At least 50 people were killed and others injured on Pentecost Sunday when gunmen attacked worshippers at St Francis Catholic Church, in Owo, Nigeria. According to reports, witnesses said armed men fired at the congregation and then kidnapped a priest as well as some other church-goers.

The Vatican released a statement Sunday after Pope Francis learned of the attack.

“The pope learned of the attack on the church in Ondo, Nigeria, and the death of dozens of faithful, many children, during the celebration of Pentecost,” Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See press office, said in the June 5 statement.

“While the details of the incident are being clarified, Pope Francis prays for the victims and for the country, painfully affected in a moment of celebration, and entrusts both to the Lord, to send his Spirit to comfort them.”

The Catholic Diocese of Ondo said on Sunday that local Bishop Jude Ayodeji Arogundade appealed to Catholics to “remain calm, be law-abiding and pray for peace and normalcy to return to our community, state, and country.”

No figures for the numbers killed or abducted in Sunday's violence have been confirmed officially.

A doctor at a hospital in Owo, a town in the Nigerian state of Ondo, told Reuters that no fewer than 50 bodies had been moved to the Federal Medical Center in Owo and to St. Louis Catholic Hospital.

After visiting the church and hospital, state lawmaker Ogunmolasuyi Oluwole told the Associated Press news agency that children were among the dead.

In a series of tweets, Ondo state Governor Rotimi Akeredolu called it a "vile and satanic attack" on innocent people. He appealed for calm urging people not to take the law into their own hands.

A video posted on Twitter showed graphic scenes of bodies and blood inside the church.

How the attack unfolded
One of the priests at St Francis Catholic Church, Owo, Father Andrew Abayomi, who spoke during an interview with BBC Yoruba, said suspected terrorists struck as the church service was wrapping up.

His words: “We were about to round off service. I had even asked people to start leaving, that was how we started hearing gunshots from different angles.”

“We hid inside the church, but some people had left when the attack happened. We locked ourselves in the church for 20 minutes. When we heard that they had left, we opened the church and rushed victims to the hospital.”

As attackers opened fire on worshippers inside the Catholic church , other gunmen waited outside to kill those who tried to flee, church officials and witnesses said Monday.

Steven Omotayo, who lives near the church, told Associated Press that he rushed to the scene upon hearing the gunshots.

“I saw a lot of dead bodies — both young and old, even children,” he said. “The people came in and started shooting from the gate.”

He said the church has three entrances and the main entrance was said to have been locked, making it difficult for many to escape.

“They were just shooting. If they see anyone trying to escape or stand up, they will just shoot the person,” he said. “Everybody standing was bombarded with bullets.”

State Police Commissioner Oyeyemi Oyediran said security forces were “on top of the situation.”

“A team pursued the assailants along with the military but unfortunately, we could not catch up with them,” he said.

Christians targeted

No-one has said that they were behind this attack, but Nigeria is facing worsening violence by armed groups, the BBC's Chris Ewokor in the capital, Abuja, says. But Ondo state has, until now, been relatively untouched.

Exactly a week ago the head of the Methodist Church in Nigeria was abducted along with two other clerics in the south-east of the country.

Two weeks ago, two Catholic priests were kidnapped in Katsina, President Muhammadu Buhari's home state in the north of the country. They have not been released.

In March, gunmen targeted the vital rail link between Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna killing at least nine people and kidnapping dozens of others, many of whom are still being held.

In May, a female student in Nigeria was beaten to death and set on fire by fellow students who accused her of posting “blasphemous” statements in a WhatsApp group.

Nina Shea, a human rights lawyer and expert in religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, a think tank and research center in Washington, D.C., told CNA Sunday that "war-like" attacks against Catholics and other Christians are escalating in Nigeria. Yet most of this violence, until now, has centered in northern Nigeria, while the southwestern part of the country where Sunday's attack took place has remained relatively peaceful.

"This massacre in a church while filled with Sunday worshippers is an atrocity that we’ve repeatedly seen in northern Nigeria over the years. Those were the work of anti-Christian extremists," Shea said.

"While the facts are still emerging about today’s massacre, it is clear that large scale, war-like attacks on Catholics and other Christians are spreading in a system of impunity," she continued. "The Buhari government has allowed this continue unabated and fails to protect Nigeria's churches. This governmental passivity is being seen as a green light for extremists to target Christians."

The intensifying persecution facing Christians globally is reflected in the increasing numbers of believers being killed for their faith.

In 2021, at least 5,898 Christians paid the ultimate cost for following Jesus, almost 80% of whom come from Nigeria, according to statistics from World Watch list.

The figures are an increase of almost 25% from the previous year. Put differently, on average, that’s 16 Christians killed every day for simply pursuing their faith. Since many incidents go unreported, the true figure is likely to be higher.
-CN/BBC/Reuters/AP