Une semaine au Kenya lance un défi aux Américains sur l'Église

Une semaine au Kenya lance un défi aux Américains sur l'Église

Crux || Par John L. Allen Jr. || 10 décembre 2017

En général, il est probablement exact de dire que l'expérience sur le terrain du monde en développement pose souvent un défi assez dur à la façon dont les Américains pensent les choses, y compris l'Église catholique.

Le catholicisme est en déclin ? Visitez une grande partie de l'Afrique et des régions d'Asie, où le plus grand mal de tête suit le rythme de la croissance en rupture. Pensez que les chrétiens ne peuvent pas être en danger dans les endroits où ils sont une majorité? Considérez l'Amérique latine, où le Mexique et la Colombie sont les endroits les plus dangereux de la terre pour être un prêtre catholique.

Le catholicisme romain aujourd'hui est une religion mondiale lointaine avec 1,3 milliard d'adeptes, dont plus des deux tiers vivent en dehors de l'Occident. Au 21ème siècle, considérant d'autres perspectives en pensant à l'Eglise n'est pas seulement une courtoisie, c'est une stratégie de survie.

Plus tôt cette année, j'ai fait valoir ce point après avoir visité le Liban. La même vérité a été renforcée cette semaine pendant que mon collègue Crux Inés San Martín et moi étions au Kenya, visitant Mombasa, la deuxième ville du pays sur la magnifique côte de l'océan Indien, et Lodwar, une ville pauvre et brûlante de 50 000 habitants dans le nord, en grande partie désert, et le centre pour le peuple pastoral et encore largement isolé Turkana.

C'était une expérience éblouissante, épuisante et révélatrice, et beaucoup trop multicouche pour une synthèse rapide. Néanmoins, voici trois premiers départs.

Gauche c. droite

Supposons que je vous ai dit que je connais un prélat kényan qui a consacré sa vie à servir la zone la plus pauvre d'un pays connu pour la pauvreté chronique, qui se soucie profondément de l'environnement et de l'impact du changement climatique sur des questions telles que l'accès à l'eau potable, et qui a risqué sa vie pour agir comme paceur entre des groupes tribaux concurrents dans des camps massifs de réfugiés.

Beaucoup d'Américains diraient probablement : "C'est un vrai libéral."

Supposons que j'aie dit que j'avais rencontré un prélat kenyan qui appartient à Opus Dei, qui met fortement l'accent sur le sérieux de la vie sacerdotale, qui pense que les bases spirituelles et amener les gens à la foi sont d'une importance vitale, et qui a peu d'intérêt pour ce qui se passe dans l'avant-garde théologique. La réaction serait probablement, "C'est un conservateur classique."

Tout ce qui précède est vrai de l'évêque Dominic Kimengich de Lodwar, et il est à peine seul. Il a ri doucement quand je lui ai demandé s'il se considérait comme "libéral" ou "conservateur", me regardant et finalement disant: "Ici, ces catégories ne s'appliquent pas."

Ou, prenez l'archevêque Martin Kivuva Musonde de Mombasa.

Une minute, Kivuva se vantera d'un récent film produit par l'archidiocèse défendant le mariage traditionnel, et le prochain il sera en train de discuter des derniers efforts pour promouvoir l'harmonie et la paix interreligieuses. C'est une cause très progressiste à Mombasa, une ville religieusement mixte dans laquelle catholiques, musulmans, pentecôtistes et évangéliques, adeptes de religions traditionnelles et hindous ont tous des empreintes importantes, et tous aujourd'hui sont sous l'ombre de menaces transfrontalières du groupe terroriste Al-Shabaab dans la Somalie voisine.

Dans les yeux de Kivuva, il n'y a rien de prédestiné au conflit religieux. Les vraies lignes de bataille, dit-il, ne courent pas entre musulmans et chrétiens, mais entre modérés et radicaux – et Kivuva avertit, il y a des instincts radicaux dans toutes les traditions.

Interrogé s'il est frustré par la façon dont les Occidentaux ont tendance à lire l'église africaine à travers leurs propres yeux, il rit, disant que les crises et les besoins qu'il essaie de résoudre chaque jour, tant pour son troupeau catholique que pour la ville dans son ensemble, sont beaucoup trop urgents pour laisser beaucoup de reste pour s'inquiéter de la façon dont les Occidentaux perçoivent ce qu'il fait.

Cependant, il ajoute ceci: "Il s'agit d'un monde très différent de l'Occident, et les façons de voir les choses doivent s'adapter ... si vous me demandez si je suis un «libéral» ou un «conservateur» J'aurais à dire, «les deux."

Femmes

By reputation, Africa is often considered a fairly male-dominated environment, and so’s the Catholic church here. Yet our experience this week suggests that much of the future of African Catholicism depends on its women.

In Mombasa, we visited the Holy Family Centre at St. Martin’s Catholic Church, which abuts the largest slum in the city. Though the parish doesn’t currently have a school, it’s got a center serving children outside school hours and during breaks, and it sees the full gamut of challenges – alcohol and drug addiction, victims of human trafficking and prostitution, kids abandoned or marginalized because they’re HIV-positive, and just basic poverty.

The center is run by a member of the Daughters of Divine Love, an order that’s been serving in the parish since 2004, named Sister Pauline Andrew. When we arrived on Tuesday, she’d organized a pumped-up reception featuring traditional songs, dances and dress.

The center draws children from several of the tribes that make up the city’s complex ethnic patchwork, making it a sort of laboratory experiment in co-existence.

Sister Pauline has bigger plans, hoping to see the center grow into a full-blown primary school served by eight members of her order, who would live in a nearby convent she’s also working on getting built. At the moment, she and another nun commute 14 kilometers every day back and forth to work at the parish, and Sister Pauline said that won’t work when the school is up and running.

Standing with Sister Pauline where the second floor of the new convent is supposed to go as soon as she has the money, I asked why she’s chosen to do such bone-crushing, emotionally draining work. She looks up from the architect’s plans as if the question were impertinent, says simply “this is where God wants me,” and launches back into a detailed explanation of her plans to model small-scale, sustainable urban agriculture by using land at the school and convent to grow crops.

Meanwhile in Lodwar, I visited the Bethany Guest House and an adjacent formation center for aspiring nuns, members of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd of the Immaculate Conception, an order founded under Kimengich.

There, I met Sister Giovanna, who runs the formation center, and Sister Magdalene, who heads the guest house. They spoke passionately about forming the next generation of women religious to go out and evangelize, teach and serve. They also described their aim to teach these young girls trade skills for self-reliance, so they can pass them on to others.

Sister Magdalene walked us through the formation center, explaining what’s been done already and what will need to be done in a hurry. Here too, growth is one main challenge – they’ve got five young women in formation now, with another eight expected to arrive next year.

Sister Magdalene, too, projected a calm determination when asked about all the different ways such an undertaking could go off the rails.

“This is what the church needs from me,” she said of seeing the effort through – as if the church needing something, and her then delivering it, is axiomatic.

Say what you want about these women and their dreams, but one thing is for sure: Terms such as “subservient,” “uncritical” and “second-class citizen” simply don’t apply.

Small input, big results

In a world clogged by appeals for charitable causes, it’s natural to wonder from time to time how many of these outfits actually make a difference on the ground. Anyone who knows the Church in a place such as Kenya, however, can tell you that when one of these charitable groups works well, it doesn’t take much to achieve big results.

Several international Catholic organizations are involved in supporting the work of the Church in Mombasa and Lodwar, including Miseror in Germany, Missio Aachen, the Pontifical Missions Society, and others. Our trip, however, was sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need, a papal foundation devoted to supporting the persecuted and suffering church around the world, and so it’s their footprint here that’s clearest to me.

We saw any number of projects Aid to the Church in Need is backing, from convents and schools to formation centers for nuns. One that left an especially deep impression was their support for paying Mass stipends to priests in Lodwar, where priests have to have the Marine spirit to survive – this is a poor, forgotten, chronically under-developed place that covers vast distances, and if you’re not willing to literally go the extra mile, you won’t make it.

Much of the work of this diocese is primary evangelization, bringing the Gospel for the very first time to the isolated, pastoralist Turkana people. The rest is consumed with the realities of poverty, water shortages, drought and famine, and ethnic conflict. It’s an unforgiving, if also oddly compelling place, and the people here look to priests not just as pastors, but as ombudsmen to whom all of life’s problems can be directed.

We were privileged to get to know several of Lodwar’s priests this week, and at one stage, over lunch, our conversation turned to money. I said I’d heard that Aid to the Church in Need helped cover the Mass stipends, and wondered how much they were.

Father Isaiah Ajiri, who came from Uganda 15 years ago to serve in Lodwar and now works in the diocesan pastoral center in addition to assisting in the cathedral parish and taking care of several remote “outstations,” told me it usually works out to about $100 a month, so about $1,200 a year.

Casually, I asked if that’s intended to be some pocket money for the priest, on top of whatever his basic income is. Ajiri and Father Joseph Ekalimon, the vicar general of the diocese, hesitated, not quite sure what I was asking.

“Let’s put it this way,” I said. “What’s the priest salary in this diocese?”

Ajiri and Ekalimon burst out laughing, and eventually Ekalimon recovered enough to explain there is no priest salary here – that $1,200 from the stipends is a priest’s total annual income, and it’s expected to cover not only his needs but those of people who come to him for help.

All in, Aid to the Church in Need’s share of the bill for the stipends each year comes to about $60,000, making it hardly the largest line-item in most organizations’ annual budgets. For what they buy in a place like Lodwar, however, those dollars pack an impressive punch.

Changing the world, in other words, doesn’t always have to be about shock and awe. Sometimes, it can be about helping a dedicated missionary priest put one foot in front of another.

Source: Crux...