
CV NEWS FEED // Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) has issued a statement of condolence to the family of a Catholic catechist in Burkina Faso who was abducted, tortured, and killed by radical extremists late last month.
Burkina Faso is a landlocked former French colony in West Africa, where 61 percent of the population is Muslim and Catholics are around 23 percent.
According to Fides News reports, the body of Edouard Yougbare, 60, was discovered on April 19, following an attack by a group of armed radicals in the suburban outskirts of his hometown, Saatenga. Yougbare is survived by his wife and five children.
“We are heartbroken by the loss of Yougbare,” Maria Lozano, ACN’s head of press, wrote in a statement:
He served his community faithfully, and his death was a devastating blow to the people of Saatenga. Catechists in Burkina Faso are on the frontline, risking their lives for the good of their people. Just two months ago, another catechist was killed in the Diocese of Dori, while leading a Sunday morning celebration.
“ACN asks for prayers for the victims’ families and all the people of Saatenga, who are deeply affected by these events,” the statement added, emphasizing the increasingly “drastic” security situation for Christians living in the country in western Africa.
Christians are continuously persecuted by terrorist groups “inspired by Islamic extremists,” ACN wrote, describing the rising violence in Burkina Faso as a part of a “wider conflict” involving countries in the Sahel region such as Mali, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.
In Nigeria, as CatholicVote has previously reported, targeted attacks carried out by radical Islamist Fulani herdsmen against Christian farmers in the Plateau State have resulted in hundreds of deaths.
Secular media outlets covering the conflict have characterized the clash between the two groups as spurred on by “climate change.”
However, as Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi, in Benue State in Nigeria told CatholicVote in February:
That [claim] is not true, because by all standards, climate change is not purely a Nigeria [problem]. It is a global issue. So I don’t know why, if climate change is happening also in Europe and America, I don’t know how many people in the U.S. are killed to solve climate issues.
