositi may very well be the primary Congolese saint, but noted there are several other Congolese who’ve been beatified before him. And regardless, the Vatican must confirm a miracle attributed to his intercession after he’s beatified before he may very well be canonized, a process that may take a long time or more.
“We feel relieved today to see that our son has been recognized worldwide for the advantages he has brought,” Kositi’s mother, Gertrude Kamara Ntawiha, said in December when a memorial Mass was celebrated in his honor at Goma’s Sainte-Esprit Catholic parish.
The Mass brought together family, friends and community members. They reminisced about Kositi’s life, drawing from it lessons about his fight against corruption and inspiration for his martyrdom.
“We can have saints here, we will have blessed people here in Goma, it’s not unimaginable,” Abbé Jean Baptiste Bahati, a Catholic priest, said throughout the commemoration.
Being declared a martyr exempts the sainthood candidate from the requirement that a miracle have to be attributed to their intercession before they’re beatified, thereby fast-tracking the method to get to step one of sainthood.
Several others have been declared martyrs under the redefinition of the word, including El Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero who was killed in 1980 for his preaching against the repression of the poor at the beginning of the country’s civil war in addition to St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who traded his life for that of a married man in 1941. Kolbe was beatified under normal procedures in 1971 before St. John Paul II announced that he can be venerated as a martyr when he canonized him in 1982.
They have a standard bond: A life lost fighting for the poor and the less privileged.
It is the ethos that Pope Francis encouraged Congolese people to emulate when he visited the country in 2023.
“He could easily have turned a blind eye; no one would have came upon, and he might even have gotten ahead consequently,” the pope said of Kositi. “But since he was a Christian, he prayed. He considered others and he selected to be honest, saying no to the filth of corruption.”
That cause lives on on the Floribert Bwana Chui School of Peace in Goma. Named after Kositi, the college goals to advance the social justice and welfare that he fought for, with a whole bunch of youngsters displaced or orphaned by war under its care.
“Floribert is an example,” said Aline Minani, a part of the Sant’Egidio community of laypeople that runs the college.
“Through this school, we proceed to live and pass on Floribert’s values to those children.”
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Associated Press journalists Nicole Winfield in Rome and Chinedu Asadu in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed.
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