Category: WM Special

There’s nothing more depressing for a missionary who lives and works at the extreme periphery of the Church than reading articles and books on the Church’s mission. Experts and theologians tell us how we should be, and what actions we should take to address the new and major challenges of missionary life. Then, in fact, missionaries remain basically isolated.  Over time, every missionary learns to discern the things he can do, those in which he has some talent, and then, with God’s help, he tries to do something at the service of the Gospel. The failures are inevitably more numerous than the successes. Then, of course, you are told you have acted in isolation. You start doubting whether you have done everything wrong, or whether you have betrayed your vocation and the charism of your institution. Or whether you are only a missionary because of the label that has been sewn onto you.  Some years ago, I enrolled to attend a spiritual retreat led by a great theologian and writer on missionary themes. I had read his texts and found them inspiring. The topic under discussion, “Challenges for the Mission Today,” was of great interest to me. The course was to be held in Malawi, an African country normally considered a tourist paradise. But it was not held because the famous theologian cancelled it at the last minute, apparently because he was told that, in Malawi, he would be at risk of contracting malaria.  I decided to use that week to make another trip to the Nuba Mountains, region of Sudan, where there were Christians for whom it was a luxury to celebrate the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It was something they could only afford to celebrate once every two or three years. The experience immuned me to fine words, spoken or written. I learned to believe more in the wisdom of simple people – and to the stimuli and calls we receive from them – rather than in the wisdom of the learned intellectuals.   The future is passing by Of course, I did not stop thinking about what I did and still do. I continued reading all the materials that are written on the topic of mission life, at least in the texts that I can find. The duty to keep alive, alert and vigilant, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel, is valid not just for the sake of waiting the return of the Lord, but also because it is an integral part of the life of the missionaries – in order to deepen their knowledge of the society and culture of the people among whom they live. After this long introduction, one written by a missionary of the streets – or as they say in Nairobi, a “jua kali” missionary (Swahili for “one who operates under the hot sun”) – it is clear that the following list is the result of a highly personal vision. I do not want to use words like “pneumatology,”

A theological dissertation was defended at Manila’s De la Salle University in April 2010. It is entitled “Understanding Ancestor Reverence in the Benguet Kankanaey Indigenous Tradition: Towards a Dialogue with the Christian Tradition.” The author, Leonila L. Taray, also a member of the Kankanaeys of the Cordilleras, writes that the centuries-old indigenous peoples’ (IPs) traditional practices are still quite alive today. Although the findings of the study refer to Kankanaey society, we may also apply them to other IPs and to lowland Christian Filipinos. Taray writes that, even after death, the departed “remain as members of the family and the clan,” that “they have the power to grant blessings, shower prosperity, long life, and healthy life for their descendants on earth. It is also within their power to cause illness and misfortunes to the living.” Their mode of action is rooted in clan lineage, consanguinity and affinity.  The Kankanaeys also believe that the spirits of those who recently died are perceived to linger on earth for some time. That is why the living invite the departed to join in the rituals, to partake in eating and drinking in ordinary gatherings. This belief is shown when the living put in a few drops of liquor before drinking. In Metro Manila, where the men informally gather in side alleys over drinks and finger food, a common practice in the gathering is to empty a few drops in the glass and pour the contents into the ground. We have heard of an incident where some professionals with PhDs, during a tennis break, poured out a drink to the spirits.    The seen and the unseen The Kankanaeys behave and act in the conviction that daily life is linked with the social economic, and the religious. Because the departed and the living are integrated as one, religion permeates all aspects of life. Taray writes: “Those who lived in the past continue to relate with and affect the lives of those in the present; those in the sky world continue to join and bless those on earth during the performance of rituals or ceremonies and those in the underworld are enjoined likewise. Thus, the Benguet Kankanaeys perceive the world as an integrated world of the living and the dead. Humanity does not stand apart from nature.” While Greek-inspired Western theology speaks of the natural and the supernatural, the Kankanaeys and Filipino popular religiosity prefer to speak of the seen and the unseen. This way of thinking is also in the Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.” That is why Filipino popular religiosity has the practice of pasing-tabi. For instance, before throwing water outside the window even when nobody is seen to be around, the typical Filipino will say, “Tabi, po!” (please step aside). The practice reflects the belief that the unseen spirits can get wet and perhaps take revenge for the act.   Concept of the departed Taray continues:

“Women, who know only too well the price of conflict, are also better equipped than men to prevent or resolve it. For generations, women have been educators for peace, both in their families and in their society. They have proven indispensable in terms of building bridges rather than walls,” said Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations.  For instance, in Rwanda, the parliamentary election in September 2008 gave women 45 from the 80 seats at stake, resulting in the world’s first national legislative chamber with a female majority in a modern nation. The previous election, in 2003, had already given women 48.75% of the seats in Parliament.  Women oversee also institutions of justice that are critical to the country’s peace and stability. Since 2003, Ms. Aloysia Cyanzaire is the first female justice of the country, after heading previously the traditional courts established to try the less serious crimes in the 1994 genocide.  Aloisea Inyumba is, nowadays, a senator in the Rwandan Parliament. But, before that, she was a member of the Unity and Reconciliation Commission and minister of Family, Gender and Social Affairs in the immediate aftermath of the genocide. All the time, she encouraged Tutsi and Hutu women to start talking to each other in order to bridge the gap of ethnical barriers.  In Nepal, for instance, women victims of violence demanded to take part at the peace negotiations between the government and Maoist rebels and, at the 2008 legislative elections, political parties had to include 50% of women in their lists.  In Colombia, women’s convoys with thousands of participants travel to some of the most dangerous areas of the country to speak up against the war and its consequences, namely, poverty, and occasionally negotiate with guerrillas. In the posters they carry, they wrote slogans like “Women’s bodies are not spoils of war.”  

It was the popular Oprah Winfrey program and “there I learned about Congo, widely called the worst place on earth to be a woman. Awakened to the atrocities – millions dead, women being raped and tortured, children starving and dying in shocking numbers – I had to do something,” says this woman who, at 29, ran a photo business together with her boyfriend, in Portland (Oregon).  That same year, in September, Lisa Shannon ran her first marathon – more than a marathon, actually, 48 kilometers – to draw attention to this serious problem and raise some money. It took her almost eight hours and lots of pain. But she refused to give up. “Every half-kilometer represents a real woman’s life and the lives of her children. They will know that someone cares, that their lives are significant,” she said later. With that first run, she raised 28,000 dollars. In 2006, she completed her second 48-kilometer run, but this time joined by hundreds of other runners in ten states in the USA and four other countries, namely Germany and Ireland. The movement, Run for Congo Women, was thus born.  The money they raise goes to support Congolese women through a group called Women for Women International. This group sponsors more than a thousand war-affected Congolese women, who are raising more than 5,000 children, war orphans mainly. “They’ve lost everything, but they take children in when they can’t even feed their own properly,” says Lisa.  In January-February 2007, she made her first travel to Congo. For five weeks, she visited alone the South Kivu province. She went back in 2008. She could meet some of the women sponsored by her movement and even find, to her surprise, that one of them had named her newborn baby Lisa, probably the only one with such a name in the whole country.  Lisa, who is now 34, has just published her first book, A Thousand Sisters, where she details her experience in Congo. “In a place where no man with a gun is the good guy, I confront militias, massacres, murder cover-ups and unspeakable horror. Along the way, I am forced to learn lessons of survival, fear, gratitude and love from the women of Congo. A Thousand Sisters is a portrait of the world’s deadliest war through the intimate lens of friendship. It is a story of passion, hope, and my journey to carve out human bonds that cannot be touched by terror,” she wrote.  

“We will never, as a nation, move forward if we do not apologize to the women of this country for letting them down during the war; we will never, as a nation, know better days if we do not ask for the forgiveness of our mothers, sisters, partners and female compatriots for what we let them go through during the war. (…) As head of state, I apologize for the wrongs wrought on women; as Commander-in-Chief, I ask for forgiveness for the armed forces,” said President Koroma at the International Women’s Day.  “With this apology, Sierra Leone took an important symbolic step. A formal apology by the head of state is one of the simplest yet most fundamental measures that a government can take in fulfilling the right to reparations,” said International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) president, David Tolbert. Sierra Leone started, in 2008, the implementation of a reparation program and the ICJT has been urging President Koroma’s government to ensure that this program reaches more women victims, particularly those in rural areas, women who suffered sexual violence and war widows. Although the government initially estimated that around 5,000 victims of sexual violence would register, only about 3,000 have done so. It is possible that some women victims of sexual violence had come forward as part of the more than 11,000 who registered as war widows to avoid the stigma associated with sexual violation.  

Generose Namburho used to work as a nurse at a hospital in eastern Congo. One night, a number of Hutu militiamen invaded her home, killed her husband and tried to rape her. She screamed for help and the attackers hacked off her leg with a machete, cooked the amputated part and ordered her children to eat it. One son, 12 years old, refused and was killed. She saw everything, before fainting from the serious wound. Women are a particularly vulnerable group in armed conflicts. And rape has increasingly become a weapon of war as much as a machine-gun or a shell, used either by a regular army or by guerrilla groups, because spreading terror among civilian populations is a very common means to try and achieve their goals.  “War rape intimidates the enemy. It demoralizes the enemy. It makes women pregnant and thereby furthers the cause of genocide. It tampers with the identity of the next generation. It breaks up families. It disperses entire populations. It drives a wedge between family members. It extends the oppressor’s dominance into future generations,” says Sally J. Scholtz, a philosophy professor at the Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA).  In Africa, for instance, women and young girls, “as symbols of the honor of their communities, are raped to humiliate the women, the men in their families and their entire community,” says Véronique Aubert, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Africa Program.  According to Aubert, “rape and other forms of sexual violence have been used so extensively and with such impunity that we can only conclude that government security forces and armed opposition groups have been using these crimes as part of a deliberate strategy to instill terror in the civilian population.”   Especially vulnerable Violence usually associated with rape and sexual assault leaves women traumatized – physically as well as psychologically – in their most intimate being – sometimes injured beyond any possible reparation in their bodies – incontinent, pregnant against their will and sometimes contaminated with diseases such as syphilis and AIDS. And, if they manage to survive and go back home, they are rejected by their own families for having given birth to a child “of the enemy.”  In Africa, for instance, apart from raising the children, women have a very important role in the household economy, mainly in rural areas. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), recent estimates say that women provide approximately 70% of agricultural labor and produce 90% of all food. Killed in armed conflicts, displaced, sexually assaulted and with subsequent diseases, they can no longer give their contribution to support the family.  The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in a survey published last February to assess the real vulnerability of women in conflict areas, recalls that “women and children are the object of special respect and must be protected, in particular, against all forms of indecent assault (Articles 76 and 77 of Protocol I additional to the 1977 Geneva Conventions),” but, under humanitarian law, women

A few days back, a friend of mine sent to me a very interesting book: The Schism: Catholics without Pope. The author, Riccardo Chiaberge, introduces 14 very interesting and dynamic persons, people oriented and dedicated to link new aspects of life with the Gospel. I would say that they all are charismatic persons, in whose performance the Holy Spirit is present and active. They find themselves in frontier conditions, for example: a sister in Africa facing AIDS; a doctor in a hospital for infertile couples dealing with issues of fertilization in vitro; a medical researcher dealing with stem cells; a theologian striving to reformulate the theology of creation within the context of modern cosmology, and so forth. The common bottom line is that all of them are operating in frontier situations. All of them are motivated by a real passion and compassion for people vexed by problems without solutions. What they are doing might not be hundred per cent in line with the general statement of the hierarchical Church but, all in all, I would say they are real artisans of the Kingdom of God. They enjoy sound intentions and the will to be in communion with the Church, though their initiatives are not as yet fully in line with the general statements of the magisterium. In the above mentioned artisans of the Kingdom, a new child is conceived. The hierarchy cannot prepare the ‘trouser’ or the ‘skirt’ before the new creature is born. At the origin of conception, there is the Holy Spirit, not the hierarchy. The hierarchy, later on, will welcome to the community the newly-born child. A certain amount of tension between the charismatic and the institutional elements in the Church is inevitable.  The Holy Spirit is the first agent of evangelization (Redemptoris Missio, 21) and precedes the full establishment of the Church; He sets the process of personal conversion and of the coming of the Kingdom into motion. The full belonging to the Church will come later. The Church cannot control the dynamism of the Holy Spirit, but only recognizes His presence and action with the passage of time through a challenging journey of discernment. Therefore, Chiaberge’s labelling the 14 protagonists as schismatic faithful is by all means inappropriate. They are not separated from the Church; they are not rebels. They are simply ahead of the formal approval of the Church which cannot but come after years of testing and experiences.   Present in all cultures  The Spirit has been present in the world from the beginning of creation. He is present in cultures, peoples, religions even before the Gospel is proclaimed in that given environment. The Spirit is manifested in the traces of truth, wisdom, charity, solidarity, patience, piety, faith and hope which are present in every culture and religion. The philosopher Saint Justin was well conversant with the Greek, Roman and Hebrew wisdom. He coined the expression: Semina Verbi (seeds of the Word) to convey his conviction that the Word and the Spirit of

We believe in one God who reveals Himself in three persons: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We proclaim this reality of God in our prayers, and we find the foundations of this in the Word of God. Yet, if we read the Bible carefully, we realize that God revealed Himself in time, in a build-up of self disclosing. The very same can be said of the Holy Spirit. Of course, He has always been there. He chose to show Himself little by little. This is why the authors of the Bible, inspired by the same Holy Spirit, recognized His presence in a crescendo of knowledge and intuition. The Spirit of God is present at creation, at the very start of our adventure. In the first verses of Genesis, we are told that God created the universe and the “Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” Then the “earth had no form and was void, darkness was over the deep.” It is a very depressing situation. The land has no shape and it is deserted. Darkness is a negative reality throughout the Bible. It represents the contrary of God’s will: light, salvation, life. At the beginning, creation is still in chaos, which means death and it is in antithesis to what will come later: harmony, life, beauty. Creation is the moment when God refuses the negative and opens the way to a new reality. Over the shapeless and void, hovers the Spirit of God. The Hebrew word used here (merahefet) is used only two other times in the Bible. It has the meaning of shacking, flying. Yet, later commentators – both Jews and Christians – read this word to mean “to brood.” However it is interpreted, we see the presence of God through His Spirit. A presence that means birth of a new reality and care for creation. The Spirit is present at Creation. Even the psalms remind us of that. “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and the face of the earth is renewed” (104:30). The Spirit will be present at the end, at the moment of judgment. The Spirit is present throughout salvation history and escorts the human being in his journeys towards God. The word used in this text to refer to the Spirit is ruah, literally wind. While the meaning of ruah changed in time, often, the presence of God’s Spirit is linked to wind. It is with a puff of breath that God gives life to the human being in Genesis 2:7. It is in the gentle murmur of the breeze that Elijah encounters God on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:12ff). In later books, ruah becomes more and more a word related to restoring life. In Ezekiel 37, the dry bones are revived with the ruah hayyim, the breath of life. After Israel returned from exile in Babylon, the prophets understood a deeper reality: they were able to bring forth the Word of God because of the action of the Spirit of

If you want to cultivate peace, protect Creation,” this is the theme for 2010 World Day of Peace, celebrated on January 1. This time around, Pope Benedict XVI decided to focus on an important issue: caring for Creation is vital for life on the planet. This is a human right. We all have the right to see Creation well preserved for us and our future generations. This is also the will of God, who entrusted the human being with “tilling the earth and taking care of it” (Gen. 2:15). The Maasai of Kenya have an apt saying: “We do not own the Earth; we are simply guarding it for our children.” It is not by chance that the motto ‘Justice and Peace’ in many international gatherings has been modified, adding ‘and responsibility for Creation.’ The Pope’s message wishes to raise awareness about the strong bond that exists in our globalized and interconnected world between protecting the Creation and cultivating peace. It is not a novelty that insecurity, war and many abuses of human rights have been done to gain access to natural resources. The fight against indigenous people in the Amazon Basin is an example in point. Today, we see similar issues raised in the civil war in Darfur and Malakal area in the Sudan. The war in the Great Lake Region is as much power and political control, as a fight for the right to exploit resources. Undoubtedly, when a group of people wishes to take control of natural resources against the plans of the local population, abuse of human rights and conflict will ensue. The answer to these tensions lies on the sustainable use of Creation. God has given us precious resources, it is up to us to use them well and in a way that favors development. For instance, deforestation is a major problem in many countries. The world market wants more and more wood for furniture, building and other applications. Precious woods are highly sought after. When there is a high demand, there is also the incentive to respond by providing goods. However, deforestation leads to depletion of water resources and erosion. Deforested ground is not always good for agriculture, so that local communities do not really benefit from logging. Instead of cutting down forests, local communities can be trained to use renewable natural resources to make a profit. For instance, many powerful medicines are prepared with flowers and herbs from tropical forests. A community that looks after the environment and save its riches, will benefit from preserving the original status of their region. Another way to guard Creation is to avoid pollution. In reality, we will never be able to live in a pollution-free environment. Every living being creates pollution. However, we can minimize our impact on Creation by recycling, lowering poisonous emissions, and find alternatives to plastic packaging, excessive water use, polluting mining, etc. Leading a more sustainable life means having less impact on the environment, giving nature the time to recover from pollution,