close-up
life and faith

THERE, WHERE THERE ARE “LIVING STONES”
The Pope called them “living stones” at the beginning of his ministry,
the men through whom “God Himself builds the house.” From frontier mission territory to the rebirth after the scandals in the Boston diocese, we present here three stories from the Church in the world.

edited by Luca Fiore and Alessandra Stoppa

DIVYA, CONVERTed
among the sheiks
“I was born 35 years ago in Delhi into a Sikh family. During the Easter Vigil, I will be baptized, in the parish of Abu Dhabi.” Divya Singh has lived for a few months in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, less famous than Dubai, but no less wealthy. For over a decade, this city has been one big construction site, with skyscrapers and great works being completed in record time where a few decades before there was only desert. All this is due to petrodollars, certainly, but also to the foreign workers who provide low-cost manpower, above all Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos. They work in the construction sites, in the homes of rich emirs, as taxi drivers, and in humbler jobs. Divya has the good fortune to work as an engineer in the State administration. By now, foreigners are 80% of the population, and include many Catholics. The only Catholic parish in the city has 100,000 faithful. The Church in the Arab Emirates is made up of simple people, many of whom lack the money for a taxi to go to weekly Mass. A poor Church, a Church that is for the poor. Pope Francis would like it. Every year, at the Easter Vigil, some adults are baptized, people who, precisely here in the Arab peninsula, have found work and encountered Christ. There is a Chinese woman who met Christianity through her Filipino colleagues at the airport duty-free shop. There is the young Malayan cook whose mother had converted to Islam, but he wanted to become Christian in Abu Dhabi. And then there is Divya, the Sikh, who met Christianity through his wife, Hwae Jung, a Korean artist he met in Boston. “We got engaged. She was Catholic, and on Sundays I accompanied her to Mass.” For a Sikh, it was a completely new experience, a discovery. “It’s not that I was disappointed with my religion. I went to the temple with my mother. But the language was a big obstacle. The Sikh rites and texts are in Punjabi, the language of Punjab, a state in northern India. I only speak Hindi. So I never understood well the meaning of the words they said in the temple. In Boston, instead, English was spoken at church and I could understand everything.” Both families resisted, but in the end they had to give in, and Divya and Hwae Jung got married with a dual rite in church and in the Sikh temple.
“After two years, she asked me if I had ever thought of becoming Catholic. She said she wanted us to be together in paradise, but that if I didn’t become Christian it wouldn’t be possible. She said that if I felt it was the right thing, I should do it.” Divya began thinking about it. A few months later, they moved to New York to work in a big bank and at the same time pursue a masters degree at Columbia. He found that nobody worked a mere 40-hour week (“I would even work 90 to 100 hours a week”) and soon he was unable to keep up the pace. “I no longer had time for anything, and ended up getting sick. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. It was then that I began reading books on religion and praying, and I started to feel better. Certainly, I had a good doctor and my wife was taking care of me, but I saw that those texts and the daily rosary made me stronger. I had the clear perception that God and the Holy Spirit were helping me.”

“At home.” When Divya was offered a job in Abu Dhabi, he seized the opportunity to move, because the pace was less stressful and he would have more time for his family. He was quick to contact the parish priest of the Church of Saint Joseph, and began catechism for Baptism. “The thing about Christianity that struck me was that, when I walked into a church, I felt at home. As an engineer, I loved how the Christian rites were systematic and orderly. But what counted most was the help I felt in the moment of greatest difficulty in my life. I saw that something had changed. It is strange to be baptized here, in Abu Dhabi, but the community is truly alive. When the people come here, notwithstanding a thousand difficulties, they rediscover their own faith.”

Rebirth after the scandals
Antonio Enrique began working as editor of the Boston Pilot, the daily paper of the local diocese, a few days before September 11, 2001. But for him the true perfect storm arrived the next January, with the beginning of the scandals about reports of sexual abuse by some Boston priests, which led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. For the Catholics of the city, it was the beginning of a nightmare. Pain for the victims, disgust at what had happened, and disorientation caused people’s faith to falter and a great number to abandon the Church. “The situation that Cardinal Sean O’Mally found in 2003 was very difficult,” recounts Enrique. “For almost a year, protesters against the Church gathered outside his Masses.” Is it possible for faith to re-flower in a place where men of the Church have committed such horrible acts?
Ten years have passed since the Capuchin Cardinal arrived in Boston. The scandals have not been forgotten, but the Church has had the strength to get up again and continue her journey, with small steps. It is true, between 2000 and 2009, attendance at weekly Mass fell by 24%. “Today, only 16% of the 1.8 million Catholics go to Sunday Mass,” explains Enrique. “But after the explosion of the controversy, the number was even lower.” A sign of renewed trust is the offerings of the faithful. “Before, the diocese collected 17 million dollars a year, but at the apex of the scandals it fell to 7 million. Today, offerings have settled around 14 million a year.” But there is another index that gives the measure of a rediscovered vitality. “When he arrived, O’Malley found a diocesan seminary that was dying. Today, there are 70 young men preparing for the priesthood, 20 of whom attend the Redemptoris Mater seminary of the Neocatechumenals.”

Something growing. After what happened, the choice of the priesthood is anything but an easy one. “The Cardinal sought to invite and support living ecclesial realities like the new movements, for example CL and the Neocatechumenal Way, to which I belong,” explains Enrique. “Each year we have between 400 and 500 adults who request Baptism. Maybe there are conversions because of marriage to a Catholic, but above all because people encounter someone able to witness to the faith in an interesting way.” Another aspect O’Malley wanted to emphasize was the relationship with young people, and he increased pastoral activity in colleges. “Young people between 18 and 23 leave home to go study,” recounts the editor. “It is a period when it’s easy to lose one’s way.” Catholic schools in the diocese are in great difficulty, but recently the Cardinal opened in Boston Cristo Rey High School, a Catholic school famous in the United States because it provides a quality education to young people from lower income families, giving students the opportunity to pay their tuition by working five days a month in city businesses. Enrollment is growing. What has enabled those who stayed to start again, to get over the scandal? “For me, it was important to understand that I am no better than those who committed those horrible acts,” says Enrique. “We are all sinners. Only this enables us not to be scandalized by the others and to keep going forward. We can only pray and ask God to heal us and enable us to continue to testify to the world the most important thing: His love for us.” His mercy, Pope Francis would say.

roger, jean, and me like the centurion
In these days in Chad, the heat has arrived and the field work stops. It is the period of the year when there is more time for the community, which lives notwithstanding the 115° F heat, the long distances on foot, and a Christianity in its early stages.
Fr. Luca Dal Bo, of the PIME (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions), has served in southern Chad for four years. When he was a child, in Sambughè, a small town near Treviso, Italy, a missionary would return every now and then, and young Luca would listen to him speaking about Brazil for hours. “It seemed impossible to me that there could be anyone who didn’t know Jesus.” He had grown up to the simple rhythm of prayer, Sunday Mass, his mother entrusting herself to the Lord, and his grandfather’s great love for his grandmother. “They always told me, ‘We thank God for everything, because without Him we wouldn’t even be able to breathe.’” Today he lives in Fianga, with men who did not know the faith. “And I know it through them.” He brings the conversation quickly to himself: “I am in mission in order to stay with Jesus. These years have been a great opportunity that God has given me to deepen my faith.”
At every Mass, he perceives the words of the consecration as an invitation: he thinks, “Take the Body and the Blood... your life!”, “And do like Me, in memory of Me. Here, give yourself, let yourself be broken, sipped, in the name of Jesus.” He says that his heart still overheats in the face of certain ugly things in the traditional culture, such as the tribal initiations–many Christians of the village have left the Church to participate in these rites. “Some not, though, some have remained faithful to the Baptism they have received. They stayed home, continuing to come to the parish. It was hard, because the ‘initiated’ were very aggressive. But when those who had abandoned following Jesus saw the faithful ones, they asked to return.” A Church that remains standing, notwithstanding falls. “It falls with Jesus, and gets up again,” he says. “One finds the courage only if one is in love. The person in love is forgiven everything.”
He desires this courage for himself, “to lay his head on Jesus’ chest like John, because one feels loved even if one still doesn’t know how to love truly.” And “all the rest”–his daily life and his responsibilities “are only expressions of staying with Him.”

“White smoke!” It is the same mission as ever, as Pope Francis called it in one of his first talks, “bringing Jesus Christ to man.” Luca is learning it: “God gives the gift of faith to those who let themselves be seduced by Him.” He thinks of Jean Louis, an elderly man who used to walk three miles with his missal in hand to come here. “The evening he died, I greeted him and he didn’t respond, but when I asked him if he wanted the Holy Oil he looked at me and smiled. His strength returned and he sat up, to pray.” Then, he lay back, serenely, and closed his eyes. “He changed me, evangelized me. The way he died announced Christ to everyone, like the centurion, who could say, ‘The Lord is here.’” And he said it again, looking at the faces of the 40 priests of his diocese when all of a sudden, at the meeting with the bishop, one of them with a radio to his ear yelled, “White smoke!” They crowded in front of an old TV. “I’ll never forget those faces full of expectation, and that silence, so as not to miss anything. We were there, far across the world, squashed close to the TV in the heat, but so desirous to see the Pope.”
A shout comes up from the courtyard, “Luca, a ball!” It is the daily call. Six-year-old Roger comes to the mission with his little friends to play soccer. His parents are dead and he lives in a shack with his grandmother. One day, he arrived and said, “Luca, shoes!” He only had half a sandal on his feet. “I told him, ‘You work and I’ll pay you with shoes.’ He gave me a big smile and set to work gathering leaves for the mission.” He worked an hour and a half. “It broke my heart to see him pushing the wheelbarrow bigger than himself, but I let him do it, because he was happy.” Roger invited his little friends to the Way of the Cross. “Even if he doesn’t understand what it is, he sees that we do it and so he knows that it is a great thing.” Staying with Jesus: “A bit at a time, it is becoming the most important thing for me,” says Fr. Luca, “The thing that fills my life.”