A prayer meeting is a group of lay people getting together for the purpose of prayer as a group. Prayer meetings are typically conducted outside regular services by one or more members of the clergy or other forms of religious leadership, but they may also be initiated by decision of non-leadership members as well.
The Acteal massacre was a massacre of 45 people attending a prayer meeting of Catholic Indigenous townspeople, including a number of children and pregnant women, who were members of the pacifist group Las Abejas ("The Bees"), in the small village of Acteal in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Right-wing paramilitary group Máscara Roja murdered the victims on December 22, 1997, while the Government of Mexico first admitted responsibility for the massacre in September 2020.