It was with great enthusiasm and attention that the Academic Community of Braga was with Kasia and Barbara on this first day for these CLM in Portugal.
During this event, organized by the University Pastoral of Braga, the CLM shared their life stories and their missionary testimony at this time before departure for the mission of Carapira.
CLM Portugal
We are happy because we have just received from Barbara (Italian CLM) and Kasia (Polish CLM) that will stay with us until April to learn Portuguese. This preparation aims the preparation before departure for the mission of Carapira, Mozambique.
During this time, both will share many moments with us and together we will walk toward a greater internationalization of our CLM family.
We welcome them and we ask you for prayers for this time of specific training before their missionary service.
CLM Portugal
From the 18th to the 20th of September took place in Verona, hosted by the Comboni sisters, the third national assembly of the Italian CLM.
We discussed mainly about the places and the times the CLM are called to witness their vocation to be missionaries according to the charisma of St. Daniel Comboni. The second important aim was to meet each other and to share the experiences, the problems and the joys that every group faces during its daily commitments in its own territory.
We were warmly welcome by the Comboni sisters. There were many different groups coming from all over the Country: Venegono Superiore, Milano, Padova, Verona, Bologna, Firenze, Palermo, Agrigento and Bari. There were also other “special guests”: the coordinator of the CLM international committee Alberto de la Portilla, the referent for the Italian MCCJ province Fr. Massimo Robol, the MCCJ in charge for the missionary animation of the Italian province Fr. Giorgio Padovan and others Comboni fathers and sisters.
The first positive aspect was the high number of people who attended the assembly. We were about 90 people and many of these were new faces and, moreover, they were young. This means that the charisma of Comboni still fascinates and appeals people of different ages, different places and with a very different background.
Friday afternoon was dedicated for welcoming the participants; after a short official welcome from the national secretary and the special guests, we met for a starting prayer. Thanks to some songs and symbols we entered in the theme of the meeting. After dinner, we had a special game so that we could know better each other. During Saturday, we developed the main theme of the assembly: after a short prayer, we met Maria Soave Buscemi who guided us explaining some verses from the Bible. These explanations helped us to read deeply and with a new point of view the scriptures. During the afternoon, we organized four workshops in order to deep four different aspects of our Charisma: missionary animation, immigration, new styles for living, Justice and Peace. We divided the big group in four smaller groups. Inside the group, the leader gave some good information about the theme and later there was the opportunity for sharing. Though it was not so easy, the workshop allowed us to share some good ideas that each and every group can apply to its own reality following some common criterion. In the evening, we could luckily see a show presented by a group of youth coming from Mali.
On Sunday, after the morning prayer, we met all together and the four different groups reported to the others what came out during the discussions of the previous day. After this, we celebrated together the Holy Mass. During the celebration, we have the opportunity for “sending” officially Barbara and call upon her the protection of the Holy Spirit. Barbara is a CLM who is preparing for leaving in August 2016 for three years in Mozambique. After the Celebration, Federico (Italian representative in the European committee) and Alberto de la Portilla presented the European meeting of August 2016 that will take place in Portugal.
It was very important during the assembly, to hear from the voice of many different MCCJ that they have the need and the will to cooperate more with the lay. We were asked to take part in some national committee and give our support to Nigrizia (the main national magazine of the Comboni family).
At the end of the assembly was very clear that it is not so easy to find the way and the time for living our missionary charisma but the only possibility we have to achieve this goal is to build a net in order to keep in contact and support each other.
CLM Italy
Accompanied by Fr. Giorgio Padovan (standing in the photo), Comboni Missionary recently arrived from Brazil, about twenty Comboni Lay Missionaries (CLM) of Bologna and Florence met on 13 and 14 of June, in the house of Pax Christi in Florence, to pray and reflect together on the theme “Disciples, missionaries and Combonis in the path”. These days, according to some lay people, “encouraged some of us to share, to continue the missionary journey with more enthusiasm and joy, and to renew our heart, sometimes tired and wounded.”
The joy and beauty of being Christians and missionaries is the phrase that can summarize what has been lived in this two-day retreat in Florence. Guided by the motto “Disciples, missionaries and Combonis in the path”, the image of the path accompanied the laity in the reflections, sharing and prayer. A path that is not easy, they said, because sometimes it is uphill and very tired, but gives “sense and taste to our life and vocation.”
Fr. Giorgio Padovan, who returned a few months ago from the mission in Brazil, helped the group with simplicity, to deepen from the standpoint of the missionary, the path of laity, the baptismal vocation, personal decisions, the love to the mission and the Comboni charism.
“The thoughts and shared experiences – comment the laity – encouraged some of us to go forward, to continue the missionary journey with more enthusiasm and joy, and to renew our heart, sometimes tired and wounded. The seeds were sown for each CLM group to program with renewed creativity, the way to follow in the next year”.
How to be CLM where we live and work? How to be Christians and missionaries in the world of migration, among the excluded, through our commitment in the activities of justice and peace? in parishes and some missionary churches closed and afraid to go out? These are some of the questions that the Bologna and Florence CLM tried to answer, so they can return home enlightened and willing to make a “good missionary journey”.
Bologna and Florence CLM
This land is called Pau-Brasil, Irajá, Comboios, Caeiras, Olho d’Água, indigenous villages in the state of Espíritu Santo.
I spent nine days with great intensity, important days, beautiful, full of friendship and sharing, we as Comboni Family (priests, religious, laity, scholastics) and the Tupinikim indigenous people, people of this holy land.
The simplicity, humility, sharing, hospitality, are words that I remember celebrating those days.
The availability, tenderness of the families we met, visited, lived, brought forth the beauty of true and sincere principles that value the encounter with the Other and the sacredness of knowing how to welcome.
The Tupinikim people, as all indigenous peoples, fought for the recognition of the land that was always theirs and they lost with colonization, besides losing the right to be resident.
Indigenous land, holy land.
A fight that began in 1979 until 1981 for a territory increasingly exploited by another colonization, a foreign multinational, supported by the lobbies of political and economic power.
Many attempts were made by the police with guns and threats to the Tupinikim in order to leave their land. Many were the processes, finding letters and documents to prove it was an indigenous land and finally in 1993 came the land demarcation and recognition that protects the indigenous territory, their communities and villages.
The struggle for life, fight for rights, respect for a culture that is being lost and resist the increasingly dominant homogenization that wants to treat everyone as objects and consumers.
Threats ended and the law has confirmed a truth that has always existed, now is the time to recover a territory exploited by a (foreign) industry that planted eucalyptus trees at each site by market interests, for the manufacture of cellulose.
The problem is that these trees grow faster and take water from the land, impoverishing the soil and occupying the space of the native forest.
When the weather due to drought does not help, everything becomes difficult and complicated for those who live from agriculture.
Restart, caring for the earth and its fruits, through an indigenous tradition that always respect the Pachamama, living with essentials, is a beautiful lesson of life that indigenous taught us.
In this land we were welcomed, we felt at home and there is no more beautiful thing for a foreign pilgrim that being accepted and taken in hand.
Comboni Family: Father Elias, Father Savio, Sister Josephine, Emma, Wedipo, Cosmas, Fidel, Grimert.
Emma Chiolini (Italian CLM in Brazil)
