WCC NEWS: WCC condemns recent extremist attacks around the world

The unbearable toll of lives lost, and the impact on the affected communities and nations, must engage the concern, solidarity and action of the international community and all people of goodwill, to stem the bloodshed and to confront the brutal ideologies behind such atrocities,” wrote Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca, interim general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), on 3 November, as he commented on the violent extremist attacks in western Ethiopia, Kabul and Vienna.

Photo: Albin Hillert/WCC, 2016.

3 November 2020

In an attack on ethnic Amharas in western Ethiopia on 1 November, 54 people are reported to have been killed, in a tragic escalation of the ethnic violence which threatens the very fabric of the Ethiopian nation.  In Kabul on 2 November, gunmen attacked Afghanistan’s largest university, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than a dozen, in the second deadly assault on an educational institution in the capital resulting in mass casualties in just over a week.  And now in an apparent religiously-inspired extremist attack in Vienna – which began outside the Seitenstettengasse Synagogue, four people are reported killed and another 17 wounded.  Stressing the WCC’s categorical denunciation of all such attacks, and its rejection of any attempts to justify such violence on religious grounds, Sauca ended the public statement with a prayer: “Merciful God, bring peace to a world increasingly riven by divisions and hatreds. Introduce compassion and wisdom to those leaders who so fearfully lack these qualities and who incite hatred and violence,” he wrote.  Read the full statement of the WCC Interim General Secretary

See more