Image from It's about PEOPLE!! - Fr. Kevin Mullins on the St Columbans Mission Society

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Ministering in a city where crime is pervasive and murders occur at an alarming rate, Columban Father Kevin Mullins knows he's been very fortunate, writes Joseph Kolb for the Catholic News Service.

While he has personally escaped the violence, the Australian-born priest has been touched by it through the lives of his parishioners at Corpus Christi Church in the poor neighborhood of Puerto de Anapra in Mexico.

During Advent 2008, though, there was a time when parishioners and fellow priests were praying for his soul, thinking he had been killed during an attack by drug cartel gunmen.

"I have been quite lucky," Father Mullins said. "It was actually an Anglican minister who had a heart attack and was found in his car a few blocks away from my house."

In Mexico, the sight of a priest slumped over in a car is not all that unusual. In 2005, Father Luis Velasquez Romero was found in his vehicle in Tijuana, handcuffed and shot six times. In 2009 a priest and two seminarians were gunned down in their car, dragged out then shot again because a relative of one of the seminarians was believed to be associated with one of the country's notorious drug cartels.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against the cartels in 2006 more than 40,000 people have been killed, including 12 priests. A survey from the Catholic Media Center in Mexico found that in 2010 more than 1,000 priests were extorted, 162 threatened with death and two kidnapped and killed.

Prior to Calderon's aggressive action, three priests had been killed in the preceding decade.

FULL STORY

Priests face death, extortion amid Mexican cartel violence (St Louis Review/Catholic News Service)

OTHER STORY AND PHOTO CREDIT

It's about PEOPLE!! - Fr. Kevin Mullins (St Columbans Mission Society)