Y.B. MANGUNWIJAYA'S BLUEPRINT FOR A DIASPORA CHURCH IN INDONESIA

Karel Steenbrink

Theology of liberation has found some prominent expression in Asian countries. The minjung of Korea and the dalit of India have entered into the international discourse of Christian theology, while Philippine theology in some instances has been close to Latin American paradigms. The fourth great Christian community of Asia, the Indonesian, has not yet managed to produce a clear and distinct phrase for a theology of liberation. The Pancasila concept has been proposed, but this is a controversial issue, because the five-pillar-ideology of Pancasila is political rather than religious, and is an interreligious rather than a clearly Christian concept. Yet, as we shall see, Indonesian theologians continue to elaborate on this concept and it may become a key concept for the future. Theology of liberation has always stressed the close relationship to political and social action. "Traveller, there is no path: you make paths by walking" has been formulated as one of the key hermeneutical procedures for many theologies of liberation, although reality often may have been different.' Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya, the most outspoken and promi- nent Indonesian theologian of liberation, is not a theologian by profession, but is called a budayawan, a sage, wise or highly civilised person (from budaya, culture, civilization). Born in the Catholic minority community of Central , living amidst an overwhelming majority of Muslims, Mangunwijaya is the adversary of a Catholic or Christian ghetto, but has become the advocate of an open diaspora. This will be elaborated in this article by presenting a summary of his biography, his work as an archi- tect, his literary work, his social and political essays and finally his more theological writings. Mangunwijaya was born in 1929 in Ambarawa, , as the first of twelve children to an exemplary couple of second generation Christians. His father was a student in the Jesuit highschool of Muntilan, Central Java, founded only in 1905, but soon becoming the basis for a fast growing group of Catholics in Central Java. His grandmother, bom in a nominally Muslim family, was brought to a nuns' boarding school in Mendut, at a distance of about five miles. She was urged to follow this

1 Hugo Assmann, Teología desde la praxis de la liberación, translated as Practical Theologyof Liberation,London: Search 1975: 43. 18 2 first class education: "the religion of these nuns is also very good".2 Mangun's mother too went to the boarding school of the Sisters at Men- dut, where she met his father at an arranged party between the students of the Jesuit school at Muntilan and the girls of Mendut. With only about 15.000 Catholics in Central Java amongst a population of more than six million, the schools and the properly arranged dating had to provide the nucleus of a family, like the one in which Mangunwijaya was born. Mangunwijaya did not enter a highschool, but a vocational school. It did not obstruct his intellectual career but provided him with technical knowledge and skill, which again and again would help him solve every- day problems. After the Japanese occupation, 1942-1945, he went to a more prestigious type of secondary education, but also joined the anti- Dutch guerilla movement in , which had to fight for the independence of Indonesia between 1945-1949. Thanks to his technical skills and his young age he could move freely between the border of both parties. In 1951 he entered the minor seminary of , and continued his studies at the major seminary of Yogyakarta, led by the Jesuits in Yogya- karta, where he was ordained a priest in 1959. Mangunwijaya did not enter the Jesuit order; on the contrary, he was the only one of his class to 3 take the decision to become a secular priest.3 "Jesuits always work amongst the elite. They want to teach at prestigious universities and I wanted to become the pastor of a small parish in a remote village, stay close with ordinary people. ,,4 His bishop Albertus Soegijopranoto, in 1940 the first Indonesian to become head of a diocese, compared a bishop without a secular clergy with a tiger without teeth, because he would be dependent on the religious orders. Yet Mangunwijaya received an uncom- mon task, a few days after his ordination. Soegijopranoto sent him to Germany in order to study architecture. This bishop wanted really to 'indigenize' the still too colonial Catholic church of Indonesia and wanted his talented young priest to become the architect of churches in Javanese style (Soegijopranoto and many of the clergy at his time thought in terms of regional Javanese rather than of Indonesian, the new country). The city of Aachen was chosen on the advice of another Indonesian student, Wardi- man Djojonegoro, who was to become minister of education of Indonesia in 1993.

2 Mangunwijayawrote a novel on the school of the Sisters, Balada Dara-dara Mendut, Yogyakarta:Kanisius 1993: 6. 3 In my article "The rehabilitationof the indigenous:recent research on the history of Christianityin Indonesia", Exchange 22 (1993) 254, I wrongly supposed, on the basis of his academic training both as a theologian and an architect, that Mangunwijaya was a Jesuit priest. 4 This and other remarks are taken from interviewswhich I had with Father Mangun- wijaya in Yogyakarta,July and August 1997.