On the afternoon of April 28th, we had the meeting of the missionary team of Carapira where participated the Comboni Missionaries, the Comboni missionary Sisters and the CLM. The meeting had as its theme “SEE”, from the reflection of the letter from the General of the MCCJ on the 150th anniversary of the plan of Comboni, taking as a guiding line for reflection the question “what is the reality that is challenging us today as a missionary opportunity and with what universal issues?” The evening began with the adoration of the Most Holy. Right away began the works, for which we formed three thematic groups: 1) Health and Women; 2) Education and Parishes; and 3) Justice and Peace, Questioning over land and labor. Each group makes a list of the different views on every issue from the perspective of the question placed at the beginning, later in a general plenary; we all share the results of the work. A summary was prepared that will be used for the preparation of the next meeting of the team that will address the JUDGING. We conclude the Comboni family evening with a typical dish of Mexican cuisine “Posole” prepared by Beatriz CLM.
English
Another moment of Comboni Family
Last weekend I had the chance to participate in the assembly of the Europe province of the Comboni missionary Sisters. In Madrid they reunited sisters arrived from Berlin, Paris, UK, Portugal and Spain each of them with the hope of sharing their day-to-day missionary call.
I know that some people see the assemblies as a few days of long sitting and hearing many words. I think the assemblies of the Comboni Family are moments to share experiences and create missionary illusions.
This province born with the illusion of understanding and propose significant missionary presence in Europe, at a time when the mission is conceived not only as a geographical shift from north to south of the world, but as a meeting with all “South’s” that are scattered throughout the world, for a meeting with the brothers and sisters who live apart or are excluded. We met with our hearts full of missionary experiences on African, American, Asian soil that want to show in Europe the need to live in communion with those peoples more poor and abandoned. These hearts cannot close here but also be open here in Europe where there are victims of exclusion, exploitation, poverty … Knit in community, in family, a prophetic life style means to side with the underdog, of those who has less opportunities. Knowing that so many situations in the South are still bleeding but been aware that in this global village the interrelationship among everything, the interdependence makes us stand beside those who suffer anywhere in the globe, in solidarity one with the other, seeking a better world for all, where the causes, actions and consequences of our chores are strongly interlinked in this global village we inhabit.
From this fact we reflected on the need for reconciliation in our communities, in our environment. Only from the love that transforms the heart, and then generates life, we can offer an increasingly fraternal relations, understanding us as daughters and children of the same Father (Abba), enables us to rise above differences and difficulties in establishing bonds of brotherhood.
It has resonate strongly the Comboni´s intuition of the Cenacle of Apostles be made of religious brothers, priests, religious sisters, secular and lay as one family. This gift of the Comboni charism challenges us to think together, to work together, to pray together and suggest as a family the need for mission today.
The challenges of ministerial service, the missionary presence wherever we are, in the work of missionary animation (opening doors and windows to make known the life that is in need of our support in many corners of the world), the work with situations of South’s situations in Europe like immigrants, trafficking persons, peripheries where commitment to issues of justice and peace is necessary to address situations like a closeness hug to attend people… all networked with the lay that everyday are engaged in these realities, with other congregations, with social entities, with a real networking that fortify the action of every individual and institution engaged in this service to give life in abundance to those who need it most.
Revitalize everyday our community life, where everyone is protagonists, where we may propose a more humane style of life, sustainable, close to the needy, open and welcoming to those around us.
The formation that help us grow in our spirituality, to be attentive to new realities, to be prepared for a better service, which balances our doing with reflection and prayer that helps us to be and work with sense to the everyday of our lives.
To cap we also celebrate the 50th years of votes of three of the sisters present, witness of fidelity and devotion that encourages us in our missionary journey.
Therefore each assembly of the Comboni Family, and this one confirmed, it remains to be a place to pray and dream a better world, to walk together on the path of Emmaus to discover the presence of Jesus that is on our side and unfolds and open our eyes to the realities of this world, encouraged and precedes us on the way to Galilee.
Thanks for these days
Alberto de la Portilla
The ecclesial vision that emerges from the “Plan” of Comboni
“Comboni – since he believed in the unity of the human race and in the fact that the Gospel must be addressed to everyone – adopts an attitude of prophetic demystification of that form of cultural racism…” (Prof. Fulvio De Giorgi, Consiglio di Direzione di Archivio Comboniano).
Contextualisation
Any up-to-date reflection on the “Plan” of Comboni that is not simply historical but something that is spiritual, pastoral and missiological (made from the point of view of faith, of belonging to the Catholic Church and of Comboni ‘offspring’), must start with contextualisation, without adopting a level of interpretation that is direct and unmediated, as if it were a modern text. Actualisation must avoid the danger of a certain sort of over-simplified actualising fundamentalism; this, at best, would amount to trivialisation or, at worst, serious distortion. No text of the period (not only those of Comboni) can be read without contextual filters: otherwise, for example, anyone who at that historical moment was against racism could risk to be seen today as a racist.
It is not simply a matter of translating the language of the XIX century into the language of today (using a method that is not simply one of historical semantics): even if just this understandable aspect indicates a much greater problem: that of the forms of cultural (and spiritual) continuity/discontinuity between ourselves and our Fathers and Mothers of the past, between our vision and theirs.
Comboni saw himself within the Catholic Church: but so do we, today. However, the Catholic Church is a living organism that is growing: it has therefore ‘grown’ with respect to the XIX Century. And this growth includes self-awareness: the ecclesial vision itself. We cannot, therefore, feel ‘perfectly comfortable’ in the attire of the nineteenth century: if we did, then this would mean everything was at a standstill, that Christianity was not living but dead, and that our task would not be historical but archaeological…
Actuality and prophecy
In short, it is clearly evident that the ecclesiological paradigm of Comboni, his ecclesial vision, was that of Vatican I and not that of Vatican II and that his culture, within which many aspects of his ecclesial vision were defined, was that of Lombardy-Venice of the XIX century and not of the XXI century. So, then, what does this (obvious) statement mean for our interpretation? Which are the traits of continuity, actuality and prophecy and which are those of discontinuity within which there has been progress (growth)?
The closer the cultural elements of Comboni are to the Gospel, the more continuity there is: the Church proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a proposal of a liberating covenant offered by God to the whole human race (which – and it was not so obvious then as it is now – implies the unity of the human race: there is only one human race and all men and women are sons and daughters of God, equal in personal dignity). To such an extent that, in the heart of Europe, there grew the new cultural form of racism. Comboni was alien and opposed to such cultural developments. Racism implies two essential elements: 1. Human races exist (usually reduced to three); 2. There are inferior and superior races. Comboni – since he believed in the unity of the human race and in the fact that the Gospel must be addressed to everyone – adopts an attitude of prophetic demystification of that form of cultural racism. Here, moreover, there is not only continuity but also a permanent actuality in this approach because, whether in an explicit or, more often, a dissimulated form, there still persist today racist visions that are capable of finding a place even in the ecclesial vision.
Discontinuity as growth
Cultural elements of discontinuity, instead, are those most closely tied to the specifics of mentality and thought of the time: ‘geographic’, ethnographic and cultural ignorance of the Europeans regarding many parts of the planet and many layers of humanity; the existence – therefore – of mythical fantasies and of common traditional places (including religious ones: such as the so-called ‘curse of Ham’) which filled these cognitive lacunae and which today may seem to be ‘racial prejudice’ (they were prejudices, just as we all have prejudices but not racial prejudices since they did not share – as I have already stated – in the specific elements of that cultural form).
Methodologically, it is essential to understand these differences so as to be able to see the reflection on the “Plan” of Comboni against the background of his ecclesial vision and his prophetic actuality.
Unity, utility e simplicity
If we adopt the racist view, we will hold that European civilisation is superior and therefore destined to dominate others: condemning them to ‘separate’ development (apartheid) or ‘civilising them’ from above and outside some aspects of them, the better to rule and exploit them for the purposes of the Civilisation held to be superior. In the “Plan”, Comboni adopts an opposite paradigm: that of the unity of the human race. In this framework, it is possible that some peoples (historically speaking, these were the Europeans, but they might have been others) are the first, due to historical coincidences, to accomplish achievements to be considered positive (e.g. writing, literacy, medicine, science or technology): these achievements are then made known to all, they are shared and made available to ‘regenerate’ all of humanity, to improve, in other words, real existence by diminishing all forms of suffering, poverty and injustice, for the purposes of common usefulness. But this ‘civilisation’ (‘the sharing of the achievements of civilisation’) is not to be imposed from above or from outside: if this were the case, even with the best of intentions, asymmetry and therefore a possible imbalance and dominance would be introduced. Civilisation/sharing is to be proposed and carried out from below and within, under the immediate leadership of the beneficiaries, without deceit or complicated mediations but in simplicity: only then is it ‘re-generating’ (intrinsically emancipating). The results, consequently, will be generating and generators, creative and innovating, autochthonous and original, not extrinsically similar (assimilated) to those of Europe, nor yet hostile to them: because they are the fruit of a fraternal encounter in which the good of all is sought and not an unbalanced encounter (a clash of cultures) in which the good of just one party is sought (the stronger one).
The presuppositions, therefore, of the ecclesial vision of Comboni in the “Plan” may be summed up in these still actual words-symbols of his: unity, utility, simplicity.
The approach of the Plan
Such an approach as that of the “Plan” is, effectively, all the more relevant today, in a world that is globalised and interdependent (much more than in the XIX century), because it indicates the only way forward for a unitarian but not uniform development of the human race, in a plan of non-violence and sharing, always respecting the others. The approach of the “Plan” demystifies two perspectives that make up, today, the two greatest dangers of dehumanisation: on the one hand the dynamics of unequal development, with a logic (like that of neo-liberalism) which tends to increase the claws of riches through communitarianism and xenophobic exclusion, rejecting the equality of rights and personal dignity; and, on the other, aggressive western culturalisation such as large-scale defoliation of all local culture, or universal standardisation or the ‘McDonaldisation’ of the world.
This approach of the “Plan”, which seems to be in prophetic harmony with the social teaching of the Church (cf. the actual indications of Pope Francis), even though formulated in a period in which the expression itself “the social teaching of the Church” did not yet exist, was, for Comboni, the consequence of an ecclesial vision that had to be rooted in the Gospel of liberation of Jesus of Nazareth. Even today, it is against the background of the Gospel that the Plan must be seen to best understand it and put it into practice in fidelity to the charism: this is an essential hermeneutic criterion for a modern interpretation of the “Plan”.
Consequently, some essential elements of the ecclesiological vision of the “Plan” (which at the time, were by no means held by the majority or taken for granted, although they could be seen in an important tradition of Propaganda Fide), appear prophetic and, even today, bearers of evangelical renewal: the Implantatio Ecclesiae as the founding of truly local Churches with local clergy; equality of race in all meaningful ambits, especially those of the spiritual and Christian life; the importance – ad intra and ad extra – of the Catholic laity.
The subject is broad, fruitful and rich in possible new developments – but here I can only make a brief reference to this – the matter of the pedagogical apparatus of the “Plan” which, in an original manner, combines different elements: the emancipating power of instruction for all; education as intellectual charity; the pedagogy of the oppressed.
An ecclesial vision that is harmoniously Unitarian
It is precisely the pedagogical apparatus that produces a harmoniously unitarian ecclesial vision – since it is unitarily founded on the formation of consciences – of evangelisation and human promotion: “The formation to be given to all the individuals of either sex who belong to the Institutes surrounding Africa must be characterised by the following goals: to impress and plant in their souls the spirit of Jesus Christ, integrity of behaviour, firmness of Faith, the principles of Christian morals, a knowledge of the Catholic catechism and the basic elements of necessary human knowledge.” (W. 826)
Prof. Fulvio De Giorgi
(Consiglio di Direzione di Archivio Comboniano)
The Comboni family is growing!
On days 1 to 3 of May met at the house of the Comboni Missionaries in Nürnberg our small group of CLM. For two years we met regularly on the theme “Mission Motherland”. During many years each of us have realized not only to be touched and moved by the charisma of Daniel Comboni, but also to walk with the Comboni Family. At the beginning of the meeting we exchanged ideas with Father Karl Peinhopf (new provincial of the DSP) on the current changes, challenges and priorities of the mission as “permanent heart” of the Comboni Family.We continue with an intense work on the future configuration of the group, the real possibility of making a common work (considering that we are distributed from Vienna to Saxony) and the question of seeing how we join among us to grow and give wings to the missionary work in our day to day despite the distances. We are Pia Schilmair, Birgit and Christioph Koch, Brigitte Kreiter, Martina Schrott, Barbara Ludewig and brother Friedbert Tremmel of the Comboni Missionaries as advisor. We decided to risk in this way as CLM group and throw our skills for the common good of the Comboni Family. Brigitte Kreiter and Barbara Ludewig were chosen as representatives of the group.
German CLM group
[Mozambique] Training of monitors for Literacy and Adult Education
On days 24 to 26 April at the pastoral center of Mutoro take place literacy training. This formation included 33 monitors of the various areas of the parish of Carapira, having as principal speaker Professor Dr. Adelino Zacarias Ivala. It took place in a favorable environment, having good collaboration between the trainer and the trainees. It has also attended the three Comboni Lay Missionaries of Carapira and sister Paula, Comboni missionary sister. Of the 33 participants were three Mozambicans CLM trainees.
We thank you for participating in this training that will help us in enriching our missionary training.
May God continue to bless us in our walking!
Ancha, Margarida and Zeferino, CLM’s in training.
T