Overcoming a Deadly Contradiction

Overcoming a Deadly Contradiction By Fr. Robert Mosher More than 500 years have passed since the arrival of the first Christians on the shores of the American continents, and the Church has experienced both pains and joys, through the periods of darkness and the periods of light of the history of this encounter of European and Original peoples. Some Europeans generously shared the Good News of God’s reconciliation to humanity through Christ, and helped organize the community of the faithful throughout the hemisphere, showing by their kindness and just treatment of others that this News was a believable reality. On the other hand, the savage exploitation and racism by many others also spread seeds of violence and division over the course of that long period, eventually leading to today’s scandalous reality of a supposedly Christian region that nevertheless has the greatest degree of economic disparity in the world.

The breach between the poorest and the richest is intolerably wide throughout the Americas, and constitutes a serious challenge to the credibility of the Gospel, to say nothing of the basic humanity of the peoples that live here. How to overcome such a deadly contradiction?

“That does not depend so much on grand programs and structures,” the leaders of the Latin American Catholic Church warned at their gathering in 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil, “but on new men and women who incarnate said tradition and novelty, as disciples of Jesus Christ and missioners of his Reign, protagonists of new life for a Latin America that wants to recognize itself with the light and strength of the Spirit.” (No. 11, Document of Aparecida.)

Here you will read of how our Columban missionaries, lay and consecrated, actively participate in this proposed renewal of the members of the Church in the Americas, becoming along with our communities a life giving yeast in the dough of society. We cross-cultural missionaries, inserted within an ever more missionary Church, experience continuously the grace of conversion and a more faithful living out of the Gospel in our own lives, often inspired by the examples of the people we accompany, as you will see.