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A Capuchin
missionary's celebrated ministry in Ethiopia
A long and interesting
series of events is planned for the bicentenary of the birth of Cardinal
Guglielmo Massaja (1809-2009). He was the Capuchin friar who reopened
the way to Ethiopia for the Church in the mid-19th century after the
failure of the Jesuit, Franciscan and Capuchin missions in the 16th and
17th centuries.
He was also one of the
Church's most important missionaries. Mission historiography regards him
as the greatest evangelizer of the 19th century and his example and
message are still timely today. This is partly because of the
environmental conditions in which he worked, the vicissitudes of his
never-ending journeys, the mettle he showed and his skilful
organization, which enabled him to envisage and achieve "a presence like
that of the early Church and, for this very reason
—
simplicity, essentiality and clarity in harmony with the character of
the tribes he evangelized
—
worthy of apostolic times", Fr Antonino Rosso wrote, having spent his
life studying the missionary's writings.
Two congresses were held in
Rome on 11 November 2008 and on 9-10 June 2009. The participants
examined his spirituality, his literary opus
—
a grammar of the Oromo language, a parallel-text catechism, (Amarah and
Galla) and missionary memoirs
—
the context in which he carried out his apostolate and his relations
with the Italian authorities in the perspective of the colonialism in
which he was involuntarily involved.
All this will be brought to
life in a historical philatelic exhibition on 3-4 October in Madonna di
Campagna Parish, Turin, organized by the Capuchins; at two other
congresses, in Asti on 17 October and in Turin on 21 November; in the
film: Abuna Messias, the first documentary on Massaja that
won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1939 and which has recently
been restored; in the documentary: Un illustre conosciuto,
made by Nova T of Turin.
His profound spirituality
sustained him during the exile to which he was condemned eight times; in
the years of solitude that he spent in villages unknown to even the most
thorough explorers; in the difficult conditions of the epidemics that
decimated his people (whom he saved from a virulent attack of smallpox);
in the apostolic endeavours that required him to be Bishop, doctor,
tradesman, architect, stone mason, ethnologist, teacher, writer and
researcher, honoured, persecuted and humiliated, since, as he himself
wrote, "a missionary must play at least two roles: that of teacher,
which is the least, and that of victim, as a supplement to, and
continuation of, the sacrifice of Calvary".
On the eve of his death in
San Giorgio, Cremano, in the Province of Naples, he wrote on 6 August
1889: "I want it known that in the end I am no more than a poor
Capuchin, a missionary of Jesus Christ; I consider any other dignity or
supposed merit but greater debts to God and to humankind. If, in
addition, many people wish to admire, praise and reward the poor
endeavours of my apostolic life, I protest that I never intended to
serve the Church and our homeland in order to please anyone, making a
name for myself or obtaining honours in society, but solely to do my
duty and help the souls redeemed by Jesus Christ. For me, any title
would be no more than a flower, sweetly scented for a day, but useless
for eternity".
It certainly proved
beneficial, on the other hand, to have involved in his work clergy
trained at mobile seminaries or introduced to an original
Ethiopian-Catholic form of monasticism with a Franciscan Rule; to have
reorganized the catechumenate to obtain convinced and determined
Catholics; to have professed a vow that obliged him to be a missionary
for ever, "among sons and daughters whose hearts can be improved by
accepting them, sympathizing with them and praying for them, however
sinful they may be"; to have built "first the Church of souls before the
church of stone, that would otherwise have been empty"; to have
practised rigorous fasting (on almost 200 days a year), from which,
however, he dispensed others but not himself; to have chosen to go about
barefoot always, even among pebbles and thorns, as did his people; to
have accepted an extenuating task and inhuman periods of imprisonment,
which, however, did not prevent him from loving the children received
from God "as much as they require".
When they needed treatment
in illness he set up small primitive hospitals and became a doctor,
curing endemic pathologies with surprising success because he combined
Western medicine with traditional resources and, especially, "practical
and living evangelical charity, for preaching charity with words alone
is one thing and preaching it by example is another".
Daily contact with the
Copts led him to live for some time with the monks of the Monastery of
St Anthony in the Thebaid Desert "from which come the Coptic Patriarchs
and Bishops, sowing seeds of conversion", thereby anticipating by more
than a century Paul VI's Post-Conciliar Decree On the Catholic Eastern
Churches, Orientalium Ecclesiarum, in which, "a common
sharing in sacred functions, things and places, is permitted for a just
cause between Catholics and their separated brethren" (n. 28).
Following his arrival among
the Galla tribe, "with full Franciscan rigour, by begging a piece of
bread from door to door", he understood that it was indispensable "to
educate and instruct Africa with Africa", beginning with the education
and instruction of youth; hoping for the opening of centres suited to
this "in easily accessible places (the coasts) and with suitable means."
With no European "means"
(books, treatises, essays) at his disposal, he himself wrote school
manuals; he organized courses of scientific training and compiled a
grammar of the Oromo language, earning the praise of several members of
the Italian Geographic Expedition who described him as "an apostle of
Christ and a scientist, an impartial author and a supreme master of
things African".
It was precisely because he
was an "apostle of Christ" that he categorically refused to mix politics
and religion. "My sentiment and my conviction" he wrote, "were always
contrary to the system of confiding in the favour of princes as an
element too fragile and too emotional to serve as the basis for a
religious enterprise, which by its nature must descend from on high".
One day, expressing
gratitude for the honours that at a certain point were showered upon
him, he declared: "The Cross to which I had some right was that of
Calvary, pure and simple, of which I have not been worthy".
Yet the great missionary
always remained attached to that Cross with a love that fostered his
true and genuine holiness, although it was not modelled on the clichés
dear to men (penance, miracles, visions); a holiness which, after the
Second Vatican Council, we begin to perceive in all its greatness and
which, after more than a century, we hope to see proclaimed and
officially recognized.
Two saints, moreover,
Daniel Comboni and Justin De Jacobis, would have canonized him on the
spot because: "he was a man as simple as water, he led the holiest life,
of which I know many details", and "were I Pope, one sight of him would
suffice to make me canonize him". Leo XIII, learning of his death,
exclaimed: "a saint has died!".
The opinion of his
missionary confreres was unanimous in recommending that he deserved
"noble and worthy popularity": they all reputed him to be "full of
active charity and unable to rest while his brother suffered"; "a
provident father with all the qualities desirable in such persons"; "a
holy old man, bent rather by his efforts, struggles, deprivations and
sorrows than by his years".
This fame of holiness that
accompanied his life, "humanly illogical but supernaturally fruitful"
(Jean-Baptiste Coulbeaux), spurred the Capuchin Order to initiate
straight away the informative processes for his eventual beatification,
in Harar, Frascati, Naples, Asti and Turin. In 1993, Cardinal Angelo
Sodano, at that time Secretary of State and like Massaja a native of
Asti, reintroduced the process that had been blocked.
The cause was resumed and
everyone hopes that it will rapidly reach its conclusion with the
official recognition of the virtues of a missionary who for years lived
"with a handful of chick peas, like the Abyssinian hermits" and who,
shortly before his death, was able to write that "the entire South of
Ethiopia has heard God's word, with Christians scattered everywhere:
then God will judge the rest. For us, his will suffices".
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