Catholic charity to support seminarians touted as 'soldiers of the faith' after Normandy church terror attack
Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) responded to the killing of an 84-year-old Catholic priest by supporting the training of 1,000 seminarians across the world.
The Italian chapter of the Catholic charity announced its plans to fund the seminarian studies of priests in the 21 dioceses of countries Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, Angola, Bolivia, Tanzania, Madagascar, ambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Romania, India, and Kenya.
"We chose the seminaries that had the greatest need for aid, to allow them to accommodate more students and form what we consider to be the new 'soldiers of the faith,'" ACN Italy said on its website.
ACN launched the campaign in honor of Fr. Jacques Hamel, the French Catholic priest who served the parish in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, Normandy for more than a decade and even chose to forego retirement. Two 19-year-old local extremists slit the priest's throat on July 26 after they interrupted Fr. Hamel's morning mass and held the church hostage. The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) terrorist group hailed the extremists, shot dead by the police as they rushed out of the church, as one of their soldiers.
The pontifical foundation believed that producing well-prepared priests would be the best weapon against the current threats of fundamentalism and perceived the necessity of the priests' presence among societies that come under direct attacks of extremism.
"Support for the formation of new priests is a concrete response to fundamentalism, because especially in countries where the extremist threat is the greatest, the ministers of God must possess the appropriate tools to promote dialogue and contribute to a peaceful coexistence between all the religious groups, putting an end to the conflicts," director of ACN Italy Alessandro Monteduro, told the Catholic News Agency on Aug. 10.