The costs of discipleship

A SIMPLE WOODEN cross with its inscription No mataras, stands on the side of the road that runs through the district of San Juan de Lurigancho on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. It emphasises the commandment of the Lord “You shall not kill!” and recalls a Columban sister who was killed alongside escaped prisoners in 1983.
Sister Joan
On 14 December 2003 sisters of the Missionary Society of St. Columban marked the 20th anniversary of the violent death of Sr Joan Sawyer (51) and eight prisoners who died in a shootout with police on the dusty road outside their squalid prison in Lima. Originally from Ireland, Sr Joan used to go to the Lurigancho Prison three or four days a week to visit prisoners. Conditions there were bad, and out of 5,000 prisoners only 1,000 were sentenced. The rest were pending sentence or perhaps innocent. Sr Joan used to try to bring them some relief – medicines for some, a kind word for others, news about how their legal papers were progressing in the Ministry for Justice. The majority of prisoners came, in her own words, “from the poor sectors of Lima where they never had enough to eat, didn’t finish school and couldn’t find decent work.”
On the morning of 14 December 1983, a group of prisoners decided to try to escape. They took as hostages Sr Joan, three Marist Sisters and several social workers. After all day negotiations with the prison authorities, it was agreed that the prisoners and their hostages would be allowed leave the prison in the evening in an ambulance. They were no sooner outside the prison gate than waiting police riddled the ambulance with bullets from all sides. Four bullets struck Joan, one through the back of the neck, two through her leg and one through her finger. When removed from the ambulance she was dead.
During the Mass on the day of Joan’s burial, in a church filled with the scent of lilies, a large banner placed over the altar read “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt.25:36) and, “There is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends” (John 15:13). The fact that local people have given her name to a mother’s club, a retreat centre and a centre for school leaving groups is a tribute to how the poor communities living near the prison cherish her memory. But Sr Joan was not the only Columban to put her life on the line in recent times in the course of her missionary outreach.

Lives on the line

  Fr Rufus Halley (57), an Irish Columban priest, was killed in the Philippines in August 2001 after a failed kidnap attempt. He was shot dead while riding his motorbike between neighbouring parishes on a dirt road in Lanao del Sur, Mindanao. He had been stopped by armed men and, after attempts of dialogue with them failed, he turned to flee. He was gunned down and his body left by the roadside.
  Fr Halley’s mission was in an area of intense conflict on the island of Mindanao, which is predominantly Muslim. He had immersed himself totally in the Muslim culture and religion, so much so that he worked as a sales assistant in a local Muslim shop. He tried to bring Muslims and Christians together, healing the rifts between warring factions and creating an environment for inter-faith dialogue. It was an indication of how deeply he was loved and appreciated that the local Muslim community asked to honour him as a sultan after his death. They prayed over his body for a whole day and night, reading the Koran as a sign of respect and prayer for him. Fr Halley himself had said “It doesn’t matter whether you are Christian or Muslim, what matters is that God is one.”

Kidnapping

Four years earlier, on 27 October 1997, another Irish Columban priest working in the Philippines, Fr Des Hartford, Apostolic Administrator of Marawi in Mindanao, narrowly escaped death. He had received a request to go to a local beach to meet representatives of Muslim rebels. They kidnapped him, and so began an eleven day hostage ordeal.
That first day, there was an initial 30-minute journey in a jeepney to the mountains and then a two-hour walk into the mountains. The eight captors were heavily armed. One shot a wild bird which they ate with some rice. At nightfall, camp was set up in an opening in the forest. “My captors prepared a makeshift shelter for me, a few planks of wood covered by leaves of nipa palm,” he said afterwards. It was a starry night. “Having to move location and sleep in the open makes me apprehensive.” He slept until it began to rain and was amazed at how well the makeshift hut kept the rain out. The other days were largely spent on the move, negotiating slippery mountain paths and swamps, surviving on rice, coffee, dried fish and bananas and fending off ‘savage’ mosquitoes. Washing and shaving were done in rivers.
Fr Hartford had worked for almost thirty years promoting peace in this region of conflict. The rebels of the Moro National Liberation Front (MILF) hoped by their action to bring pressure on the government of the Philippines to fulfil promises made in an amnesty agreement some years earlier. He said afterwards his greatest fear was that the army and police would try to rescue him in a shoot out with his captors without waiting for negotiations to run their course and he was grateful that the government had respected the appeal of Church leaders not to attempt a military solution to his kidnap. He mentioned, too, his struggle to overcome the resentment of being held captive although he understood the desperation of the rebels in trying to get the government to keep to its promises. “I have many Muslim friends, and those friendships have in no way been diminished by what happened,” he said afterwards. Through the ordeal he constantly recalled scriptural texts such as Psalm 138 “With your strength, O Lord, you have strengthened me.” Had he ever thought of trying to escape? Any temptation in that direction disappeared when he saw one of his guards shoot a bird for dinner through the neck at a range of about 30 metres!
The Columbans are not unique. Many missionary societies record similar stories of members facing kidnapping and other dangers working in cross-cultural missions throughout the world. Fr Hartford was, in fact, one of six Catholic foreign missionaries to be kidnapped since 1991 in Mindanao alone.

Missionaries in danger

Missionaries often work in the world’s worst trouble spots, frequently staying after other groups and agencies have left for security reasons. On 15 September 2002 two elderly Italian Comboni priests, kidnapped for several days by rebels in Northern Uganda, were released unharmed. Fr Ponsiano Velluto and Fr Alex Pizzi walked several kilometres back to their mission and simply carried on with their work. The priests had been taken by members of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) along with several Ugandan civilians from the Opit Missionary, 300 km north of Kampala. The two priests said the rebels stole their two-way radio and took them away on foot, saying LRA leader Joseph Kony, who was reportedly in southern Sudan, wanted to speak to them. The priests spoke to Kony over the radio and were allowed to leave soon afterwards. More than 100 rebels had been involved in the raid, during which Opit’s trade centre, military barracks and Catholic mission were looted and burned. The LRA rebels are known for their unpredictable behaviour and are accused by international human rights groups of widespread human rights abuses, including recruiting thousands of children as soldiers. The kidnapping occurred just as religious leaders were attempting to foster a peace agreement between the government and the rebels, who have been in conflict for the past 15 years.
Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. In recent years, three bishops, 12 priests, three nuns and one Catholic missionary have been kidnapped there. One archbishop, one bishop, 43 priests, two religious and two Catholic missionaries have been killed. On 16 November 2002 the head of the Latin American Bishop’s conference, Jorge Enrique Jimenez, and parish priest Desiderio Orjuela were released unharmed from being held by rebels after troops stormed a rebel hideout. The 60-year-old bishop had been seized by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s oldest and best-armed rebel group. Pope John Paul II had appealed for the safe release of the two clergymen, and called on the kidnappers to abandon all forms of violence.
At the end of each year, the Vatican agency, Fides, issues a martyrology. This includes all Catholics – clerics, religious, and laymen – who are known to have been killed while engaged in missionary work. In December 2003 the list contained 29 names. For the first time, an apostolic nuncio was listed: Archbishop Michael Courtney, who was murdered in Burundi on 29 December. Africa was the continent where the greatest number of missionaries died: 17 people were killed there, including six in Uganda and five in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Colombia, where six missionaries were killed, proved once again to be the most hazardous country to carry out missionary work.