(ANS – Reda) – Sorrowful and premature mourning has come the Salesians in  Poland and the Vice Province of Zambia: yesterday morning, 16 July, Fr Zygmunt Labun while in a car with his brother and sister-in-law was hit by a local train at Reda, in Poland, at an unmanned level crossing. Fr Labun, originally from the Warsaw Province was in Poland for a series of medical checks.

Fr Joseph Czerwinski, another Polish Salesian missionary who is in Poland in these days, sent news of the tragic event to the Superior of the Vice Province of Zambia, Fr George Chalissery, who at present is in Zimbabwe awaiting the arrival of the casket of Don Bosco.

Fr Labun, 47 years of age went to Zambia in the early ’90s and there completed his formation and received the orders. He was Vice Rector of the community in Kabwe.

When he heard the news, the Rector Major, through the Councillor for the Africa and Madagascar Region, Fr Guillermo Basañes wrote. “Full of affection, sympathy and prayer we gather round the family, the Vice Province of Zambia and the Warsaw Province from which he originally came. Humanly speaking it is a great loss, and we can understand an event like this only in the light of faith, which invites us to resign ourselves to the Will of God rather than to the absurd or to chance. In the light of God, as Paul declares, ‘in everything God works for good with those who love him,’ who in Jesus Christ is Lord of the living and of the dead”.

Published 17/07/2012