Sri Lanka’s Catholic church says the Vatican has named 167 of its faithful killed in Islamic State-inspired suicide bombings six years ago as witnesses of religion.
Hundreds, including Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic religious figures, attended a vigil Monday in memory of the victims on the church of St. Anthony, targeted within the attacks.
Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, told the attendees Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints within the Vatican, has included the names of 167 Catholics who died within the bombings within the churches of St. Anthony in Colombo and St. Sebastian in Negombo “within the catalogue of the witnesses of the religion in its order book, considering the context of their heroism.”
He said they were chosen “on account of violent opposition to their faith motivated by ‘odium fidei,’ the hate of the religion.”
Ranjith also said seven victims of other faiths were “respectfully remembered.”
Witnesses of religion are those that sacrificed their lives for his or her belief.
Pope Francis formalized in 2023 a recent category of recognition by the church of people that lost their lives while professing the Catholic faith and created a special Vatican commission to catalogue their cases. The commission, based within the Vatican’s saint-making office, has gathered a whole lot of cases, with a view to highlighting them alongside officially recognized martyrs of the church, who’re on the trail to possible beatification or sainthood.
More than 260 people, including 42 foreigners, were killed within the near-simultaneous bombings during Easter Sunday at three tourist hotels and three churches, two Catholic and one Protestant, on April 21, 2019.
The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka has demanded further probing within the attacks, particularly after British television Channel 4 interviewed a person who said that he arranged a gathering between a neighborhood IS-inspired group, National Thowheed Jamath, and a top state intelligence official to hatch a plot to create insecurity in Sri Lanka and enable former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to win the presidential election later that 12 months.
