Comboni Lay Missionaries

Retreat of the Comboni Lay Missionaries of Bologna and Florence

LMC Italia

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.”

LMC ItaliaFr. 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”.

LMC Italia Bologna and Florence CLM

“Take off your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy ground”

Brasil

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)

Visit to Italy

Italia

Last weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the coordination meeting of the Italian CLM in Florence.

I appreciate the invitation of the CLM from Italy to share this time together. It was very interesting to know more deeply the reality of the different groups that are present throughout Italy. Each with a particularity and its own way. A reality closely linked to each specific place and expressed particularly by each group. The richness of the charism of Comboni is clear, and in Italy can be seen in the way that lay people try to stay faithful to this vocation. Some groups with great commitment to social level, working on JPIC issues like immigration (which is news in the media these days for the misfortunes in the Mediterranean), raising awareness in schools and doing missionary animation in parishes and area centers, heavily working the presence of community life as laity, with specific experience and new projects for opening, maintaining consistency in training the groups, with prayer as revitalizing center, etc. We had a specific time to know how things are going for Emma in Nova Contagem with the Brazilian CLM and Marco and Valentina in Piquiá (also in Brazil) and the support that the different groups provided them.

We also had a good time to talk about the reality of the CLM internationally, so that I could inform and exchange points of views. I encouraged them to communicate in the international blog what each group was doing. Something I always do in the groups. There is so much wealth that, it is a shame that others do not know it and when we exchange it everyone can grow.

I think Italy has a nice way to go to create synergies. Starting with the different groups within the country and of course in coordination with the CLM internationally. We create a large network where we can work together for a more fair, more human, more divine… world attending to the problems of men and women of our time from the 20 countries where we operate, exchanging ideas, experiences, contacts, support. On top of that, we are one big CLM family, united by the same charisma and intuition of Comboni that “this work (the mission) should be Catholic, and not specifically Spanish or French, German or Italian”. Comboni encourages us to continue working together, not seeking uniformity but synergy, commitment, collaboration, fraternal assistance to carry out Jesus’ call to mission. A family that worry and support each other for the good of the people.

In addition to the meeting I also had time to visit the group of Bologna and Venegono. Talk quietly, share concerns. I admit that I felt very comfortable at all times, in family. The best of these trips is to feel closely the warmth of each CLM, the enthusiasm for the mission, the commitment of everyone, beyond or within the labor and/or family obligations that as laypeople we face every day. The Faith and follow of the Lord that from every corner of the world we try to carry out every day.

I hope many others may join the group, in all countries, to continue serving the Lord in our smallest and needy brothers wherever He leads us.

Meeting to celebrate the 150th nniversary of the “Plan for the regeneration of Africa”

congreso RomaAfrica, Continent on journey.

Dear friends, while participating to the 13-14-15 March meeting on “Africa on journey”, organized on the occasion of the 150 years of the “Plan for the regeneration of Africa”, inspired by God to our founder St. Daniel Comboni, I offer you, as a reflection, the Fulvio de Giorgi’s conclusive synthesis that collects the substance of these three day workshops, intensely and joyfully lived in the exchange and in the encounter of the whole Comboni family.

The meeting has seen its conclusion in the Eucharistic celebration presided by card. Fernando Filoni.

We thank the General Mother Luzia Premoli who opened the meeting by wishing us her welcome and presenting the program of these days, and thank, as well, the General Father Enrique Sanchez Gonzalez who closed the meeting workshops with the invitation to develop in our life and in our missionary work the reflections which emerged out of the meeting itself. “We have walked together and it has given us the opportunity of breathing new fresh air, the one – we cannot deny it – that, as we know, is now changing the whole human world. Now starting from this new sensibility, says fr. Enrique, Comboni’s dream reveals itself to be beautiful, actual and greatly challenging.

Let us remember that Africa has no need of donors, because it is able to grow by itself and is ever more conscious of its own strength, as our missionaries realize while living on the spot.

It is not by an accident that our institutes are themselves getting strength   through so many confreres coming from Africa and this fact is the demonstration of how true is Comboni’s Plan. Africa has to become the protagonist of its own history.

congreso RomaThe gift of the Pan received by Comboni was not a gift just for him, but it was for all those who, after him, were going to live with the strength of the Spirit contained in it.

The fact is that Africa has got something which nobody else has. It has a life of its own; and this is a particular, precious gift for all mankind. It is a thing that can’t be explained, but must be lived; it is an experience of love. Therefore I wish for all of you to continue this way, i. e. to continue with new freshness this experience of love for this new African youth”.

I leave you this beautiful synthesis on the topics of the meeting, which has been prepared by Fulvio De Giorgi. I have brought it home in order to share it with you.

My greetings to all of you and a fruitful mission as well.

Rosanna Braglia, CLM Italy

congreso Roma “If Daniel Comboni were here, on seeing all this, he would have his heart full of consolation and of joy at the spectacle of such a grown up Africa, of the sons and daughters of his institutions involved in this great project, of his dream partly already a reality with so many fruits, as well and especially in women’s laity, and partly still just a track which has to be followed for the future.

This is the main fruit of our meeting and it keeps on calling us to set us in a new direction. It is fundamental to say this, and all the participants to the meeting have underlined it, that about Africa there must never more be a negative, catastrophic, sad way of looking.

Pope Francis reminds us that “only the ones who look for the happiness of their neighbours, can be missionaries”. A thought which reminds us of what Comboni said: “It is the Sacred Heart of Jesus that helps me to overcome all the enormous obstacles I have to face in order to make true my Plan for the regeneration of the African people with the African peoples themselves”.

The key words are two: ‘PLAN’ and ‘HEART’.

The first word is “PLAN” [here it is to be taken into account that in Italian the corresponding word has several meanings. Note of the translator]. What is a Plan? It is project which challenges the critical capacities of each one and asks as well for the commitment of the will supported by great hope.

All of us, any continent we come from, are called to decolonize our hopes, our designs, our plans, our ways of looking, trusting in a hope that is greater than we are, and supports us in our commitment. The decolonization of the way of looking cleans up our eyes and helps us to see well the fact that Africa is keeping on growing, and that Europe can become its partner in its positive factors. The fact is that in Africa we can find a kind of New Renaissance. Europe can cooperate to it, by walking together in friendship.

The Africa of the African peoples has told us that it wants to live in fullness its life at the side of the other peoples. Therefore (decolonizing the way of thinking and overcoming stereotypes) dispersion and transcontinental emigration in all directions are a source of benefit in spite of the fact that they are caused by the inequalities existing inside the Country itself of the emigrants, and of the great sufferings they bring with themselves.

But it is important not to fix these events once and for all inside a negative horizon of death, but to set them free and regenerate them as an occasion, as a chance, for a more various and more beautiful world.

Here we are: more beautiful! The expositions of photos, the sculptures, the films and music offered in this meeting oblige us to recognize, generally speaking, the great beauty and aesthetic creativity coming from the new African art, from the new cinema. And our hope can better see what is positive, underlying connections which are going to become projects and plans growing around us.

The word “Plan” [having in mind the Italian word] includes also the idea of levelling out, that is of filling up vallies and lowering mountains, of putting all things to the same level. And here we are reminded of the sermon in Mathew’s Gospel, the one of Jesus on the mountain, the one Luke calls Sermon on the Plain, where we read also the threatening word “Woe to you rich!”. If all of us are on the same level, we can look each other directly in the eyes; in this way injustices and inequalities become unbearable. “Throwing down the powerful from their thrones and setting up the humble” is the dynamic of the MAGNIFICAT.

In this way we understand, as Samia Nkrumah (minister in his country) has said, that it is a right for the African peoples that they may control their economy for the benefit of the peoples of Africa themselves and may find the way for Pan-Africanism.

To set at the same level means to fill up the valleys and the abyss of corruption in the government lists; it means also to recognize that the walk to African democracy must be autonomous and new and not in the European forms. Certainly it will be a walk with lights and shades, of corrupt and dictatorial governments; but even the failure of the african leaderships must not slow down the understanding of the citizens in order to set to a better level their political directories, so that these ones may be uninterested about their particular profit and form agents of social trasformation, as Efrem Tresoldi said (Nigrizia), quoting Pierli.

Levelling means also to throw down the mountains of enmities and hatreds, the mountains of internal wars and of the accumulation of arms, as Maurice Simoncelli (Archivio Disarmo) has demonstrated; “always looking for the levelled way of peace and stability” according to the observation of Alfred Mantica (Interventions of Italy in Africa). The result will be that the Africas at the plural, towards which our walk is directed, are the Africa of justice, the Africa of peace, the Africa of the safeguard of creation, the Africa of rights.

But “Plan” [considering another meaning of the italian word] reminds us also that it is better to proceed “slowly”. The ones who know the letters written by Comboni should remember that he used to say: “Yes, many missionaries are in a hurry; you however go slowly.” Exaltation of slowliness (!), if it means “patient, perseverant listening and discernment, walking together without leaving anybody behind”. It means, then, an inclusive and participative ecclesiological plan, with a female profile, too, as sister Luzia Premoli (general superior of the Comboni Sisters) said together with sister Elisa Kidanè (Comboni Fem); a plan which is being put into practice in the small Christian communities, as card. Petrer Turkson told us.

From many sides it has been noted the importance of historical information in order to overcome the wounds of past discriminations and of more or less recent civil wars. All countries and continents have gone through them; but all of us must tell each other that, in order to go on, we must talk to each other and look together for a purification of the memory and of a history, if not co-participated, at least inclusive of the different points of view.

Patience and discernment are necessary, and not a hasty simplification.

Patience = going slowly. Also as a Church that reconciles and lives as God’s family, we have the task of asking ourselves about the salvation history that is evolving in God’s today and about the responsibilities to which we are called.

The second word is “HEART”. The Heart of Christ. The heart has two fundamental movements: systole and diastole.

In the Heart of Christ these two movements are incarnationism and escatologism.

On one side, incarnation. The Gospel penetrates and becomes flesh in all today cultures in order to make them flourish into liberation and salvation. A penetrating Gospel becomes inculturated taking on itself the cultural complexities in the pluralism of evolving identities. Today the Gospel has a half-cast face.

This incarnation, then, can discover, accept, give the due value, as the (theologian) Martin N’Kafu has said, to all the signs of the time, wherever they may be. Only in this way we shall have an African theology, not because it has been re-elaborated in Africa, but because it can collect in itself and make flourish all the seeds of the Word spread in African cultures and religions, excluding no cultural, geographic and human element.

This incarnation, as Cècile Kyengue (member of a european parlament) has told us, looks for the primacy of life and therefore is opposed and fights against any human being’s traffic and against the new slavery, i.e. against the horizons of violence and death in which it is Christ himself who is badly treated and killed.

In this enculturation, step by steps with the incarnation, a great role and a great responsibility is put on the modern means of communication, on TV and press. Frs. Jules Albanese and Fabrizio Colombo have underlined this aspect together with the guests of the round table.

Therefore a positive growth of communication in Africa, considering together digital and paper, runs on the line of internet, always making visible and transparent the positive side which is growing in it, like “THE PEARL”, defined by sr. Elisa Kidanè, in the deep respect of the person. The matter is not to give voice to the ones who have no voice, but, perhaps, to give no further voice to the ones who have already too much of it. Therefore the task is to go on decolonizing the way of looking also in Comboni mission press.

But at the side of the first movement, the Heart of Christ has the movement of the escatologism, i.e. the capacity of detaching one selves from any injustice, any idol, any horizon limited to this world. All of us Christians, any continent we belong to, are like foreigners in this world, “we are in the world, but we do not belong to the world.”

François Kamkindi said: “I feel at home in many places”: This is nice, but we can say more “The kingdom of which we are citizens, our true country, is not this world”.

I conclude with a saying of the 12th century, of a great mystic, Hugh of St. Victor: “The one who finds sweet his country, is but a tender beginner. The one for whom every land is one’s own land, is already a strong person.”

“But the only perfect person is the one for whom the whole world is a foreign country.” I took this sentence from a Bulgarian author who lived in France, who borrowed it from Eduard Said, a Palestinian who lived in USA, who, on his side, took it from a German author exiled in Turkey!”

Fulvio De Giorgi.

“I was in prison and you came to visit me”

Emma

Among the various pastoral activities of the parish of Santo Domingo, led by the Comboni Missionaries in Nova Contagem, it is also the prison ministry, in charge of 15 volunteers, including the Comboni Lay Missionaries, which are part of the parish.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning, the group meets to visit the pavilions of the maximum-security prison of Nelson Hungria, located in Nova Contagem, with about 2,000 inmates. The meeting is at 08:00 in the square next to the prison.

The prison situation in Brazil, as in other parts of the world, suffers from high overcrowding due to prison system with little attention to the recovery of prisoners.

Prisons in Minas Gerais, for example, can receive 32,000 prisoners, divided into 144 prisons; actually, there are 54,000 inmates in the different units. This situation only gets worse the living conditions of prisoners, with a further object of punishing instead of re-educate and re-socialize, with serious violations of human rights.

EmmaThe action and commitment of the group of Prison Ministry, composed mainly of women, is to believe in a work of promoting human dignity, respect for human rights, and the overcoming of the limits of the current prison system in favor of a model that allows effective recovery and reintegration of the individual.

The most important of our pastoral activity is the testimony of a God who does not discriminate anyone, in a place marked by contempt, prejudice and violence, making ours the words of the Gospel: “I was in prison, and you came to visit me “. It is the pedagogy of Jesus, method, model, who heads the way of this pastoral, recognizing the face of God in every person, including the prisoners.

There are many challenges and difficulties in our pastoral activities, such as excessive bureaucracy that often delays and complicates our work, controls, restrictions on visits, limited permissions; but with courage, this small group of volunteers are facing difficulties. This has allowed in 2014, to create two groups of catechesis in prison. And it was possible that some inmates, who had requested, receive the sacraments.

EmmaFor this are fundamental the moments of ongoing formation that we make at the end of the month, to have a dedicated space of programming and training, allowing prison pastoral agents learn the actions that will help to improve prison visits and the relationship with the inmates. In this also helps the training conducted by the diocese.

In short, this would be the work of the prison ministry. A simple action, giving hand, encountering real faces, listening to the life stories of those who are on the other side of the bars, to bear witness to the dignity of every human being, because as the Gospel says “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13, 35.).

Emma Chiolini, Comboni Lay Missionary