CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) -- Priests in South Africa are targets for robbers because they are believed to have money, clergy said after a French missionary became the fourth priest to be murdered in the country in 2009 when he was shot dead in a robbery at his home.

"I don't think priests are targeted in particular, but with South Africa's culture of crime anyone who is thought to have something worth stealing is at risk," said Dominican Father Mike Deeb, director of the justice and peace department of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference.

Five people, including three teenagers, have been arrested for the Dec. 7 murder of Missionaries of Africa Father Louis Blondel, 70, in Diepsloot in the Pretoria Archdiocese. The missionary priest had lived in South Africa since 1987.

The robbers, who made off with less than $10 and a few possessions, entered through a small window and shot Father Blondel when he opened his bedroom door.

"It's frightening and tragic that children were used for the crime," said Father Deeb, noting that the youngest suspect is 12 years old and small enough to get through a tiny window in the house next to the church where Father Blondel lived.

"It makes you wonder, what are we breeding in our society?" Father Deeb said in a Dec. 14 telephone interview from Pretoria.

South Africa is among the most crime-ridden countries in the world, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. About 18,000 people were murdered in the country during the year ending March 2009, South African Police Service reported. South Africa has a population of about 48 million.

"Where people have no respect for life, priests are sitting targets," Father Deeb said, adding that in a poor settlement "a priest living in a relatively simple building among shacks will be seen as well off."

Most priests who run parishes in South African townships live in a brick building next to the church and community hall.

Father Daniel Matsela Mahula, 34, from the Klerksdorp Diocese, was killed in February by hitchhikers for whom he had stopped, and Father Lionel Sham, 66, parish priest of Mohlakeng in the Johannesburg Archdiocese, was killed in March after being robbed and abducted from his home.

Father Ernst Plochl, a 78-year-old Austrian missionary of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Mariannhill, was killed in May in the Kokstad Diocese.

"Priests are more vulnerable than most other people in South Africa because of the nature of our work, what we have to do," said Passionist Father Kieran Creagh, who was shot twice in the chest by robbers in 2007 at the hospice he runs at his parish in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria.

"A lot of crimes targeting religious use the knowledge that we will respond to a call for help, whatever time of day or night," he said in a Dec. 15 telephone interview from his parish, which is not far from the parish of the late Father Blondel.

"I live in fear more than I used to. If I go out of the township at night then I don't come back until the next day," said Father Creagh, 46, a missionary from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who said he plans to return home in 2010 after construction is finished on of a small conference center next to the parish's hospice and AIDS clinic.

"This is not a good way to live, feeling jumpy when there's a strange black man at the door," he said, noting that his parishioners worry for his safety.

"I am the only non-African for miles in this township, which has half a million people living in shacks," Father Creagh said.

"It's a challenge for the church to keep priests secure and out of danger without having them live in a castle," he said. The local church also "needs to find a way of dealing with Sunday collections," as "word gets around that priests have this money," he said.

Father Creagh said he lived with violence in Northern Ireland, "but that was home and this is not."

"I don't think I have a future in South Africa with its AIDS, crime and poverty. I don't feel that I belong here anymore," he said.

But a Detroit priest who has worked in southern Africa for more than 40 years said he is "here to stay."

"My life has been entangled with the struggle to free South Africa from the curse of apartheid" and with the "struggle to meet the challenges" that followed its demise in 1994, Mariannhill Father Casimir Paulsen said in a Dec. 15 e-mail message. He is responsible for two parishes, one rural and the other semi-urban, in the Mthatha Diocese.

"I come from Detroit, Mich., which was once the murder capital of the world, so I am no stranger to violence," said Father Paulsen, 73, who was tortured by South African police during the apartheid era.

"I feel that it is better that I stick with them, although I would be free to escape the violence here by going back to the States. But would I be guaranteed, in my original home country, that I would not experience violence there? Not at all," he said.

Father Paulsen suggested that all parishes in South Africa establish justice and peace groups and train interested parishioners in ways "of seeing what some of the causes of problems in our neighborhoods are, and trying to tackle them."

Churches and the government should work together on a "long overdue" program "to emphasize morality and ethics in our schools, in our hospitals, in all our government institutions," he said.

Community involvement in tackling crime is a key to reducing the crime rate, Father Deeb said, noting that help from the Diepsloot community enabled the police to catch Father Blondel's killers "so quickly."

"The church needs to gets its people involved in community policing forums," Father Deeb said. "This is a big challenge."

Copyright © 2009 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops