“It is due to the prayers of my well-wishers that I am alive. My captors did not ill-treat me. They fed me even when they were fasting,” said Father Uzhunnalil, who reached home after 556 days in captivity. On the morning of March 4, 2016, Father Tom Uzhunnalil was praying in the chapel of an old age home in Aden,   Yemen, where he was stationed, when he heard gun shots he stepped outside and saw the security guards lying in a pool of blood. What followed remains etched in his memory – he was witness to the deaths of four nuns among the16 people shot dead before he was taken captive. He was given a rousing welcome at home, which is fitting and Christian. But are we celebrating such tragic events forgetting the values underlying? He is not the first priest who gets kidnapped and released Fr Alexis Prem Kumar SJ, who worked for three years as Afghanistan country director for Jesuit Refugee Service in Herat province, was abducted by Taliban gunmen in June 2014. He has been released after eight months in captivity with the assistance of the Indian government. There is nothing to be too jubilant here, because his abductors never intended to kill FrTom. He was a tool in their hand to bargain for the ransom. It is the Oman government that took the lead in getting him released after a papal representative visited Oman. Sultan Qaboos bin said that following a request from the Vatican to assist in the rescue of a Vatican employee, the Sultanate transferred him  on September 12  to Muscat in preparation for his return home.  In the end, who really won in this kidnapping story? It is not very unusual in the Arabian peninsula and adjoining areas of the Middle East to kidnap foreign individuals for extorting money. This has nothing to do with religion although the kidnappers mask their faces. Who knows if the senseless killings were intended to add price value to the kidnapped person. What were the terms and conditions of the release? The world would not know it. Beyond doubt the Church was at the receiving end; she lost six nuns of the Missionaries of Charity in that country. The humanitarian activity in anarchist Yemen cost the Church dearly. But it is part of the Church’s daring steps to live in the footsteps of the crucified one. It is not jubilant success story as the world sees it, but a tragedy of the nature of crucifixion. But why? For taking a stand on human dignity and divine glory of man every where and any where in the world. While we thank the Lord for Fr Tom’s release, we should also remember and thank them who help others to live as human beings. We should resolve to stand by man wherever and whenever he suffers crucifixion and degradation.  Terry Waite of Britain was negotiating the release of Western hostages in the Middle East for  the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1980 and he was abducted  by Iranian based armed men and kept a hostage for 1,763 days in captivity before his release in November 1991. He wrote, “It was morally strengthening to be able to stand on truth. When they beat me on the soles of the feet with cable I felt, of course, acute pain. I couldn’t walk for a week after that. But I felt a sense of pity and a sense also, I admit, of revulsion against those who commit such acts on someone who was totally defenceless” … “Somehow it’s developing the ability to find your centre, to be self-centred in the best sense of that word, and to allow that centre to grow and to flourish and somehow not to lose hope and a belief can enable you to have hope. I have religious belief, yes.”  The values of love, compassion, care and understanding, which lie at the heart of Christianity and of any religious tradition worth its soul sustained the unjust sufferer. William Butler Yeats said: “But I being vulnerable have only my dignity. I have spread my dignity at your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dignity.” This dignity is the essence of man.