Paul Keenan
Mother Teresa. The slain nuns of Aden lived out their faith to the last, writes Paul Keenan
“We will continue our service to the poor and needy.” Of the many statements issued in response to the callous slaughter of four nuns in Yemen on March 4, the quietly defiant promise from the victims’ own Missionaries of Charity congregation through the pain of their loss must stand as the most inspiring.
Stunned as the order was by the daylight attack on the nuns as they worked at a Missionaries-backed retirement home in Aden, it immediately turned to the steadfast example of its founder, Blessed Mother Teresa, in answering to the gunmen who so barbarously took the lives of Sr Anselm, Sr Reginette, Sr Judith, Sr Marguerite and 12 of their charges and fellow workers.
A fifth nun, Sr Sally, was saved when she was afforded time to hide in a fridge after a warning from a security guard. Meanwhile, a lone Salesian priest, Fr Tom Uzhunnalil, was cornered in the chapel and taken as a hostage by the gunmen – his fate at the time of writing is unknown.
The praise that Missionaries Sisters never seek for themselves came from numerous other quarters, led by Pope Francis. Described as “shocked and profoundly saddened” by news emanating from Yemen, the Pontiff insisted that the slain nuns “are the martyrs of today. May Mother Teresa accompany in paradise these, her martyr daughters of charity, and intercede for peace and sacred respect for human life.”
Statement
Adding to his words, the US Bishops’ Conference issued a statement in which they stated: “Caring for the aging and dying is an act of love and mercy.
“Giving totally of oneself to serve the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters is an act of courageous faith. Thus, it is always a great sorrow when such acts of mercy lead to martyrdom.”
More locally, the Apostolic Vicar of Southern Arabia, Bishop Paul Hinder revealed that he had discussed evacuating the sisters from their deadly environment, but “they told me there was nothing to discuss, they would not leave whatever happened because they wanted to stay with the people entrusted to their care”.
Significantly, he added: “It was clear that on the part of the sisters this was no exhibition of heroism, it was purely their desire to follow Jesus Christ.”
The bishop’s testimony is borne out by a spokesperson for the missionaries in India who added to the order’s statement that the murdered sisters had been given the option to leave Yemen as fighting continued, but “they opted to stay on to serve the people”.
The import of the nun’s decision and Christian witness is best understood by placing it directly into the context of what one commentator has called “the world’s forgotten war”.
Quite aside from a previous incident, in 1998, when rampaging gunmen killed three Missionaries of Charity in the port city of Hodeida, the Aden sisters had been operating under the threat posed by the fighting that has plagued Yemen since mid-2014 when predominantly Shiite Houthi rebels took to the warpath against the mainly Sunni regime of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.
The Houthis, a major tribal grouping of the country’s northern borderlands with Saudi Arabia, had become disaffected with the rule of Hadi, and, deciding to fight alongside forces loyal to his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, stormed and seized the capital Sana’a in September of that year.
Dimensions
The religious dimensions to the conflict then came into play as Saudi Arabia, alleging that its sworn enemy, Shiite Iran, was secretly backing the Houthis, established a military coalition with Hadi’s Sunni forces, quickly escalating the conflict to a deadlier state of affairs.
Creating his new headquarters in Aden, where he fled as Sana’a fell, President Hadi has inevitably drawn the conflict south and to the very gates of the Christian charities and churches operating there.
As if this were not enough, the fractious environment has allowed for both the re-emergence of Al Qaeda and the growth of Islamic State in Yemen. The latter group has staged numerous attacks in Aden and is at this point blamed for murdering the nuns.
The very real tragedy in all of this, however, is the timing of the nuns’ deaths. It has transpired in the days since the shootings that the main actors to the ongoing conflict in Yemen have begun to make positive moves towards one another in search of a lasting peace.
On March 8, it emerged that two senior Houthis had travelled to Saudi Arabia for talks. Reports from Yemen subsequently revealed that the Houthis and the Saudi-backed coalition had agreed a prisoner swap as a conciliatory gesture which may, just may, be the first step towards a negotiated peace.
The swap was met by an announcement from the Saudis that they were enforcing a ‘period of calm’ along Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen so as to allow the transfer of medical and other necessary supplies.
Even more significantly, the Al Arabiya network then reported that a leading Houthi commander had issued a warning for Iran to stay out of matters. In a Facebook post, Yousef al Feshi demanded that “officials in the Islamic Republic of Iran must be silent and leave aside the exploitation of… Yemen”.
Al Feshi was reacting to a suggestion from an Iranian military commander that perhaps Iran should become involved in Yemen to the same extent as it has done in Syria, surely an ominous line of reasoning.
Context
Meanwhile, in the context of the wider Middle East, though specifically connected to the Aden slayings, the US Bishops’ Conference noted in its statement lamenting the nuns’ deaths that the long expected US State Department declaration on Islamic State’s genocide against Christians was due to be made barely two weeks after the shootings and would be “a life-saving aid in the defence of those facing the extremists’ violence”.
Should those working towards that decision be moved by the quiet defiance of the Missionaries of Charity, the impact of Srs Anselm, Reginette, Judith and Marguerite might be felt far beyond the violent shores of Yemen.