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The Abduction

Fr. Giancarlo Bossi, Italian missionary of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, was abducted last June 10.  Ten armed men seized him shortly after the Mass in Payao, a small town in the area where Fr. Bossi is pastor.  The abduction took place at 9:35 a.m. (local time) in the costal town of Bulawan, in the area of Zamboanga, in the southern archipelago of Mindanao.  So far no one has claimed responsibility for the abduction, nor have any ransom demands been made.

 Father Bossi is the third Italian priest kidnapped in the area in the last ten years. Fr Luciano Benedetti from PIME was abducted on September 8, 1998, near Sebuco, Zamboanga del Norte (Mindanao). He was released after 68 days in captivity on November 16.  Fr Giuseppe Pierantoni, a missionary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was kidnapped in October 2001 by a group calling itself Pentagon while he was celebrating Mass in Dimantaling, Zamboanga del Sur. Freed six months later, he told the authorities that he had been passed from one group to another as military and police mounted a huge manhunt.  The Filipino army and separatist guerrillas have been waging a bloody war for many years but it is civilians and the religious who have often had to pay the price.

 The missionary who was kidnapped, the superior explained, “was well loved. Here they call him ‘the gentle giant’ because he is peaceful, quiet, sticking to the essentials. He talks little but is a hard worker: he has always joined manual work with his spiritual life. One of his dreams has been to live in a village as a witness to the radical newness of the Gospel: he wanted to live as a farmer.”

 He is a man, Fr. Sandalo continued, “who has always expressed a deep solidarity with the poor. When he was asked, this past February, to return to Payao, where he had already worked for three years during his early years in the mission of the Philippines, he gave up what he had dreamed of doing in order to resume his work with the poor.”