An Italian priest, don Andrea Santoro, was killed on Sunday 5 February, by a pistol shot fired by a lone gunman as he was praying alone in the parish church of St. Mary at Trebizond, a Turkish city on the Black Sea. He was 60 years old. A priest of the diocese of Rome, Father Santoro was posted to the mission in Turkey and there took a close interest in interfaith dialogue between Catholics and Muslims. Don Andrea believed that “the exchange of spiritual gifts” between West and Middle East was not only possible but also important. There’s a text he wrote that testifies to this: it’s a letter he wrote last year to the vicariate of Rome. It has now become his “spiritual testament”. The Middle East he wrote is the “great ‘holy land’ where God decided to communicate himself in a special way to man”. It’s a land with “its dark sides”, but also with “its riches and its capacity to illuminate our Western world with the light that God has always penetrated it”. The Catholic community in Turkey has been thrown into a state of shock by his assassination, but it also feels the responsibility to continue along the road traced by don Andrea. “We said Monsignor Ruggero Franceschini, president of the Turkish Bishops’ Conference shall continue to believe that dialogue is possible because Muslims and Christians worship the one God. Albeit with different proposals and with different agendas, we are all people who base our life on the law of God. The death of don Andrea was therefore a senseless execution. But extremism is senseless, or else it coldly makes calculations with the sole aim of creating unrest”. The funeral of the priest will be celebrated in St. John Lateran in Rome on Friday 10 February.
