Witness / Rose’s Account

“Without God, we can do
nothing; it is He who
draws everything along”
At the Synod as an auditor, the Ugandan nurse goes home taking with her the look of the Pope, “A father who is with us,” and she explains why it has changed her.

by Alessandra Stoppa

She is going back to her women in Uganda to tell them what she saw in Rome. She saw St. Peter’s tomb. “He was a man in flesh and blood, that man who saw Jesus face to face, who was chosen, lived and died, and was like us. He was in the cell with Paul. I saw where they were arrested. I had no doubt, but it was like seeing once more that my faith is founded on something true, not on a legend.” Rose Busingye is going back to the Meeting Point in Kampala after 20 days at the African Synod. She was invited to take part in the assembly as an auditor, and now she goes back home to talk about Peter, and above all about the Pope: “I saw a father who has always been with us. He is a father who sits beside us. He doesn’t take away our problems, but accompanies us. Before him, I know I no longer need to be afraid of anything.”
Twenty days of reports and work groups, the whole day, from morning to seven in the evening, with a pause for lunch. But Rose did not feel the weight of the day, because she never tired of looking at the Pope. Looking at him gave her the desire and the force to go back in the afternoon, to go back the following day, and the day after that. “The Pope was there, just like a father with his children, with all of us, his children. I will never forget the tenderness of his look.” Apart from the General Audience on Wednesday, Benedict XVI followed the whole Synod personally; when he was absent, the difference could be felt. “His presence, just his being there, made me think back to the content of what he had told us the first day, explaining that things do not depend on our organization.”
Poverty, violence, immigration policies, fundamentalism, AIDS, abortion... With all the Holy Father heard reported, despite all the grave facts that were recounted and the questions raised, “he was serene, never agitated. You could see clearly that he consists in something greater than himself, and so is not afraid. I saw him certain that the value of everything does not depend on what we do, whether we build or don’t  build… but the value lies in belonging to the history of the Church. In him, you see that Christianity does not depend on organization or on the conditions, because there is Someone who carries it along.” The work of the assembly  “was useful above all for understanding this: there is no drama or problem that can stop Christianity. The Mystery is not stopped by anything; He is at work.”

European man. In the morning, Rose left home at seven, finishing at seven in the evening. There was a pause from lunchtime until 4:00 p.m.  As she walked through Rome, she understood better the contents of the Synod. “I thought that the problem there in Africa is the same problem that is in Europe. It is the problem of European man: lack of faith. You see people in the street, you meet them in the shops, and many of them are sad. They have everything, yet they are sad, with some faces that I don’t see even in Africa, where people have very little. So I ask myself: what makes people happy?” If you discover that, when you have solved the problems, you haven’t solved the question of life, you ask yourself, “What can solve it?” As she answers, Rose thinks of the face of a friend she discovered over these days: Rudolf Deng Majak, Bishop of Wau, and President of the Sudan Bishops’ Conference. “Every time we spoke, he reminded us of the fact that without God, nothing is possible: ‘Without Him, we will do nothing.’ He kept repeating this.” Knowing that the region from which Deng comes is one of the most problematic of the area, she expected to meet in him someone afflicted. Quite the opposite: “He told us that everything is lacking where he comes from, and he was smiling,” as if the problems made the Mystery more imposing. “Not because it’s nice to be poor, but because the point is not to take away the problems, but to discover the meaning of things.”
She has this opportunity before her eyes every day. Think of the women of Meeting Point. “They still have all their problems, but they know that something great has happened in their lives. Their hearts have encountered God, and this is like the end of their problems, so they go singing to the quarry every day.” It is just what the Pope said at the Synod: “Christianity is not a collection of ideas, but a way of life, because Christianity is charity, it is love.”

Land of martyrs. At the end of the days of the Synod, the Pope wanted to have lunch with the participants. He wanted to greet all of them, in groups of fifteen, to embrace them, one by one. “When he came up, I thanked him. I brought him greetings from my women, and he said to me, ‘It is the land of martyrs.’ He wanted to remind me of my belonging, to tell me once again that the faith has reached Uganda.” The Holy Martyrs of Uganda are the men who were killed between 1885 and 1887, sons of African tradition who became Christians. They affirmed God to the point of death.
In greeting the Pope, Rose understood better what Fr. Carrón tells us, that, “a man who belongs to God cries out to God–see, Benedict XVI in his belonging cries out to God that His will be done. And it is really true that an ‘I’ in relationship with the Mystery is able to change everything around him.”