Father Andrea Santoro, a Roman fidei donum priest who carried out his ministry in Turkey, was killed in Trabzon (Trebizond, Turkey) on Sunday, 5 February 2006, while he was praying on his knees in the church of Santca Maria. His death revealed a life spent in hiding, but rich in a deep spiritual and religious heritage rooted in the history of a generation of Roman clergy. Andrea Santoro was born in Priverno (Latina) on 7 September 1945.
In the mid-fifties he moved to Rome with his family, in the populous Quadraro district. He entered the seminary in 1958 and lived his formation in a season characterised by the Second Vatican Council. Ordained a priest by the then Bishop Ugo Poletti on 18 October 1970, Fr Andrea became assistant parish priest at the Trasfigurazione, a parish in the Monteverde district. He remained there from 1971 to 1980, during an intense season of experimentation.
It was the period of the conference ‘on the evils of Rome’, and for Fr Andrea these were years of battles and deepening his understanding of the Bible in social reality. In 1980, Card. Ugo Poletti asked him to take over the leadership of a parish, but Fr Andrea asked to take a sabbatical to spend in the Holy Land. Returning to Rome, the young priest asked Cardinal Poletti to go on a mission to the East, but the Cardinal sent him, in September 1981, to a neighbourhood under construction on the Tiburtina (Verderocca) where he built the church dedicated to Jesus of Nazareth, consecrated in 1988. In 1994, a new sabbatical period allowed him to lead groups in the Middle East in collaboration with the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi.
Then the superiors entrusted him with the parish dedicated to the martyred saints Fabian and Venantius, in the Appio district. In 2000 Card. Camillo Ruini sent him as a fidei donum priest to Turkey. Fr Andrea serves in the Apostolic Vicariate of Anatolia. His first destination is Urfa (ancient Edessa), a city of ancient tradition, a meeting point of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Don Santoro intends to create a bridge between the Church of Rome and the Christian communities in Turkey, heirs of the Church of Asia Minor. He also founded an association, ‘Window for the Middle East’, to support his mission. In 2003, Fr Andrea was transferred to Trabzon, the ancient Trebizond, in the north-east of the country, on the Black Sea, to take care of a parish with a Catholic population of less than ten people. In Trabzon, Fr Andrea witnessed the disasters that followed the fall of the Soviet giant: the heavy emigration from the former USSR territories to Turkey caused by misery and despair, the miserable condition of Armenian or Georgian Christian women forced into prostitution.
In Turkey after 11 September, Fr Andrea lives on a ridge of world crisis in a season marked by profound changes. On 5 February 2006, he was shot twice in the back while praying on his knees in the last pew of his church. His is a human story that embodies the experience of a generation of Roman Catholics who were nourished by the Bible, learned the lesson of the Second Vatican Council, and learned to look to the East as a source of faith renewal.
