Pilgrim Ways

honoured. Prince Philip read an extract from the Acts of the Apostles as a black cloth was lowered to uncover the carved statue of his great-aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia, grand daughter of Queen Victoria and a saint in the Orthodox Church. Married to the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II, she gave away jewelry and sold her most luxurious belongings, after Grand Duke Sergei was assassinated. She used the money to establish the Martha and Mary home in Moscow and created the Sisters of Love and Charity. Their work of charity and prayer then flourished. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 she was imprisoned. In 1918, the night after the Tsar and his family were assassinated she, too, was shot dead by the Communists.. The others who have been commended as exemplary men and women are Manche Masemola, who was a 16-year-old Anglican convert who was killed by her animist parents in Sekhukhuneland, Transvsal South Africa, in 1928. They were frightened that she would leave them or refuse to marry. She was a member of the Pedi tribe and is buried alongside her sister on a remote hillside. Her younger sister died a few days after her. The burial site has become a place of pilgrimage for South African Christians.

Lucian Tapiedi of Papua New Guinea was killed during the Japanese invasion in 1942. Born in Taupota, Tapiedi's father had been a sorcerer but he became a Christian and a teacher.

After the invasion the Japanese murdered many missionaries. Tapiedi helped a group trying to escape. They came to a village inhabited by the Orokaiva tribe, some of whom proved to be hostile. He died after he refused to abandon the missionaries with whom he worked. His killer, a tribesman, later converted to Christianity. His killer took the name Hivijapa Lucian and built a church dedicated to the memory of Tapiedi.

Bonhoeffer, John And King.

In 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian , was killed by the Nazis at Flossenburg. His godson sat alone in the centre of the nave of the Abbey and played Sarabande's Cello Suite during the service of dedication. Bonhoeffer had run an illegal seminary at Finenwalde until it was shut by the SS in 1937 and he was arrested after he became involved in a failed putsch against Adolph Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer was part of the Confessing Church of Germany which was founded in reaction to the pro-Nazi German Protestant Church. Esther John, of Pakistan, was a Presbyterian evangelist thought to have been killed by a Muslim fanatic in 1960. She moved to Pakistan after India was partitioned and continued to develop her faith in secret. After seven years, she fled, terrified of being forced to marry a Muslim. She took the name of Esther John and started to evangelise the villages around Chichawatni, teaching local women to read. She often worked with them in the fields. In 1960 she was found murdered in her bed. Her killer was never found. Martin Luther King, the Baptist pastor and civil rights leader, and holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, granted in 1967, was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, shortly after he saw several laws protecting equal rights placed on the statute books. Dr.King once said: "If physical death is the price I must pay to free my brothers and sisters from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive."

Zhiming, Luwum and Romero Wang Zhiming was a Chinese pastor in the Yunnan region, killed during the Cultural Revolution in 1973, aged 66. He defied Mao's orders to humiliate landlords or to denounce foreign powers. He continued holding secret services for nearly 3,000 Christians, whose church had been closed. Arrested by Red Guards, he was executed at a mass rally. In October 1980 the Chinese Communists "rehabilitated" him and offered his family compensation.

Janani Luwum of Uganda was the Anglican Archbishop murdered during the military