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Eric
Manhaeghe, CICM Allow me to start with a statement we all agree upon: ours is a time of transition for missionary institutes. This calls for a regular check-up. Every transition is requiring a lot of energy. Consequently, we need to know how much energy we have and which illnesses may prevent us from making the best possible use of our energy. The missionary institute I belong to is called Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae. We most often use the acronym cicm which does not mean much to outsiders. Many years ago, we were called Missionarissen van Scheut. This is not Latin but Dutch. Scheut is the name of the place where we were founded and means ‘shoot’. There is a rich symbolism in the name and I will come back to it later. Let me first tell you why we abandoned it. Because we want to be practical. Our French speaking confreres, in spite of at times heroic efforts, rarely succeeded in pronouncing the word Scheut correctly. As a matter of fact, words starting with the consonants ‘sch’ were used in a founding Flemish myth to unmask the French and consequently smash their heads. With the English speaking members there is no such problem, yet they are pragmatic and adapt the word for easier pronunciation. ‘Sch’ becomes ‘sh’ and ‘eu’ becomes ‘i’. This allows for easy pronunciation but the meaning does in no way correspond to the original. In 1862, the year of our foundation, cicm was a tiny shoot indeed. One hundred years later it became a majestic tree, admired by many at the impressive celebration of the centenary. Today, the tree still looks solid but no longer majestic. Its beauty is gone. There are old dying branches, and a few new ones but one of them got severely damaged, another one has many yellow leaves. There also are a couple of new shoots, yet one of them withered. I propose that we make a check-up of this tree. Let us start by having a look at the branches and the leaves: how do we feel and how are we perceived? We will also need to examine the roots: our identity and charism. Finally we will examine the fruits: our activity and its results. How do we feel? How are we perceived? I already mentioned that cicm looked like a majestic tree in 1962. We were in full expansion and often considered heroes by the people. This is no longer the case. Membership is dwindling and financial resources are decreasing too. True, membership became far more international than before and there are a good number of young promising members. People no longer look at us as heroes but most of them still admire us for our courage. Some perceive us as foolish idealists, recklessly attempting to achieve the impossible. A number of failures suggest that they may have a point. Deep down, cicm members feel that they are called. They are somehow people who were at a certain moment struck by the Lord Jesus and this changed their lives. They did not acquire their vocation, they received it. This makes them happy. Casual observers are at times surprised. Are these joyful laughing men missionaries? Are they not supposed to be more serious? We are a happy and at times noisy lot. Cicm members are very generous too and this makes us vulnerable. We have a heart for people, especially for those who suffer. This passion for them makes us at times forget all the rest. This is how some of us get involved in a myriad of activities losing sight of the One who called us. Like other religious, we are not entirely normal. To start with, we have no wife, no children, and yet we are often called ‘father’. This is also how we feel. Our service is in many cases literally life-giving. Again, this is making us vulnerable. Paternalism is a serious temptation. Second, we are practicing the community of goods. We have no personal possessions but we receive a lot in order to do our ministry. This is often a blessing but may also become a curse. Think again of aforementioned paternalism. Distributing goods, however well-intentioned, is in many cultures seen as proof of being rich. Exactly the opposite of what we want to be. Third, we discern God’s will together with our brothers and guided by our superiors. We go wherever we believe God is sending us. Many among us are serving in remote and thoroughly deprived areas where people are living in misery. We do not even feel that we deserve praise for it. We find it normal. Yet, we are often deeply hurt when we feel that we are not understood. These hurts may lead to bitterness and cynicism. Others among us assume that everyone needs to be as available as we are. This leads to authoritarianism and at times harsh treatment of people and even confreres who feel unfit or are simply afraid to serve in a given place. Prayer is very much part of our life. Living among the people, we most often pray with them. Many of us highly value moments of quiet prayer. There also is the fitness centre of ongoing formation. Only a few make regularly use of it. Some stay there for a year and then again forget about it. Yet, the offer is always there and this is reassuring, especially in difficult times. The trouble with prayer and ongoing formation is that they take time. Our passion for the people is at certain moments literally consuming all our time. Activism is never far away and makes us very vulnerable. Paradoxically, it is the main reason why confreres at a certain moment abandon their vocation. Frenetic action totally obscures the fact that they received their vocation as a gift. They lose sight of the One who granted this gift and see no more meaning in their ministry. Most of our communities and pastoral teams are multi-cultural. This is a marvellous gift and at the same time a tremendous challenge. It creates the feeling of always being somewhere in between. The gaps that need to be bridged are at times widening to the extent that no bridge can hold any longer. This is an aspect of our life that calls for much further reflection. Sure enough, the older ones among us embarked on this venture without much preparation, welcoming the other as a gift with the openness and the naiveté of a child. This is very generous, yet the time may have come for all of us to have a hard look at the way in which we can cultivate this gift. To sum up, we feel that we are carrying a precious treasure in earthen vessels. They need to be handled with great care and we are not all that good at it. One cannot armour earthen vessels. It would render them useless for the nature of the treasure itself requires the real thing: fragile earthen vessels. Taking good care of them is the message. Our identity and charism: mission ad gentes Looking at the branches and the leaves of our tree, we noticed at the same time healthy and unhealthy ones. Being pretty much action-oriented we may feel tempted to start pruning at once. This is not necessarily the right approach. Let us first have a look at the roots or our self-understanding. Do the roots really reach the place where the right nutrients can be absorbed? Something may have happened to our self-understanding as members of a missionary institute. A basic question is: “What do our Constitutions say about our being or our charism?”. It might be a good idea to start by finding out what charism means. It is derived from the Greek word charis: grace. In the Eucharist the priest greets the people with the Pauline formula: “The grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” Grace here refers to the participation in the very life of God given to us in Christ and received with the Spirit. Paul considers it a reality Christians must communicate and share. The Greek word charisma represents a favour granted by God, a particular gift for the good of the community. Paul lists several of them in I Co 12:8-11. Vatican II views religious life as a charism, a particular gift of the Spirit to the Church. It is a divine gift the Church received from the Lord (cf. LG, n. 43) and as such it belongs inseparably to the life and holiness of the Church (cf. LG, n. 44). The leadership of the Church does not create charisms but receives them on behalf of all the faithful. These charisms often challenge the Church in many ways. Hence the need to discern their authenticity as gifts coming from the Spirit. The Archbishop of Mechelen received cicm as a gift from the Spirit on November 28th, 1862. His discernment was confirmed by the Congregation de Propaganda Fide on July 20th, 1900, thus granting cicm the status of a missionary institute of pontifical right. In a decree, dated May 31st, 1988, approving the new cicm Constitutions, cicm is characterized by the same Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples as follows: “Participating in the mission of Jesus Christ entrusted to the Church, may the Missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary commit themselves to their role as messengers of the Good News, in full fidelity to the charism of their venerable Founder and to the Constitutions approved by the Holy See, which offer a sure guide for their daily lives as persons consecrated to God for the missionary service Ad Gentes” (Constitutions, p. 6). The decree explicitly mentions the charism of the Founder and then states that those who are faithful to it in accordance with the newly approved Constitutions are “persons consecrated to God for the missionary service Ad Gentes.” The Constitutions themselves never literally mention the charism of cicm nor the Latin term ad gentes. The Constitutions never use Latin words. A wise decision for less and less members understand Latin! However, the same notion is rendered in English by the expression “to the nations”. Article 2 presents the corporate commitment of cicm. It affirms that each member heard the call of Christ: our very being is not something we created but it is a response to a call, hence a gift we freely accepted from the Lord. Art. 2 goes on stating that, having heard this call, we are sent to the nations. In Latin, this would read: ad gentes missi sumus. This corporate commitment is further specified in Articles 3 through 11, under the heading Sent to the Nations. Aforementioned description of our very being is in line with our own tradition. Cicm was indeed founded for ‘the conversion of the infidels’. True, we no longer feel comfortable with this condescending terminology reflecting the view of the Church at the time of the foundation of our Congregation. Vatican II brought about a radical change in the Church’s thinking about and attitude towards the believers of other religions and the people who are indifferent or hostile to religion. The ancient term ‘nations’ was reintroduced because it sounds more neutral in the ears of our contemporaries. Reaching out to them was then called missio ad gentes. In his encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II explicitly states that “The specific nature of this mission ad gentes consists in its being addressed to ‘non Christians”’ (34). This includes interreligious dialogue (cf. RM, 55-57) as mentioned in Art. 4 of our Constitutions. Looking at cicm and many other missionary institutes alike, one cannot fail to note that the overwhelming majority of the members are no longer directly reaching out to people of other religions and convictions. They are simply too busy with the pastoral care of the churches they founded. The task looks so overwhelming and the needs so enormous that they feel compelled to stay. In many cases, this leads to a distorted self-understanding. The more popular understanding of the missionary as a pastor in a foreign country takes the place of the self-understanding as a missionary reaching out to people of other religions and convictions. The roots are no longer growing naturally, they change direction and may be affecting the health of the tree. This will become much clearer when we consider the fruits of the tree or our activity. Missionary activity: a multifaceted corporate commitment We are dealing with a rather special tree. It brings forth a great variety of fruits. Yet it is important to remember that not each single branch but the whole tree is producing them. Some branches, even tiny ones, would like to produce everything. This is not only exhausting the available energy but success may lead the branch to break off. I would like to insist in this section on our corporate commitment which never totally coincides with the personal commitments of the individual members, even not with its sum-total. I will elaborate on one particular aspect: worldwide availability. At a certain moment of our history it started leading a life of its own, thus severely limiting the wide variety of fruits we are supposed to produce. It even tended to take the place of the roots. Unsurprisingly, our doing which flows from our being is rather diversified. Art. 2 of our Constitutions mentions the most basic things we are doing as a Congregation (corporate commitment): we leave our country, we proclaim salvation as a gift of God which liberates people, we address ourselves preferentially to the poor, we live and work together in closely knit multicultural communities, thus witnessing to universal brotherhood and reflecting the reality that all local Churches are jointly assuming their responsibility for the universal mission. This list is by no means exhaustive, Art. 3-11 add a few elements like interreligious dialogue, missionary animation, cooperation with other Missionary Institutes and other Christian denominations. Obviously, no member is able to do all this on his own. This is a corporate commitment. Art. 3 points out that any personal commitment, wherever a member may happen to live and work, must be a contribution to the corporate cicm commitment. This is a matter of personal and communal discernment leading to eventual reorientations. Our doing or corporate commitment reflects the new understanding of mission in the Catholic Church: reaching out to people of other faiths and convictions in a respectful way, living among them as witnesses rather than as teachers, faithful to the spirit of Evangelii Nuntiandi. Yet, one particular thing we are doing seems immune to change: we leave our country. This is often called the ‘traditional’ ad extra. Forgive me for returning to some Latin terminology but ad extra is Latin and leaves me no choice. It may surprise many but no equivalent of ad extra can be found in the Constitutions. Does the expression ‘we leave our country’ mean ad extra? Not really. One must admit that it is closer to the term profectus which we used at the time we were still reading Latin. In English one would simply state that we are sent. Profectus means ‘left for’ with the intention of moving forward, going beyond. The correct Latin term based on the wording of our Constitutions would read: egressus (a patria), left (his country). This is all the more noteworthy because the explanations and specifications following Art. 2 are not about the demands or challenges related to leaving one’s own country but about integrating oneself into the welcoming country. Why was cicm’s traditional self-awareness as expressed by the term profectus ad replaced by the concept of leaving one’s country? An attentive reader will have noticed that the New Testament never mentions ‘missionaries’. Yet, from the very beginning of the Church the disciples of Christ were reaching out to whomever was willing to listen to them. This is an essential dimension of discipleship. The term mission (in the way we understand it today) is used for the first time around 1610, at a time that reaching out to non-Catholics was no longer natural and even potentially dangerous. The fourth vow of the Jesuits was called voto de las misiones. The members who were allowed to take this vow were willing to accept any special mission from the pope. There were two broad categories. First, the exterior mission addressed to the ‘infidels, heretics and the apostates’. Second, the interior mission aiming at strengthening the faith in neglected parishes or at bringing back those who had lost the faith without having formally deserted the Church. The Congregation de Propaganda Fide popularized the term exterior mission and called all who were involved in it missionaries. Other institutes like the Redemptorists took to heart the interior mission. Please note that ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ refer to the type of mission, not the country of origin of the missionary. One must wait for the beginning of the 19th century to see a large number of missionaries depart from Europe for ‘foreign lands’, i.e., at the other side of the Great Ocean. They were viewed as heroes by their countrymen. Indeed, many of them died very young, mostly because of illness. Their ‘converts’ also highly valued them. For more than a century, missionaries enjoyed a rather high status. This changed drastically during the second half of the 20th century. At home, the missionary is no longer seen as a hero but rather as an arrogant destroyer of cultures. Overseas, the highly valued promoter of civilization and bringer of the true faith becomes a mere expatriate. One can hardly underestimate the shock this sudden change brought about at the level of feelings. Many missionaries felt bad almost everywhere. Unsurprisingly, a few started developing a spirituality of the expatriate, the person who leaves his country for a noble cause. Abraham who responded to God’s call and left his country to become a blessing for all is their model. This is a creative and constructive response to a painful experience: being degraded from the status of hero to the one of the rather marginal expatriate. It is saying: “Indeed, expatriates we are and this is our choice. We willingly accept this low status because of the Lord who called us, thus allowing us to become a blessing for the marginalized and despised”. There were a few problems, though. The first one was that this new and undoubtedly valid spirituality did not attract many young Europeans and vocations dropped drastically in the old continent, especially in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. At the same time, more and more young people from the so-called ‘mission’ countries asked to join the missionary institutes. Until the seventies, most members born in these countries stayed as missionaries in their own country (the mission oath was meant to keep missionaries in the territories of de Propaganda Fide!). The new concept of ad extra was promoted in order to allow all members to live their missionary vocation and spirituality in the same way: as expatriates. Exterior mission now became mission outside one’s own country. This is pretty different from the traditional approach, yet this does not mean that it is necessarily a wrong discernment. A number of missionary institutes, among them svd, by far the largest one, did not follow this trend, let alone radicalize it. These institutes had already a significant number of members in countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, the People’s Republic of China, etc., which did not allow foreign missionaries to work within their territory. This reality was part of their discernment and led to a more diversified spirituality which allowed space both for expatriate and native missionaries. One assists at times at heated debates about ad extra, often identified with or closely associated with ad gentes. Admittedly, a missionary institute will always cultivate a worldwide availability among its members. This allows it to be present where it is most needed. The formation of the members will be shaped by it to a great extent. Yet making it an absolute is probably unwise. It obscures the real nature of the corporate commitment, stressing the need to be in the ‘right place’, and undervaluing the necessity to do the right thing. This explains why so many missionaries are simply pastors in a foreign country. Going back to the image of our tree, one may say that it engaged too easily in self-fertilization. Fruits that fell on the soil offer indeed at times nutrients to the tree, yet in most cases they are not meant to do this. They may force the roots to the surface and this is never healthy. Roots ought to go deep and take their nutrients from a rich soil, mainly composed of elements it did not produce itself. Ongoing discernment The purpose of this conference was to state the question about the tension between missionary charism and activity. I did not offer any answers and I probably did not say anything new. I do not have answers, only a few ideas on how to go about the present transition. I am fully aware of the fact that the image of the missionary tree is far from perfect and that it could be elaborated further. Just think of the environment of the tree. We can be sure that the sun of God’s grace will shine upon it. We are less sure of the rain. Even if planted and soundly rooted in the tradition and more recent experience of the Church, our tree may be affected by many forms of pollution. I still believe that it is a solid tree, even if it lost part of its beauty. Let’s take good care of the roots and we will not be disappointed in its fruits. Far from proposing answers, I hope that this reflection may help the reader ask questions. Times of transition call for good discernment about our being and doing. One thing is for sure: we are heading for important changes. Our being or charism is a gift and may not change that much. Our doing, however, must change if we want to remain faithful to our charism. The environment in which we are operating is undergoing rapid change and our institutes themselves are no longer the same. Just think of demographics! A multicultural membership is fundamentally different from a predominantly European one. This is not merely a matter of colour or ethnicity. This is about world views, ways of believing in God and communicating his message, ways of living and witnessing together. I hope that our common discernment will stay in close contact with the real world. Reaching out to people of other faiths and convictions is not a romantic enterprise. It often is very complex and requires the cooperation of all. When one quarter of our membership is directly full-time involved in this activity, I think that we are doing a fine job. We can never expect all to do the same! This would be counterproductive. In any case, a fair number are in initial formation and retired. Others are taking care of logistics and finances. We cannot forget the missionary animation and indeed parish work. Parishes often offer the concrete field in which all the rest can be done or a solid base from which one can reach out. Our discernment is not about how many exercise a particular ministry but rather about the orientation of our corporate commitment.
Ref.: Text given for the SEDOS Conference held on 10 June 2005 at the Brothers of the Christian Schools, Via Aurelia, 476, Rome
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