New Trends in Mission in Africa

New Mission Trends

By Don Larmore

Romantic and experienced love was late on the historical scene
In marriage and human relations.
Marriage promises, baptismal promises and even fidelity to countries
Was a matter of promise, contract, commitment, creed, and declaration.

Love we know in the philosophical sense
Can be Sensual–spontaneous–falling in love
Fraternal–philios–being in love with another
Divine–agape–being in love with the All and everyone

I think that the 20th century was the entrance
Of Experienced
Awe-full
Beyond contract, religions.
Although there were whispers about religious experience
From mystics of all religions,
Who were often reprimanded, imprisoned, or murdered
For not expressing their convictions in precise theological terms
in politically sensitive verbiage
in un-poetic or un-humorous language
in Song of Songs sensuality.
This is what Pope John XXIII opened
Up to the world –
His experienced relationships to war, to other religions, and to everyone.
He moved the Catholic Church together with and beyond the
Realm of promise, commitment, and contract.
His own personal experience in World War I,
His experience of other religions in Turkey,
His love for and visits with workers in Italy and France
Were experiences that colored
His deep promise of fidelity to Jesus in the Catholic Church.

The Second Vatican Council, and especially Pacem in Terris after the council, was John XXIII’s spiritually awe-full relationships put into conciliar and encyclical form.

They all agreed, all the bishops – my bishop from Grand Island, Nebraska and the bishop from India next to him. But the thinkers and theologians are still struggling to put these revolutionary and mystic teachings into categories. The poetry of paradox and great songs beyond the Psalms will help; a Lonergan and a Dulles and Papal Documents add some understanding; but it is a struggle to categorize the experience of a saint who walked among the poor as one of them, a farm kid whose uncle paid his way in the seminary because his folks could not do it.

To be a Catholic has been and always will be
To promise and contract to love in the face of the cross,
Until the resurrection of lived love.

Now people don’t have time for a whole life of commitment.
They want tangible religion of patient love and they want it now.
Can we deny that is what they are given by
Instantaneous everything
Immediate entertainment
Fast food
Rapid Transit and
Sudden enlightenment?

For example,
Marriage in Africa has been and still is in many places, a promise by the jamaa.
Arranged marriages were and are for a contractual purpose for jamaa and ukoo.
But then we see the couples fall in love later or maybe never
As they fulfill their destiny to continue the clan.
What about falling in love, being in love, and experiencing the agape of Divine Union?
Makoko Center was a beginning. A prophetic mission trend?

The contractual commitment to the poorest of the poor
In Maryknoll keeps us in service even though we don’t
“Experience” this every day in every way.
Will the repose of a mystic or monastic Maryknoll enhance the vocation of
“all out” mission activity to those of us coming to Maryknoll for Mission Wisdom?

Pentecostalism, and evangelical commitment to Jesus is
Based on a dated euphoria with religious content, like the mystics could sense.
These mystics only experienced “enlightenment”, union with the Divine, compassion
After years of penance and fasting and prayer and commitment and service.
Mother Teresa's main experience was the Catholic experience of commitment and dedication according to her biographers. To live without feelings of consolation for long periods, you have to be a tough Albanian lady with a heart of gold.
This form of Christianity is a new awe-filled experience before the commitment.
The commitment then is sometimes formalized in the “form” of baptism with water
A formalized declaration
A formal call to ministry
As a priest in the States, my experience of the awe of experiential religion
Began in l960 with the Cursillo, the little course of Christianity from
Spain which is 194% Catholic. The closed environment of four days
With continuous teaching leads to a breakthrough into the realization that
Catholicism is a religion of committed love. The experience is different for everyone,
But it is a dated experience. We priests were involved as participants with lay leaders and as spiritual directors to our parishioners and our experience was helping our parishioners digest this experience of God’s love thru his Church

Next was Marriage Encounter which was an experience of couples of their marriage beyond the marriage contract. It was not to solve any problems but to deepen a committed love and there again, like the Cursillo, the experience was of God thru Jesus in the Spirit in their marriage. Couples then went on the share this experience by teaching in the next Marriage Encounter as part of a team and developed a lasting love for the church and an amazing commitment to encouraging priests.

Then in the 1970 came the Charismatic Renewal with the Baptism in the Spirit as an experience beyond the promise of baptism. It like the others can be a dated experience, but a friend of mine worked in the movement for years not because he experienced God Himself in the movement, but because it was such a benefit to others.
We parish priests were involved in all these “movements” and many more for young people since our most dedicated and involved parishioners were hungry for spiritual life.
This was not a fringe group of people, but people searching for solid teaching of the Catholic Church with a serious follow-up by interested priests and dedicated lay people.

Are these movements a new mission trend in Africa?
All these experiences over the years can lead to a desire for more experiences or can deepen a commitment or promise or contract. Honoring God in Church can be a result of a deeper commitment or a desire for more experiences. Commitment with awe or awe with commitment. Are both important? Are both gifts of our Confirmation?

Healing in the Catholic Tradition is a sort of legal arrangement that God thru Jesus in the Spirit has promised to heal and we hold the Creator thru a compassionate Jesus to his word. That is a sacramental and very valid relationship with our Creator.
In the Pentecostal and Evangelical Tradition it is important to experience God’s healing with imposition of hands, song, and sometimes the work and word of a special healer. Those who have been to Lourdes can attest to this tradition in the Catholic Church, but as yet it is not part of our parochial life. A new mission trend? I think so.

The African Church will lead us to a new form of healing of body and spirit by the compassion that people feel for one another. This was deeply expressed in a recent pastoral meeting by the archbishop of Mwanza, Tanzania and many lay people. How do we comfort people beyond our committed prayers for them?
People want to connect
to experience
to have some awe in connection with religion.
The closest any group comes to this in every Sunday Mass in Africa are the choirs who are experiencing one very mystic and poetic expression of our religion common to all. You notice that no one ever examines the theological content of hymns which swing from the heretical (correction: poetic) right to left within the same song.
We Catholics are a beautiful religion of commitment, promise, and contract in the face of suffering, death, and resurrection. But a unique awe is not a part of our tradition except for the mystics and cloistered people who don’t write much.

I think Blessed John XXIII has an answer: Experienced commitment beyond fears
Tough promises in tears and
An elder’s wisdom of years and years.

This will lead to a mission vision with a new African expression.

What the Maryknoll Africa Region Might Look Like in 2010 or 2025

By John Lange

What will the Maryknoll Africa Region look like in 2010 or 2025? Now that’s a scary thought! I’ll be 79 in 2010. Although I hope to be ministering in the slums of Mukuru in Nairobi, Kenya, I know my health and physical condition are slipping every year. In February, 2004, my left foot started giving me trouble. I can still walk fairly well, but I ache at the arch. Walking is my exercise, but I no longer enjoy it like I used to. I have to force myself against the ache. Fortunately I can walk the slums in our ministry to the sick and poor because we stop a lot to pray over people and counsel them. This somehow gives my arch time to revive for the next few hundred yards. I mention this fact not to get your sympathy, but to point out what is happening to most of us. We’re old and wearing out. But in 2025 I’ll be 94. I have no realistic hope of ministering in the rough alleys and byways of the slums at that age. I hate to think of retirement. I’m a workaholic. Perhaps, I can still serve as a great grandfather chaplain for some Sisters. I will have lots of company among the present Maryknollers who are also workaholics. Hopefully we’ll find something to do as we coast home.

Will we have our Maryknoll Society House in Nairobi in 2010? I stay over most Sunday nights. Most of the time I have the house to myself. A few days ago Tex Schoellmann and a visiting priest were in rooms on the ground floor where I usually stay. I moved upstairs to avoid the jam. Hopefully we’ll somehow manage to transfer the house to more deserving people before 2010. And that will be quite a change. I took over the running of the house in 1992. At that time some of the Christian Brothers stayed in our house, and a few men from other societies and congregations. I used to worry at times whether I would have room for our guys who might pop in from Tanzania. No worry now!

I don’t follow very closely the statistics for our proposed decline. I just guess that we’ll be down to 20 priests and Brothers in the Africa Region in 2010. Most of them at least semi-retired. And 2025? You guess! My own strategic plan is to be at peace and enjoy what I’m doing until I can’t do it anymore. And I am enjoying life as chaplain to the Little Sisters of St. Francis in Kasarani, Nairobi. At times I feel guilty with this strategic plan, but I spent 10 years on promotion and have followed the work of promotion quite closely since then.

I’m convinced that we can do very little to get more vocations to the priesthood and brotherhood in Maryknoll– except prayer and offering our work as a prayer. God may intervene and change the picture, but we have not been able to change it. We’ve tried about everything imaginable—task forces, weekends at the Maryknoll Center and promotion houses, etc., etc. This thought helps my guilt feelings. Personally, I think we missed the boat 25 years ago by not taking in local vocations. The world today is so international. But it’s too late now to take in local vocations. We would have to train them here for at least a few years to weed out the millions of youth who just want to get to America. And we simply do not have the men for formation here. Not a rosy picture! But we’re in God’s hands, perhaps like the Blessed Virgin who wondered how she could be the Mother of the Messiah since she did not know man. With God all things are possible. At least we trust our God to be with us in the darkness and uncertainty ahead.

This is a pessimistic picture, I confess. No doubt too pessimistic, because I admit that I am a pessimist and pray each day for God to heal me of that affliction. I work in the Mukuru Slums of Nairobi with Father Pat O'Toole, an Irish Spiritan missionary. He is an uncontrollable optimist. I need him, but he also needs me. Together with God and God's people we have brought the Mukuru Parish in the industrial area of Nairobi from four fledging outstations to five thriving centers with about 5000 people in attendance each Sunday. The collection averages about 32,000/ Kenya Shillings each Sunday; that's over $400. We've got lots of things going: building additions to churches; building schools and helping with schools in several places; helping people build toilets; bringing in water lines to the slums; a huge medical assistance program; youth programs and on and on. But it took a pessimist and an optimist to do it. So let's have an optimist to balance my picture of what the Society will look like in 2010 and 2025.

Communication is the Problem to the Answer

By David A. Smith

In 1977 the British rock band 10CC had a song at the top of the charts called, The Things We Do for Love. I don’t recall the tune, but one line from the lyrics has stayed with me all these years: “Communication is the problem to the answer.” Of course, it was the intriguing phraseology that worked its charm to make a lasting impression. Communication is the answer to many of the world’s problems. Communication is the transfer of information. It is the core of education. It is the value of knowledge.

As missioners, we are always striving to communicate the Good News that we know to be the answer to the problem. Throughout our history in Africa, Maryknollers have often been in the forefront of introducing new technologies to assist in communicating with the people around us – language schools to learn the local dialects, tape recorders, movie projectors powered by generators, posters / magazines / books in the local languages, video players and TV screens powered by solar panels, digital projectors, shortwave radios, battery-powered public address systems, computers, cell phones, e-mail, and Internet.

Recently, more new technologies have been emerging. This new trend may yet again revolutionize communications in the years ahead for people throughout the world even in the impoverished countries where we work. There is a convergence in process. We're beginning to see it already in the developed world. Cell phones can do e-mail and allow users to browse the Internet. Computers can now tune into thousands of radio stations from all around the world. Through a single cable coming into your house nowadays in the United States, you can have telephone service, hundreds of cable-television channels, and a broadband Internet connection. Entire libraries of books are being made available for free on the Internet. Current editions of newspapers and magazines are instantly available for everyone in the world to read on the Web.

The hottest new emerging trend in communications is called Voice over IP (VoIP). IP is short for “Internet Protocol.” When I first arrived in Tanzania in 1982, to place an international phone call I had to go to the central exchange in Dar es Salaam and stand in line to use one of the four telephones. By 1996 in Shinyanga I was able to call my mother on her birthday, but I paid $75 to speak to her for only 10 minutes. Nowadays I talk to my mother every Sunday for half an hour, and it only costs 60 cents through the miracle of VoIP. With my computer connected to the Internet, I use a free program called Skype. My voice travels over the Internet and is then connected to the local telephone network in Indiana where my mother lives. Her phone rings like a normal call, and while she's conversing on the telephone, I speak into a microphone attached to my computer and hear her voice through my computer’s speakers. In fact, the technology already exists that would allow me to connect a handset to the Internet connection at my house. Then I'd be able to receive or place calls over the Internet for a tiny fraction of the price of traditional telephone service.

As communications becomes extremely inexpensive, it becomes more universally available. The new possibilities for mission are mind-boggling. Evangelization will take place in cyber space. The preacher and his congregation can be on opposite sides of the world. Radio interviews with Maryknoll missioners can now be heard via the Web. Youth can explore a missionary vocation online. Mission education materials may be freely available to millions of people even in places where there is religious oppression. Interested sponsors have already connected with missioners in the field via the Africa Region’s website (www.MaryknollAfrica.com). Missioners are keeping blogs (daily journals of activities and reflections) online so that others may better understand their lives and work. Truly, as the world becomes a global village, the Good News will be proclaimed in every corner. Communication is the Problem to the Answer!

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P.S. One of the fun things that amused Star Trek viewers over the years was how people in the future would simply talk to their computers and be understood. I hope you'll be equally amused to know that I did not type this article using a keyboard. Rather, I dictated my words and my computer did the typing for me. The future is now.

 

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Recollections on President Julius Kambarage Nyerere

By Art Wille

NOTE: Father Art Wille has been writing down his personal recollections of Julius Nyerere. Here is a collection of his stories, anecdotes and vignettes that clearly portray Nyerere’s passion for justice and honesty…

One day when Julius was teaching me the Zanaki language in Musoma, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1955, he showed me a 20 shilling Tanganyika bill. He explained that some of the workers in Musoma Government Hospital were demanding bribes from the patients before they would treat them and give them the medical care they needed. He put a small mark with a pen on the 20 shilling bill and asked me to witness it. He said that he would give it to someone who was ill and would go for medical assistance at the hospital. One person did go, but the worker who asked for the bribe in the hospital would not accept the 20 shilling bill. He demanded that the person first go and change the bill into 20 one shilling coins. In this way he thwarted Nyerere’s effort to root out corruption in Musoma Hospital. This was my first personal experience with Julius and his determination to fight injustice which would be prominent throughout his life…

One day while he was teaching me Julius mentioned that the British would probably put him in prison because of his agitation for independence. He said this because a number of other African political leaders already had been incarcerated because of their political activities. He expressed concern for Maria and their children. The house that he had built for Maria had a grass roof. These roofs last only a few years and then need to be replaced. The termites usually destroy them. I offered to loan him money to put on a galvanized corrugated iron roof. He accepted my offer and got his friend Oswald who was working in construction for the government to put on this roof. It cost only a few hundred dollars. I never thought about it after it was completed. Several years later Nyerere came one day to return the money I had loaned him. He was very apologetic and said that it had taken him several years to repay me. He told me that he had had no money. He only got this money to repay me when he went to America. There he was invited to appear on TV with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and on one of Mike Wallace’s talk shows. For each of these appearances he was given a stipend. With this money he repaid me…

Julius was a very bright student. He won a scholarship to go to middle school and after that, another scholarship to attend Tabora Boys Secondary School in Tabora, Tanganyika. One day one of the students in his house had his hands tied by the prefect. Julius thought that this was not right. He went to the headmaster to protest. The headmaster, after talking with the student and the prefect, sided with the prefect. The student was then given four strokes with the cane. Julius was ordered to give these. He did, but not with much enthusiasm. He was then made a prefect. Once again his sense of justice came to the fore. It was the custom in these schools to give the prefect twice as much food as the other students. Julius protested that this was not fair. He made an issue of it with the headmaster of the school. This may have been his first protest of what he saw as unjust, but it would not be the last…

When Nyerere graduated from Makerere University with his bachelor’s degree he returned to Tanganyika. He received two teaching offers, one from the government Tabora Boys Secondary School and one from the new Catholic St. Mary’s Secondary School in Tabora. The headmaster of the government Tabora Boys Secondary School made a bet with Father Richard Walsh, the headmaster of St. Mary’s Secondary School that Julius would choose the government school. He was wrong. When Julius chose St. Mary’s, the government then advised him by letter that at a mission school he would not get the same salary. Also if later he transferred to a government school, he would not be able to count the years spent teaching in a mission schools towards his pension. Julius was furious at this and replied in a letter, “If I ever hesitated, your letter has settled the matter. The mission teachers are doing as much as the government teachers are.” The British government at this time was paying the salaries of all the teachers, both government and mission…

Shortly after their marriage Julius and Maria returned to live in Dar es Salaam. He began to teach at St. Francis College at Pugu. St. Francis was under the Irish Spiritan Fathers who were noted for their high quality education in Ireland. The bishops of Tanzania had chosen St. Francis College at Pugu as the elite secondary school for the Catholics. The Protestants had St. Andrews and the government had Tabora Boys Secondary School as their elite schools. These three elite secondary schools got the right to choose the best students from all the middle schools in the country. Julius’ salary at the beginning was 6,300 shillings (equals $900) a year. After Walsh’s intercession it was raised to 9,450 shillings (equals $1,350) a year. This was only 3/5 of the salary that expatriate teachers with Master’s Degrees were receiving. The government had sought to have Julius teach in one of the government schools. He was the first Tanganyikan with a Master’s Degree in Education. When he decided to teach in a church school, they refused to give him a salary comparable to his level of education. They told him that “no precedent had been set. If he would join the government service, then he would set the precedent and could receive a salary comparable to his Master’s Degree.” Because of his dedication to the Catholic Church, he was willing to take a cut in salary for the promotion of education in the church…

Nyerere’s greatest contribution was his complete dedication of himself and the country to the welfare of all the inhabitants of the country. I am sure that whatever decisions he had to make, this consideration was foremost in his mind. He fought all forms of corruption. It is truly amazing that as an African President there never were any accusations with any substance to them made against him. A local politician in Musoma once told me, “Because the Baba doesn’t take bribes, it is difficult for the sons to accept them.” It is remarkable that with all the blatant corruption in so many African countries, Nyerere could stand out so incorruptible. This honesty extended not only to his personal life but also to the political scene. He stuck to his principles even when doing so would cost the country foreign aid. He would lose a great deal of aid from West Germany when he agreed to recognize East Germany. A similar loss of aid came from Israel when Tanzania recognized the Palestinian government. They stopped all their aid to Tanzania. Nyerere was not willing to let Tanzania be bribed for the sake of receiving aid from another country.

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Welcome to Hung and Jim

By Tom Tiscornia

We have been blessed with the assignments of Hung Minh Dinh and Jim Egan to do their Overseas Training Program (OTP) here in the Africa Region. Jim was born in Smithtown, New York on August 25, 1969. He received his B.A. in History from the State University of New York. Hung was born in Hue, Vietnam on August 1, 1966. He received his B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Xavier University.   Both Hung and Jim have taken MIASMU courses and many members of the Africa Region have already met them. They will do their ministry at Mabatini Parish under the Pastoral Supervision of Jim Eble. John Eybel is the OTP Coordinator for the Region. Hopefully during their time here in the region Jim and Hung will be able to spend some time with many of us in our various locations of ministry.   This is a wonderful opportunity for each one of us to participate in the formation and preparation of our fellow Maryknoll Missioners by our welcome, prayers, and experience.