In the aftermath of the 19 March assassination of Rev. Vincent Machozi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Crux columnist John Allen asks whether the definition of “martyr” needs to be expanded.
Machozi, besides being a priest, ran a website that, in Allen’s words, documented “collusion among political elites, armed factions, and commercial interests in what he termed the ‘Balkanization’ of the region in order to exploit its natural resources.”
In other words, the 51-year-old Machozi had plenty of enemies.
Even so, Allen writes, he “chose to stay, placing himself willingly in harm’s way, because he believed that’s what God was calling him to do. In other words, his killers’ motives may not have been religious, but his certainly were, and surely that deserves to be part of the picture.”