St Anthony Brief IRISH FRANCISCAN MISSION MAGAZINE No.3 APR/MAY 2020 €2.00 Remain Strong in Your Faith ✣✣ Prayer for Protection and Healing ✣✣ True Community is Possible! SO WE SHALL RISE I believe that the Lord really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on his shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on. Christ has risen, and so we shall rise… To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A person really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago,’ in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’ – C. S. Lewis Spirit and Life St Anthony Brief SStt AAnthonynthony BriefBrief 2 Spirit and Life. 4 Editorial. Saint Francis and the Joy of Coca Cola! Dolores Walshe interviews 5 Patrick Noonan OFM on his controversial book, St Francis Uncensored. Although a humanist, Dolores was fascinated how this long-time missionary in South Africa portrays the saint. Sr Patricia: Spreading Love and Hope. Francis Mureithi writes about 8 an extraordinary Irish Franciscan Missionary Sister for Africa, Patricia Speight, and her ministry among the poor and suffering of Kenya. Remain Strong in Your Faith. In this time of pandemic, the Minister 10 General of the Franciscan Order writes a word of hope to the worldwide Franciscan Family. 11 Prayer for Protection and Healing. 12 Church Brief. ‘This Kiss Changed My Life.’ Philippe Naudin kissed the Pope and the 13 image was seen around the world. He tells the story to Anne Facérias. Singing for Civility. Toni Cashnelli writes that Al Mascia OFM, American 14 friar and musician, wants to help heal the vitriol and division that plagues his own country. His message has drawn a worldwide response. True Community is Possible! Gerald Evans OFM believes that St 16 Francis teaches us how to live together in authentic love and acceptance. 18 A Very Successful Zim Day. The Story of the Kelly Chalice. Paschal Sweeney writes of a friar and 20 his connection to an historic chalice. 22 News from Around the Franciscan World. A Man of Gentle and Practical Service. Archbishop William Slattery 23 OFM honours Fr Liam McDermott OFM, RIP, a dedicated missionary in Volume 80 No.3 South Africa. Missionary Magazine of the Irish Franciscans. Published bi-monthly by Of Tiny Acorns and Giant Oak Trees. Tom Russell OFM reflects on the Franciscan Missionary Union, how small faith-filled steps can lead to unimagined harvest. 4 Merchants Quay, Dublin 8. 24 Production: Fr Francis Cotter OFM. Subscription & Distribution Secretary: A Letter from ‘Prison’. Bahjat Elia Karakach OFM, Guardian of the Helen Doran. Tel: (01) 6777651. friary in Damascus, writes from the ‘prison’ that is Syria. [email protected] 26 Design, Layout & Printing: Corcoran Print & Design. The Church is Like a Bicycle. Writing from Cuba, Gearóid Ó Conaire Tel: (053) 9234760. 27 OFM recognises the truth of Pope Francis’ statement, ‘The Church is like Subscription including Postage: a bicycle – it stays up as long as it keeps moving.’ Ireland – €15.00 per annum Britain – Stg£15.00 per annum Overseas – €18.00 per annum 30 Mission Digest. Slowly but surely! Apr/May 2020 3 A Different Pandemic Greetings to our readers of the St Anthony Brief from the parish of St Joseph in the coffee-growing area of Barberena in Guatemala where I live and work. We are four friars in the community – three Guatemalans and me from Dublin. As we entered the Lenten season, I was impressed by a reading from the book of Isaiah on the kind of penance and fasting acceptable to the Lord. ‘Is not this the sort of fast that really pleases me: to break unjust fetters, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break all yokes?’ (Isaiah Gerry Moore OFM 58:6). I reflected on this verse in the context of a recent documentary on Channel 4, Starbucks and Nespresso: the truth about your coffee. It told of giant companies that buy coffee from farms in Guatemala accused of child labour. The reporters were able to visit the farms and film children working long hours in gruelling conditions. Many of them were aged 10 or 12, but others looked as young as eight years old. They worked up to six days a week and around eight hours a day through the heat and had to contend with biting insects and possibly snakes, and all this to earn a miserable three to five euros. This documentary evoked a rapid response from the companies, questioning the facts but promising to investigate the truth of the alle- gations, and the President of Guatemala, visi- bly annoyed, cast doubt on the veracity of the reports. From my long experience in Guatemala, I can state that child labour is a well-known reality in both city and rural areas, officially condemned but tacitly approved. Children help sustain the family, working in the countryside in coffee farms, sugarcane and African palm plantations; in the cities washing cars, polishing shoes, night work in factories, street vendors, construction workers, maids, garbage collectors, and even worse, in commer- cial sexual exploitation. All of this because of the miserable amounts their parents can earn, often Child labour: children forced to work. way below the official minimum salary. More than 20% of Guatemalan children are forced to work to contribute to their family’s income, a situation that is one of the worst in Latin America. While the attention of the world today is focused on the pandemic known as Coronavirus, here in Guatemala the reality of child labour points to a permanent ‘pandemic’ known as ‘poverty’. Recent statistics indicate that the per- centage of Guatemalans living in poverty has been rising and is now estimated at 64% with slightly over 30% liv- ing in extreme poverty – a level where families are unable to obtain the minimum daily calorific intake of food. About two-thirds of all Guatemalan children live in poverty: 68% of children under the age of six live below the poverty line. Malnutrition among Guatemalan children is considered among the worst in the world. The solution to this ‘pandemic’ is not simply in discovering a new vaccine but in the will to change the lifestyles of the rich and powerful elites and to create structures that promote the life and well-being of the majority. In short, to take seriously the words of the prophet, ‘What does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8). – Gerry Moore OFM St Anthony Brief 4 Dolores Walshe interviews Patrick Noonan OFM on his controversial book, St Francis Uncensored. Although a humanist, Dolores was fascinated by how this long-time missionary in South Africa portrays the saint. Saint Francis and the Joy of Coca Cola! Dolores: Pat, I don’t usually read about Captivating saint: the icon given to the Capuchin Day Centre saints in the Roman Catholic Church, but in Dublin by Pope Francis on his visit in August 2018. your book’s title is interesting and sug- gests you might be stepping ‘outside the you think? And this after centuries of began to compare the world I was living pale’ of the Church. The image on the research on his life and times. Plus I in and the type of ‘Third World’ St Francis cover of the coffin-like door of Francis’ knew I hadn’t become a Franciscan embraced after he left home. ancient home in Italy conjures notions of because of animals! Don’t get me wrong, I found close connections between life housing death. Dolores, animals love me and I them. the two worlds so far apart in time and What’s so important about Francis of Exposed to numerous species over my space. I found myself questioning prevail- Assisi in light of the kind of world we live many years living in Africa, I sometimes ing stereotypes of Francis and indeed St in today? What is it you think people think I might even have talent as an ani- Clare, his contemporary, also born in need to hear about this man from the mal whisperer! Assisi. For instance, I was never told that Middle Ages? the highly innovative Clare was one of Dolores: And that moment of clarity? the most liberated women in human his- Pat: Well, one morning I was sitting in an tory. Against all the odds she dared to empty church before what we call the Pat: Yes, it was a moment during my explore outside the box the heretofore Blessed Sacrament when I had a sudden forty years of working abroad when it unknown in religious life. She was one of moment of clarity: Why do ordinary dawned on me that my image of St those amazing people who start religious parishioners today in the Western world Francis was outgrowing the image I had orders. Gathering my thoughts together in only remember St Francis as the saint received as a young friar in training, in this book was a way of processing my who loved animals? Pretty boring, don’t Killarney and Galway and indeed Rome. I reflections. Apr/May 2020 5 Dolores: You portray this man Francis as politically minded, a loose cannon in the medieval Church, a non-conformist, a rebel, a nuisance; not an image the nuns I was taught by ever touched on.