“This is horrible news that left us deeply shocked,” the Vatican spokesperson, Federico Lombardi, said after the news of Bishop Padovese’s killing (today) June 3.
Vatican Radio quoted Lombardi as saying that “political motivations” for the killing of Padovese “or other motivations linked to socio-political tensions are to be excluded.”
Christians have often complained of discrimination in Turkey, where about 99 per cent of the country’s 77-million people are Muslim. The Catholic Church there has 32,000 members.
Vatican Radio reported Mahomet Colleting Lukasz, governor for the Turkish province of Hate, as confirming that police were holding a man of Kurdish origins, named only as “Murat A.”, as a suspect in the killing of the bishop.
Lombardi said the suspect had been employed as a driver and general handyman by the bishop.
The Anatolian Agency news service said that a man had attacked Padovese in the garden of his summer house in Karajan, a seaside resort on the outskirts of Iskenderun.
Padovese was born in Milan on March 31, 1947. He was ordained in 1973, and became a bishop and vicar apostolic of Anatolia, Turkey, in 2004.
He had been scheduled to travel to Cyprus for a meeting of Catholic bishops from the Middle East with Pope Benedict XVI, who is visiting the island from June 4-6.
“Bishop Padovese was a person who gave his entire life to bring the gospel of love and peace to difficult situations, and therefore should be written among the witnesses of the gospel,” said Lombardi.
“This fact, coming as it does on the eve of a papal trip to the Middle East, lends an extraordinary intensity to the Pope’s mission to encourage the Christian communities living in this region, helping us to profoundly understand the urgent need for the solidarity of the universal Church to support these Christian communities,” said the Vatican spokesperson.
In May, Turkish Prime Minister Recap Tanya Endogen ordered local officials to do more to protect the rights of Christian and other non-Muslim religious minorities. Padovese had said in April 2009 that local parishes faced “great difficulties” in some parts of the country.
In 2007, three Christians were killed at a religious publishing house in Malatya in eastern Turkey. The previous year, Andrea Santoro, an Italian priest working in Turkey, was shot dead.
Leader of Catholic Church in Turkey stabbed dead
(ENI) -- The president of the Catholic bishops' conference in Turkey, Italian-born Bishop Luigi Padovese, has been stabbed to death in Iskenderun in southern Turkey.
