St. Anuarite Nengapeta

Anuarite Nengapeta was born in 1939 in Wamba, in the northeastern region of what was then the Belgian Congo. She came from a family with deep Catholic roots, and her father, a catechist and member of the Christian Family Movement (the Cana movement), played a formative role in her early religious formation. As a young girl, Anuarite helped her father with his catechetical work, an apprenticeship that gave her an early familiarity with Catholic prayer and teaching in a region where the faith was still relatively young. She entered the novitiate of the Sisters of the Holy Family (Sainte-Famille) in Bamanya, near Lisala, and made her religious profession in 1959. The congregation, founded in the Congo in 1896 by Marie-Pauline Igondwe, was devoted to the evangelization and education of Congolese women and children. Anuarite's assignment to the mission school at Bamanya placed her directly in the work of her order: teaching, catechizing, and caring for the local community, which she did with a quiet dedication that fellow sisters later recalled. Her life of ordinary service was shattered by the outbreak of the Simba Rebellion in late 1963 and 1964, the same uprising that had earlier claimed the lives of the two CMS sisters at Bamanya. In early December 1964, as rebel forces advanced through the northeast, the Sisters of the Holy Family were ordered to leave Bamanya. They were marched to the town of Bafwasende, then onward toward the rebel stronghold of Bunia, accompanied by soldiers of the rebellion and joined at various points by other groups, including the Tutsi bishop Pierre Malet, who would himself be killed by the same forces. On the evening of November 29, 1964, the exhausted group halted at the village of Ebomu. That night, a group of rebel Simba soldiers singled out Sister Anuarite and a young novice, Sister Alphonsine, demanding that they submit to sexual assault. Both women refused. The commander's bodyguard struck Anuarite with a rifle butt; the commander himself then drew his weapon, and according to the contemporary testimony of survivors, shot or stabbed her (the exact weapon is variously reported) and struck her repeatedly. She died on or about November 29–30, 1964. Before she lost consciousness, witnesses reported that she pardoned her killers, saying words to the effect of "I forgive you, for you do not know what you are doing." Her body, along with those of the other victims, was recovered the following year, and the Sisters of the Holy Family venerated her immediately as a martyr of chastity. Pope John Paul II beatified her on August 31, 1985, during his apostolic visit to Zaire, marking her as the first Congolese person to be raised to the altars. He canonized her on October 16, 1988, fixing her memorial on December 1 in the universal calendar. The Congolese bishops' conference, and Pope John Paul himself, highlighted her as a model for young African women and for consecrated religious, and she is now venerated as a patron of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, of religious sisters, and of victims of abuse.

Anuarite was twenty-five years old at the time of her death, and her brief religious life left a deep mark on the local Church. The Sisters of the Holy Family continued to gather testimony from survivors of the Bamanya march in the years after the rebellion, and these accounts formed the basis of the diocesan and Roman processes that led to her beatification. Her story is often told together with those of the CMS Sisters of Bamanya and Bishop Malet, all victims of the same brutal episode in the Simba uprising. The wounds of the Simba Rebellion ran deep in the northeast Congo, and the local veneration of Anuarite grew quickly into something larger than the immediate tragedy. Pilgrimages to her tomb began almost immediately, and her name was invoked in the catechesis of religious congregations and in family prayer across the region. In 1985, during the papal visit to Kinshasa, her cause was presented as a witness to the maturity of the African Church, capable of producing martyrs of its own in a time of violent upheaval. Her cultus is associated with several explicit patronages. The Congolese bishops named her patron of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she is widely invoked as patron of religious sisters in the region, since she died in consecrated life. In more recent devotional practice, she has been adopted as a patron of abuse victims, reflecting the circumstances of her death and the fact that she explicitly forgave her attackers in her final moments. Her memorial on December 1 is observed in the General Roman Calendar as an optional memorial, and in the dioceses of the DRC as a feast of greater rank.