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The Vatican has named 167 of its faithful killed in the 2019 Easter bombings in Sri Lanka as "witnesses of faith" in what appears to be one of the last papal acts of Pope Francis before his death.
Hundreds of people, including leaders from other regions, attended a vigil Monday in memory of the victims at the church of St Anthony targeted in the bombings.
Sri Lanka on Monday marked the sixth anniversary of one of the worst attacks on the island nation, in which at least 269 people, including 47 foreigners, were killed in the targeted bombing of Catholic churches and five-star hotels during Easter Sunday mass.
Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, told the attendees that Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in the Vatican, has included the names of 167 Catholics who died in the bombings “in the catalogue of the witnesses of the faith in its order book, considering the context of their heroism”.
Witnesses of faith are those who sacrificed their lives for their belief.
Cardinal Ranjith said they were chosen “due to violent opposition to their faith motivated by ‘odium fidei,’ the hate of the faith”. He said seven victims of other faiths were “respectfully remembered".
Pope Francis formalised in 2023 a new category of recognition by the church of people who lost their lives while professing the Catholic faith and created a special Vatican commission to catalogue their cases.
The commission, based in the Vatican’s saint-making office, has gathered hundreds of cases, with a view to highlighting them alongside officially recognised martyrs of the church, who are on the path to possible beatification or sainthood.
Two local Muslim groups that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group were accused of carrying out six near-simultaneous suicide bomb attacks.
Officials have charged dozens of people who allegedly received weapons training and participated in indoctrination classes from the two local Islamic extremist groups. But no one has yet been convicted or sentenced given 23,000 charges filed against them. Experts believe the case could drag for years due to the volume of charges.
The Catholic church has alleged that the government at the time covered up investigations "to protect the brains behind the attacks" and demanded further probing in the attacks.
The calls for investigation grew louder after Channel 4 aired an interview of a man who claimed that he arranged a meeting between a local Islamic state-inspired group, National Thowheed Jamath, and a top state intelligence official to hatch a plot to create insecurity in Sri Lanka.
He said the chaos would be used to enable former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to win the presidential election later that year.
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