Missionaries stay with their people despite horrors overseas

Mission Sunday Supplement

Engaging with people’s faith is crucial to any development work overseas, Chai Brady hears

Waiting in a small village in Peru as the threat of execution by a terrorist group increases is not a scenario many people find themselves.

That was the situation in which Sr Josephine (Jo) McCarthy found herself many years ago when she was working as a missionary. Speaking to The Irish Catholic, the Presentation Sister discussed the role of missionaries abroad and how valuable they are in whatever community they find themselves – particularly when circumstances become hazardous.

Sr Jo worked in Ecuador and Peru for more than 20 years and was recently appointed a board member of Misean Cara, a role she says has further enlightened her to the “impressive” volume and spread of the Church’s work in developing countries across the world.

Funding

Misean Cara receives substantial funding from the Government through Irish Aid and coordinates, monitors and evaluates the work of missionaries. Missionaries’ unique and holistic approach, Sr Jo states, has created one of the most important things needed to implement positive change: trust.

She says: “Missionary work is not confined to one particular project in an area, they live there and they have a commitment to and knowledge of the area. They respond with the community, they’re engaging with the community on the ordinary issues of everyday life, on water, light, housing, drought or whatever the case may be.

“They have a trust with locals. It is very interesting that trust is one of the issues that the World Bank identified as a feature of faith-based organisations,” she says.

“You need to engage with the faith aspect of people’s lives in order to do any kind of developmental work with the community, because that’s a huge influential factor and certainly I can say that as a missionary myself – faith is a huge resource.”

Sr Jo adds that there is a difference between engaging with faith and evangelising, saying: “Sometimes people think missionaries preach and provide religious services, that’s a very separate thing to recognising faith as a motivational factor and influence. When missionaries are doing development work, which is a huge part of their work, they work with people of all faiths and none. The people they’re working with might be motivated by their Muslim faith or Evangelical faith, it’s irrelevant, faith is still an important factor and central part of their lives.”

While faith is still important in missionary countries, many Irish people may not understand its role in development work. Sr Jo says “I think in Ireland people are moving away from organised religion and in the process moving to a lack of appreciation of faith or spirituality and that is still hugely important in people’s lives”.

“Missionaries are providing religious services in places but that’s very distinct from the development work they do. A huge bulk of the work they do is development work which is irrespective of the religion or no religion of the people they serve, so maybe that’s something that people might not appreciate.”

The influence of faith not just on individuals but also communities and countries can be extremely influential. Sr Jo mentions the challenges facing Presentation Sisters working in education in Pakistan “where boys are educated and the culture believes there’s no need to educate girls”.

❛❛Congregations have long had a commitment to the education of Muslim girls as well as Catholic girls”

“They educate Christian girls but in order to be able to fund the education of Christian girls they also educate Muslim girls. Their belief is that you want to educate future leaders, obviously in Pakistan the education of girls is very much a hot topic as it’s very undervalued. Congregations have long had a commitment to the education of Muslim girls as well as Catholic girls.”

The issue is much wider than education, Sr Jo says: “It might be female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa, that’s a deeply embedded belief and there’s no easy answer to it, so you need to engage with local leaders, whatever their beliefs are and move with them to make change.”

Trust in communities and engagement with faith can help change these practices, according to Sr Jo who says development work is not a secular activity.

Asked about some of the major obstacles missionaries face, Sr Jo says climate change, particularly in Africa, is a huge issue.

“No matter what development work you’re doing, if there are extreme droughts, it’s impossible to be effective. It’s a huge challenge because people who are poorest are most effected. I would have seen that in Peru when I was there, I was there after an earthquake, during El Niño, and our sisters where in Ecuador during the earthquake in 2016. It’s always the poorest who will suffer most in those situations – natural disasters. The biggest challenge is climate,” Sr Jo says.

“One of the concerns we have is there was a downturn in the economy, that it’s always the poorest who will suffer because obviously donations go down, everything goes down, that would be another fear – as their need goes up donations go down,” she adds.

It’s not just climate change that drastically affects missionary work, this is obvious from Sr Jo’s own experience in Peru when a wave of unrest, terrorism and human rights violations hit the country in the 80s. Despite this, missionaries waited it out with their communities.

Sr Jo says: “That’s another element of missionary work, what I call psychosocial, but sometimes called pastoral support, and that’s not a religious support, it’s being there with people. Just to be there at a time of crisis. In that time of terrorism, we just waited and were there for the rebuilding.”

Other organisations face more red tape in these scenarios, with Sr Jo saying there is a big difference between a missionary and a development worker whose employer is obliged to withdraw them for security reasons.

“Missionaries are there on a personal, voluntary basis. I was able to say to my congregation, to my family, ‘I’m staying because that’s my own wish’. So missionaries can stay when it may not be sometimes safe to stay,” Sr Jo says.

“It’s not a judgment on other organisations but their leaders have to answer for the safety of their workers, whereas missionaries we have a personal vocation, it’s a different thing. I was there because I wanted to be there. Some missionaries did leave because their leaders made a decision, very few.

“You’re there because you were there before the crisis, you know the people, so you’re staying with your people. It was the whole community, not just the Catholic community.

“That’s why at the time when I was there in Peru and talking to other missionaries, all of them said the same thing. When you can’t do anything, you just stay with the people and you believe there’s something beyond yourself, the transcendent, then what you’re doing there makes sense,” she says.

Terrorism

Peru during that period of terrorism beginning in the 1980s involved guerrilla attacks by members of anti-government groups and “was very frightening” according to Sr Jo. “That’s when you call on your own resources, and your only resource to call on is your own depth of faith at the end of the day”.

One of the occasions in which she felt in mortal danger, and remembers well, was when she was living in a remote village in the Andes with an American sister called Sr Sharon.

The terrorists had started targeting the rural population. Sr Sharon says: “The pattern was they were moving to a village at night and called all the community out to the public square and often executed the mayor or town councillor, or a missionary. There was an Australian missionary shot at one stage and I think two Franciscan priests.

“One day the mayor came to us, to Sharon and myself, and said the terrorists moved into a local town last night and the rumour in the town today is that they’re coming to us tonight. The mayor was a young woman, she said ‘I’m not going to run but I don’t want to expose my children to danger’, so she said, ‘would you mind my children tonight?’

“We just looked at one another and said ‘yes of course we will’. After that at about 6 o’clock her and her husband brought their two children over to us, the children were young they were primary school age. They went away and the children went to bed. We waited and wondered all night what was going to happen, thankfully nothing happened, there were several other moments like that but that was one that stands out crystal clear.”

Sr Jo is adamant that she doesn’t believe staying with the community was brave or courageous, it was a simple fact of living there and “it was what you did”.

“You were just there with your people. At that time it was the life we were living – that terrorism dominated the agenda for a few years basically,” she added.

Lockdown

The act of remaining behind when others leave was also a feature during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to John Moffett CEO of Misean Cara. Missionaries are still helping locals deal with the impact of lockdowns including the loss of livelihoods and closure of schools.

A few months ago, Mr Moffett visited South Africa where he met with Antrim-born Sr Mary McAteer who has been in the country for 35 years and assists people in numerous ways. Sr McAteer, of the Missionary Sisters of the Assumption, is a board member of the Catholic Health Care Association of Southern Africa (CATHCA). One of its projects is in Orange County, a township outside Johannesburg, working with a community group called Inkanyezi which was established initially to address the epidemic of HIV and AIDS in the early 2000s. Due to improved treatments for the disease they have moved on to work tackling gender-based violence which Mr Moffett said is a serious issue in the country.

Speaking of Sr McAteer he said: “She’s a really energetic woman who has a great vision for challenging and addressing some of the endemic problems that exist in the urban townships in South Africa, particularly with violence against women being major. Violence in South Africa is a major problem anyway, but violence against women is particularly challenging.”

Mr Moffett said missionaries have a very broad approach to their work, as outlined in Misean Cara’s recently published paper in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Proceedings called: ‘The Missionary Approach to Development: Ensuring Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education for the Most Marginalised.’

He gives the Marist brothers’ work as an example. They are educating refugee children who are not receiving an education from the authorities in South Africa as they have no documentation. The project is called Three2Six. They’re using their schools in Johannesburg and teachers volunteer to teach them.

The number of health facilities established across Africa by Christian Churches, mainly the Catholic Church, stands at about 70% according to Mr Moffett, “missionaries are still providing a vital service in health across the continent”.

Regarding social justice pursuits, Mr Moffett said: “Upholding human rights and being very vocal on behalf of communities on human rights, we have great people like Fr Gabriel Dolan (MHM) in Kenya with the Kiltegans. He’s been there for 40 years working on legislative programmes, calling out injustices and helping people access justice who would otherwise find it really difficult to get access to supports and services, people who would be indiscriminately chucked off their land for richer people’s projects, because they don’t have the education or the paperwork to retain their rights. They’re just supporting people in that way – it’s incredibly important. It is dangerous.”

In Ireland the work of missionaries is not often acknowledged in mainstream media or by the majority of politicians. Highlighting their importance in improving how Ireland is viewed in the eyes of the world, Mr Moffett says: “Historically the Irish missionaries who have gone overseas have been the original diplomats and ambassadors for Ireland. They have the led the course for Irish diplomatic missions to set up in some of these countries and have been fantastic in that way.

“I think our missionaries here are incredibly humble and don’t seek a lot of attention for the work that they do but when you amalgamate the amount of work carried out by Irish missionaries and indeed their counterparts overseas, and increasingly more so by the indigenous missionaries they are passing their charism on to, it’s an incredible network and body of people that are working towards common goals and common ends with a common purpose which is fantastic.”

Future

Looking to the future missionary landscape, he said: “It’s important to remember that Ireland is a bit of an outlier. Across the developing world, connections with Church, connection to faith is still incredibly important and we can actually see growth in Churches, growth in people joining orders and congregations in the developing world, so while we’ve got the decline in Ireland and maybe an aging population of missionaries here, we’re seeing a real growth and vibrancy in missionary development work with new entries coming from Africa,  Asia and Latin America. They are carrying on the charisms that have been passed on to them by our original missionaries from Ireland.

“I think definitely the way we support mission from Ireland in the future will be different, we might not have the personal connection of the Irish missionary overseas, the aunt or the uncle who’s gone off, but what we will have are a very active group of Irish congregations that are supporting missionaries from other countries overseas and working with them to uphold the charism and the vision that was originally established and continue on the legacy of their work in an appropriate way.”