The magnificent social work of Columban Father Shay Cullen and his PREDA Foundation constitutes this month’s Special. For 36 years, the intrepid Irish Columban missionary and his team have been rescuing children from drug addiction, petty crime and sex slavery and helping them to secure a better future with dignity and respect. In their mission, they have to fight a vicious social underground of child abusers, abetted by politicians and policemen, and challenge a pervasive indifference towards an ominous crime against childhood.
In an opposite latitude, concretely in the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Fortaleza, Comboni Father Rino Bonvini runs a mental health project to address the needs of people whose life vicissitudes and internalized poverty have burdened them with mental disturbances and depression, the world’s fourth most debilitating illness, according to the World Health Organization. A psychiatrist by profession, he tries to combine spirituality and psychiatric sciences for the welfare and liberation of the poor who are mentally sick.
Both missionaries have heeded the call of reality. Fr. Shay cannot ignore what is happening to thousands of children that abject poverty is casting into the streets where they are exploited or led to crime and, eventually, end up in squalid prisons or youth centers. Fr. Rino started his experience when he woke to the awareness that victims of mental illnesses develop a warped approach to life and God. Both missionaries feel called by a liberating God and cultivate a spirituality of freedom that inspires them to work for the release of captives from evil, poverty, oppression and all kinds of human suffering.
Teamwork is one of their strengths. The image of the Church conveyed by their projects, is that of a dynamic and active Church, attentive to the signs of the times and socially committed to those on the margins of history; a Church with a faith in action, that is at the service of the biblical God who incarnated in history to rescue humanity and bring it to the freedom of His Kingdom; a missionary and outreaching Church which does not resign itself to circumstances no matter how bad they may be but, with faith and courage, aims at building a more humane world. Thus, it is in the antipodes of a devotional and pietistic Church for which faith is a private responsibility, and salvation, a personal gift.
Fr. Shay, recalling the insults and hardships he faced along the way – arrest, deportation and even assassination threats – notes: “We had to be prophetic. That is what mission is all about – just do what Jesus did. We felt that we could not cover up any abuse. We had to speak out.”
In his faith deeply rooted in the Gospel, he quotes St. James when the Apostle says that “faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26) and Matthew 25 in the well-known scene of the final judgment where it is affirmed that Jesus identifies Himself with the poor and the oppressed and that what is done for them is the only binding criterion to qualify for eternal life. It is crystal clear that faith cannot be divorced from life and, in any way, accept injustice.
Meanwhile, “new directions and a new pastoral approach within the Church” and a “prophetic pastoral accompaniment,” are what a group of Filipino lay Catholics is precisely asking from bishops, priests and religious in a public letter on the occasion of the “Discernment on the Prophetic Calling of the Lay Faithful in Philippine Society” scheduled for this month. “Our nation is faced with problems of inequality and inequity, environmental degradation, fighting and strife and a crisis in leadership,” they affirm. May they be granted the prophetic guidance they are asking for.
