Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Popular News

HomeNewsEuropePriest killed in France, investigation underway

Priest killed in France, investigation underway

A Catholic priest has been murdered in western France. Media reports say a Rwandan immigrant handed himself in to police.

Gabriella Ceraso – Vatican City

Father Olivier Maire, provincial superior of the Montfortians, was murdered in the Vendée, in Saint-Laurent-Sur-Sevre, where his body was found by the gendarmerie and where the Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, is about to go.  The Minister expressed all his support for the Catholics of France.

According media reports, the body was found after a man handed himself in to police and confessed to the priest’s murder. According to the newspaper La Croix, the 40-year-old Rwandan-born man is Emmanuel Abayisenga, the main suspect in the arson attack on the Nantes Cathedral in July 2020. Charged with the crime, he was released under judicial supervision at the beginning of June and had found shelter in a religious community, of which the murdered priest was a member, while awaiting trial in 2022. His lawyer had already said, he was a “physically and psychologically fragile” man.

Popular News

Pope Leo XIV echoes the cry of Francis: War is always a defeat!

Warning that the “atrocity” of modern scientific weapons risks leading combatants “to barbarism far...

Sacred Family of Nazareth Sisters in Zhytomyr: Shelter, prayer, hope amid war

Three religious sisters from the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth run a...

‘We transmit the faith with Jesus at the center,’ Pope Leo XIV tells Italian Bishops

Pope Leo XIV invites Italy's Bishops to embrace their primary responsibility of proclaiming and...

With war ever present, young people from Kharkiv visit the Pope

Pope Leo XIV meets with a group of 32 young men and women from...