Category: Frontline

Frontline

A New Challenge for Mission

Everything started when we listened to the people and discovered that the biggest problem was internalized poverty. People lose their sense of life, turn inward, become self-absorbed and refuse to believe that things can get better, that they have the resources to change a crisis into an evolution. Self-esteem is reduced to the minimum and leaves room for graver symptoms that can turn into a terrible psychiatric disease like depression.

Frontline

Bethany’s Nursery School

One day, those who attend the Comboni Sisters’ nursery school at Bethany and the many other thousands of Palestinian and Jewish children, who now live in the shadow of the wall of hatred and division, will also dwell in concord and peace – without walls and barbed wires. This is, at least, our dream and our hope.

Frontline

The Joy of Simple Gestures

Fr. Vincenzo Bordo, a missionary who manages a soup kitchen and three Family-Houses for boys in Seongnam (close to Seoul, South Korea’s capital), is quite happy with the kind of life he has been leading for twenty years. It is his daily routine that fills him with joy: to beg out of love; to bow in front of the poor; to extend a caress to the boys before sending them to bed; to praise the Lord before falling asleep. Amid the daily endeavors, these simple gestures give him serenity.

Frontline

The Power of Compassion

The kindness and compassion that Sr. Brenda Imdeke showed towards a woman, defaced by a terrible illness, conquered the hearts of Muslims in a little town in Kenya. Kind gestures have the power to make wonders.

Frontline

Delayed Peace

Murder, rape, torture, pillage and displacement of a large number of civilians in Darfur, have turned this Sudanese region into a hell. Portuguese Comboni Missionary, Fr. Feliz da Costa, who has been working in Sudan for 20 years – the last three in Nyala – is a privileged witness of the crimes committed in the territory and of the people’s longing for peace.

Frontline

“Jesus was a Grand Zen Master”

A Korean-born Maryknoll priest recognized as an “honorary” Seon (Zen) Master maintains that Seon is a way of praying rather than a religion, and Jesus was a “grand Seon master.” According to Father Kim Alfonso Hak-boum, who has been learning and practicing Seon meditation in Japan and Korea since the mid-1990s, Seon can also be an effective tool for inculturation and interreligious dialogue.

Frontline

Desert, My Cathedral

“Islam transformed the life of Charles de Foucauld,” Brother Ventura said. His own, no doubt, equally has been deeply affected by his long sojourn in the prayerful isolated Christian enclave in the middle of the Algerian desert, a sort of cathedral shaped by Nature.

Frontline

The Street Missionary

In Seongnam, a commuter community close to Seoul, the South Korean capital, Fr. Vincenzo Bordo is a very well-known figure. Indeed, it is not easy not to know him, because he is a sort of a “street missionary.” His goal: to feed the hoboes, drunkards, ex-cons, the poor and elderly, the mental cases, the disabled – all of those who have no permanent place of their own and are “street people.”

Frontline

Diamond Mary

Sr. Mary Batchelor celebrated 60 years of religious life, 60 years dedicated to God and to the education of thousands of young people in Australia and Africa. Her students in Mapuordit, Southern Sudan, call her Mary, our diamond.

Frontline

“I Am In Love With Kenya”

Filipino missionary Bro. Simplicio Buena Soliven has been working in Marsabit, a mission in the Eastern Province of Kenya, 250 km from Ethiopia, since last year. As a social minister, he is happy to share his faith, talents and knowledge with the Kenyan people, especially prisoners and youth. He is doing exactly what he wanted. And says: “I am in love with Kenya.”

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