This
week:
Missions issue
Cabrini
Mission Corps: Community and faith in action
By NADIA POZO
CS&T Staff Writer
By the world’s standards, you’re on your way to success. But,
for some reason, you still don’t feel fulfilled and the feeling just
gnaws at you. What do you do?
Gina Pultorak, the new director of the Cabrini Mission Corps in Radnor,
Pa., struggled with that feeling after three successful years in consulting
work.
“My desire to do mission work developed when my faith matured and
I came to understand what life was about,” she said. “I struggled
a bit, and prayed about how I’d respond to this call.”
Pultorak realized that she is called as a Catholic to live her faith in
action, and discerned that this meant serving others through mission work.
She spent two-and-a-half years working for the Church in the Dominican Republic
before returning to the States. Now she serves others with the Missionary
Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the Cabrini Sisters —
as the lay director of their missions program.
Pultorak was hired to build up the corps in Philadelphia and surrounding
states. She’s hoping Philadelphians will be inspired by the lay missionaries
in this story and give her a call.
Pultorak connects lay people like herself, who find themselves at spiritual
crossroads and who are discerning how they will live out their unique calling.
She provides them with information about the Sisters and the opportunities
they offer to lay people through their many ministries — opportunities
that promise to enrich and deepen one’s faith.
Lay men and women have an opportunity to make a difference right here in
the Archdiocese of Philadelphia or in one of the 16 countries where the
sisters work.
They also have the rare opportunity to live in community with the missionary
Sisters for the year or two they commit to mission work.
That was what drew Carla Rosckes, who is currently a missioner with the
Cabrini Mission Corps in Chicago, Ill.
“I had been reading a book called ‘The Hidden Lives of Nuns,’
which demolished every stereotype I had about nuns,” Rosckes said.
“I thought the opportunity to live with the sisters would be a great
experience, and a way to learn more about this ‘hidden’ vocation.”
Rosckes has enjoyed working side-by-side with the Sisters, and sharing their
community life of meals, praying and activities — a life that is much
like a family’s — and at the same time, she’s learned
much about Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, the foundress of the order and
the first canonized American saint, who was named patroness of immigrants
in 1950.
Rosckes discovered that Mother Cabrini was an Italian sister who was sent
by Pope Leo XIII to the United States in the late 1800s, to care for the
Italian immigrants who, at the time, were arriving in droves and experiencing
discrimination and hardships because of their language and their Catholic
faith.
The charism of helping immigrants, the poor, and those most in need continues
today in the work of 1,300 Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Among Mother Cabrini’s many near-impossible feats was opening four
great hospitals: One operates in New York City, the Columbus-Cabrini Medical
Center, which still cares for poor patients; one operates in Seattle, and
two more are still running in Chicago.
Rosckes serves in one of the outreach programs affiliated with St. Anthony’s
Hospital in Chicago, a non-profit teaching hospital that Mother Cabrini
and her sisters ran for some time.
There, under Project Hope, Rosckes helps facilitate and lead health education
classes, creative writing classes and other services for the immigrant Mexican
community of Chicago’s west and south sides.
Since the Cabrini Mission Corps sent out its first seven missionaries in
1992 — they included a married couple — 100 more men and women
have gone through the program, working in the United States and internationally
with the missionary Sisters in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, England, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, the Philippines, Spain and Swaziland.
Cabrini missionaries have served the homeless, tutored children after-school,
planted gardens, taught English and ESL (English as a Second Language),
served in the AIDS ministry, worked with refugees, started a parish center
for clothing distribtion, worked as nurses in clinics, done prison ministry,
served the homebound elderly and those in nursing homes, provided hospitality
and pastoral care, worked with special-needs children, and ministered through
many other services, while providing a loving presence to those in need.
Ultimately, the work of the Sisters, and any missioner who works with them,
is to bring Christ’s love to the world.
“The Cabrini spirituality is a Sacred Heart spirituality,” Pultorak
said. “The mission of the Sisters is to be bearers of the love of
Christ in the world, and to do it by working with those who most need it.
Their ministry stresses presence [which means] the dignity of a person is
more important than a project. That’s why hospitality is a key charism.”
The work takes courage, said Sister Bernadette Anello, M.S.C., the president
of Cabrini Mission Foundation in New York City.
Sister Bernadette has been connected with the Cabrini Mission Corps since
its beginning, having served as a member of the C.M.C. Advisory Board and
having lived with, and been a liaison to, many CMC missionaries in the U.S.
and abroad. From lifelong experience — she was taught by the Sisters
in early childhood — Sister Bernadette has a lived experience of the
Cabrini charism.
“Our mission concept is to go where there is a need. Our charism is
steeped in the heart of Jesus” she said. “It is one of courage,
and knowing that all people are our brothers and sisters. … Flexibility
has to be a hallmark. It’s what we call in Italian ‘Disponibilidá’
which means to be available —to be ready to be sent. Can you be open
to whatever the need is? We are looking for that generosity of spirit.”
If you feel called to serve others through the Cabrini Mission Corps, in
a community in Philadelphia, or elsewhere in the U.S. or the world, visit
www.cabrini-missioncorps.org or contact Gina Pultorak at (610) 971-0821.
CS&T staff writer Nadia Pozo can be reached at npozo@adphila.org
or (215) 965-4614.
Chinese
priest is homilist at Oct. 22 World Mission Sunday Mass
By Christie L. Chicoine
CS&T Staff Writer
The Church needs missionaries, but not everybody has to go to Africa or
Asia to serve the underprivileged of the world.
“You can be a missionary in your parish, in your family and in the
place where you work,” said Father Raphael Gao, a Chinese priest who
celebrates Mass monthly at Holy Redeemer Parish, Philadelphia. He is a doctoral
student of moral theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington,
D.C.
“We are all called to be missionaries — to be missionaries where
we are — by letting the light of Jesus shine wherever we are,”
he said.
Father Gao, 36, will deliver the homily at the World Mission Sunday Mass
at 11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 22, at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul,
18th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Auxiliary Bishop Robert P. Maginnis will be the principal celebrant at the
Mass, which is sponsored by the archdiocesan Office of the Society for the
Propagation of the Faith.
Mission Sunday provides the opportunity to reflect on the Church’s
mission worldwide, as well as the fact that missionary challenges abroad
are different from those in the United States.
“Undeniably, there are missionary challenges that we face at home
— a secular and consumer society for whom God is not important …
a society in which ethnic and religious differences flare up into conflicts
and divisions,” Father Gao said.
In overseas missions, he said, “[C]hallenges may come from an oppressive,
controlling or persecuting government, or from the poverty, hunger and famine
of their people; or from ethnic conflicts or lack of education.”
World Mission Sunday is a reminder that “we cannot be so absorbed
in the challenges that face us that we can be indifferent to the challenges
that our brothers and sisters throughout the world face every day,”
he said.
God does not always carry out His plans the way we might expect, Father
Gao said. To see God’s concern for the world, we must look not only
at what the Church does, but also at what God does through others, he added.
Sometimes, what looks like a disaster for the local Church turns out to
be a blessing, Father Gao said: “When the Communists took over China
in 1949, excluded all foreign missionaries, and did everything in their
power to suppress the Church, there were about 3 million Catholics. When
the Church surfaced again in the 1980s, there were 8 million Catholics.
Today, there are more than 12 million Catholics.
“How is it that God can accomplish His plan through secular forces
that do not acknowledge Him? We must always be aware it is God’s world
and God’s mission — and many take part in it, without even knowing
it,” Father Gao said.
World Mission Sunday is also a time to remember the churches and missionaries
that face persecution, poverty and ethnic conflicts, he said: “We
must remember to pray for them, and to be one with them as they try, in
their difficult situations, to witness the love of God. …
“Mission Sunday is indeed a gift to the Church,” he added. “It
reminds us that we are one with the Church around the world, and that we
are all committed to carrying on the mission of Christ, however different
our situations may be. …
“Let us be faithful to God and to the mission of Christ.”
For more information about the Pontifical Mission Societies, which include
the archdiocesan Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Holy Childhood
Association, the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, and the Missionary Union
of Priests and Religious, call (215) 587-3944.
CS&T Staff Writer Christie L. Chicoine may be reached at (215) 587-2468
or cchicoin@adphila.org.
‘Missing’ headlines: Worldwide Christian
persecution
by Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
On the morning of Sept. 22, in the midst of the media frenzy over Pope Benedict
XVI’s remarks about Islam, almost no one heard about the three Indonesian
Catholic men who were led out of their prison cells, tied to chairs and
shot to death.
The men were convicted of inciting deadly riots in 2000 after being tried
in an Islamic court trial that was marred by illegal procedures and strong
pressure by extremists. The men were denied the last rites and a Christian
burial.
During the same time period, while everyone was listening to the denunciations
of the U.S. by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad at the U.N., First Lady Laura Bush was trying to draw attention
to another missing headline — the plight of minority groups in Myanmar
(Burma).
In that country, Christianity is considered a danger to the nation and its
adherents are routinely raped, tortured and killed.
If all the accounts of Christian persecutions ever made it into the headlines,
readers would quickly see Christianity remains a deadly serious matter almost
everywhere on the planet.
“Christians are, in fact, the most persecuted religious group in the
world today, with the greatest number of victims,” reports Nina Shea,
Director of Freedom House’s Puebla Program on Religious Freedom.
“The most atrocious human rights abuses are committed against Christians,
solely because of their religious beliefs and activities — atrocities
such as torture, enslavement, rape, imprisonment, killings and even crucifixion,”
Shea said. “Roman Catholics, together with Protestant evangelicals,
are the prime targets.”
• In Egypt, Christians are considered second-class citizens and Egyptian
nationals are frequently arrested, tortured and imprisoned just for converting
to Christianity. A recent example was Gaseer Mohamed Mahmoud, a Christian
convert who was arrested in 2005 and tortured for refusing to renounce Christ.
His toenails were pulled out, he was kept in a water-filled room, beaten
and whipped, and confined to a mental hospital.
Only pressure from the international community saved Mahmoud’s life.
He was released and is now in hiding.
• In Saudi Arabia, it is considered a religious obligation for Muslims
to hate Christians and Jews. Apostasy from Islam warrants a death sentence.
Reports of continuing harassment, surveillance, and the arrest and torture
of Christians are too numerous to report here.
• Aside from calling for the destruction of Israel, Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has also called for an end to the development of Christianity
in his country.
• In Iraq, an Assyrian-Chaldean Christian organization reports 88
Christian victims of violence since 2003. In addition to the routine kidnapping
of priests, and even bishops, dozens of churches have been bombed or attacked
and hundreds of thousands of Christians have fled the country.
• In Bangladesh, Christians are denied access to water wells and are
frequent targets of physical violence and property destruction.
• In Turkey, Christians are denied access to civil and military jobs,
and it is almost impossible to build churches.
• In Nigeria, since Islamic Law was proclaimed in 12 northern states
in 2004, clashes between Christians and Muslims have claimed 12,000 lives.
• In India so far this year, there have been more than 200 episodes
of anti-Christian violence perpetrated by Hindu extremist groups.
Among those acts were the gang-rape of two Christian women, the murder of
missionaries and priests, and sexual assaults on nuns; the ransacking of
churches, convents and other Christian institutions; the desecration of
cemeteries, and Bible burnings.
• North Korea continues to be among the most repressive regimes in
the world. In 2004, a North Korean refugee told the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom that Christians are not only being persecuted in that
country, “but their next generation, and the next generation, and
the second and third generation will be liquidated as well.”
• Because fact-finding is so difficult in China, the exact number
of Catholic clergy, seminarians and lay people who have been imprisoned
or killed in the past century because of loyalty to Christ may never be
known.
That is only a quick snapshot.
Of the world’s 2.1 billion Christians, as many as 200 million are
being denied full human rights, as defined by the United Nations Declaration
of Human Rights, simply because they are Christians.
Christians are a religious minority in 87 countries. In 40 such countries,
there has been at least one verifiable death due to anti-Christian violence
since 2000.
According to the official martyrology of the Vatican's Congregation for
the Evangelization of Peoples, Agenzia Fides, 132 Catholics have died for
their faith since the advent of the third millennium. Even so, the 2005
report acknowledges that the deaths of “many more possible ‘unknown
soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet … may
never be reported.”
Many Christians are murdered simply because they are “inconvenient”
for oppressive regimes.
Gerolamo Fazzini, the co-director of Mondo e Missione, the magazine of the
Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, has written that many die because
of their opposition — in the name of their faith — to those
in power.
“But how can we not call martyrs — gray martyrs if one prefers
— those who remain and endure in contexts that are potentially extremely
dangerous to proclaim the Gospel and give witness to Christian charity?”
Fazzini writes.
Such was the case in Rwanda, where 200 priests, sisters, bishops, seminarians
and laymen gave their lives rather than renounce the Gospel and accede to
the genocide.
It also includes the death of Sister Barbara Ann Ford. who was killed in
May 2001 in Guatemala City while working for indigenous human rights. And
the death of Father Arley Arias Garcia, who was seeking to start negotiations
between paramilitaries and guerillas in Colombia before he was killed in
an ambush.
Americans remain largely unaware of these incidents — in great part
because American media outlets spend so little time reporting on them.
“Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination
around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput during
a December, 2005 address to the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom. “First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And
third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.”
We can, and should, do more to support persecuted Christians in the developing
world. Support for the missions, both financially and prayerfully, is essential,
as is increasing awareness of those missing headlines.
Pope John Paul II called on the Church to preserve the names and stories
of modern Christians who died for Christ.
“At the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become
a Church of martyrs,” the late pope wrote in his 1994 apostolic letter,
Tertio Millennio Adveniente. “This witness must not be forgotten.”
Such testaments have always been one of the most powerful evangelization
tools available to the Church. From the earliest days, it was the courageous
witness of Christians willing to die for their faith that converted so many
Romans.
Such witness can do the same today — but first, the stories must be
told.
Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615
For
one former child soldier, time has come to speak out
By NADIA POZO
CS&T Staff Writer
Grace Akallo was 15 years old when she was kidnapped, conscripted as a child
soldier, and forced to live as a sex slave and work slave for the Lord’s
Resistance Army (LRA), Ugandan rebels who have been waging a bloody war
against the African country’s government for 20 years.
Eventually, she was able to escape. Now, 10 years later, she is finding
her voice.
Akallo was among the speakers at Ugandan Lobby Day on Oct. 12 in Washington,
D.C., when 700 Catholics and non-Catholics came to Capitol Hill to appeal
for justice for more than 30,000 Ugandan children who have been stolen and
forced into the conflict by the LRA.
The Capitol Hill effort was organized by the Africa Faith and Justice Network
(AFJN), an advocacy network of Catholic missionary communities in the United
States and Africa.
In past years since her escape, Akallo might have stayed in bed, immobilized
by depression, through the days surrounding the anniversary of her abduction.
Not this year.
This October, she found the courage to stand before hundreds of people at
Uganda Lobby Day, and share her real-life horror story.
It began on Oct. 9, 1996 in the remote town of Aboke in northern Uganda,
where Akallo was attending St. Mary’s College, one of the finest Catholic
boarding schools in the nation. A horde of LRA staged a night attack..
“There were hundreds of them, and they broke into the school and the
dormitories,” Akallo told The CS&T. “They tied up 139 girls,
and made us walk to the bush in the darkness.”
The principal of the school, Sister Rachele Fassera, followed the army rebels
into the bush, pleading for the girls’ release. She was able to free
109, but 30 other girls, including Akallo, were kept captive for their “desirable
traits.”
Sister Rachele offered herself for the 30 remaining girls, but the LRA refused
her sacrifice, and left with the captives. Akallo’s seven-month nightmare
began.
“They beat us to scare us away from trying to escape,” she said.
“In the first week, they forced us to beat a girl to death because
she tried to escape. If we refused, they began to beat us to do it. They
also forced us girls to have sex with the commanders — and there were
many of them,” Akallo said.
The captive girls spent the next month in a rough sort of boot camp.
First, they were wakened early and forced to march to exhaustion. Then,
if they weren’t sent out to fight, they worked all day in the fields
without eating. They cut grass to build huts for the commanders, and worked
guard duty.
Brainwashed and abused, the girls came to believe the LRA rebel’s
leader, Joseph Kony, was a disciple of God with supernatural powers. After
a month, the 30 girls were divided into two groups and sent to different
sites.
Akallo’s group went to southern Sudan, where the LRA had a base and
the support of the Sudanese government.
“We were given guns, and ordered to attack villages of the Sudanese
People’s Liberation Movement [a group fighting for independence in
Sudan] to get their food,” Akallo said.
“Most people in these villages had guns — not like in Uganda
—so you had to fight or be killed,” she said.
In fact, there was no food at the base. The child soldiers had to kill for
it, Akallo said: “There was no food, no water, and people were dying
every day. People didn’t even look like human beings.”
During that nightmare, all Akallo could hold onto was her faith in God,
and the hope that she might somehow return to school and make a future for
herself.
Faith and hope — and the overwhelming desire to see her parents at
least one more time before she died — kept her going, most days, although
she felt increasingly desolate.
Then her chance came. The camp was attacked by the Ugandan army. In the
ensuing chaos, Akallo escaped, dodging bullets as she fled. She found a
small group of other children who had also escaped and they walked together
for three days— living on leaves and soil — until a group of
villagers found them and took them in.
The villagers helped them return to northern Uganda to their families. Akallo
lived to see her parents again — and she returned to St. Mary’s
to finish high school before she enrolled at Uganda Christian University.
“The sisters helped me greatly,” she said. “I was totally
changed when I returned. My brain had stopped working. They gave me hope
and inspiration.
“At the time, I didn’t know why I had survived when so many
others had died.” she continued. “I believe, now, that God wanted
me to be the voice for so many who don’t have one.”
Five of the St. Mary girls were killed in captivity. Two remain captives.
The rest eventually escaped — the last one only this year.
As she healed, Akallo began volunteering at the local World Vision center,
which is now named after the school principal who had tried to save her
schoolmates and her. Through that work, Akallo was asked to speak about
her experience on behalf of Uganda’s child soldiers.
Akallo is now a senior exchange student majoring in communications at Gordon
College near Boston, Mass.
Prior to the recent rally, she spoke before the U.S. Congress.
She has told those who will listen that the LRA has killed, tortured and
raped civilians, and abducted and enslaved thousands of children and young
adults. At the same time, the rebels’ brutality has numbed the Acholi
people — the northern Ugandan tribe that the LRA claims to represent
in the civil war.
“Instead of convincing the people of their cause and getting their
support, they have terrorized the people,” Akallo said. That terrorism
includes hacking people to death with machetes and spears — especially
the elderly. It also includes flinging babies against trees until they are
dead. And then, of course, there are the 30,000 children who have been abducted
and terrorized into becoming concubines, guards and soldiers.
Amnesty International reports that without the child abductions, the LRA
would have few combatants. Meanwhile, the war has forced 2 million people
from their homes and left 200,000 people dead.
At the same time, after ordering many to join refugee camps, the Ugandan
government has failed to provide protection or basic necessities for its
own people.
Now the government and the LRA are negotiating peace. Sudan is acting as
mediator, even though that country has supported the LRA in the past.
Meanwhile, LRA founder Kony and four of his top lieutenants are charged
with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Africa’s longest-running
war. But the LRA threatens to walk away from the peace talks if their arrest
warrents are not suspended by the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
The chief of the million-member Acholi tribe — as well as leading
members of Ugandan society, and numerous international coalitions —
is urging the United States and the international community to encourage
the Ugandan peace process.
“This is considered the worst neglected crisis in need of attention
and support,” said Michael Poffenberger, the associate director of
Africa Faith and Justice Network. “Our Catholic faith compels us to
listen to the voices of these people and respond.”
Poffenberger urges everyone to contact his or her congressional representatives,
urging the U.S. to send a State Department envoy to help mediate the peace
talks, and to provide financial aid to help Uganda care for its war-ravaged
population — especially escaped children soliders — as well
as to pressure the Ugandan government to help people who have been displaced
by the war.
“Ask your senators what they are doing for peace in Uganda,”
Akallo said. “We are all the same people. We are all human beings,
suffering.”
For more information about the Ugandan war and what the Africa Faith and
Justice Network is doing visit www.afjn.org.
CS&T staff writer Nadia Pozo may be reached at npozo@adphila.org or
(215) 965-4614.
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