Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

I AM STILL LEARNING

 Letter No. 3, Bombay, December 1970

 Dear Friends

                 The time has come to wish you Happy Christmas for the second time. Some will receive my greetings a little early, some a little later but the same esteem and affection is for all of you.

     First of all I must tell you that  the chapel of Fr. Antonello in Garla is completed. The second one is just out of the ground. This also is not only a chapel, but, as we say here, is multipurpose building, in fact it will serve also as school and shelter. The name of the village is Rainapadu and is under the care of Fr. Achille Rasi, parish priest of Kondapalli (diocese of Vijayavada), who is working in India since 36 years, “always hard up and penniless” as one of his friends told me. In the village there is already a school with two teachers and around hundred children; but recently the cyclone  destroyed the structure. The people of the village are harijans, poor people who subsist on daily wages.

     Fr. Rasi wrote to me on 14/9: “The village is built on black soil which very often cracks during the dry season. So the foundation must go very deep and must be strong. The work will start very soon and Bro. Giani will supervise it. My intention is to lay the foundation before the end of the rainy season, so that it will become strong and tough.”

     In the following letter he told me that the works were on schedule and he promised to send some photos. If they come in time I will enclose one also for you.

     Now, what about me? Nothing really exiting to tell you. No missionary life, no baptisms, no building chapels. I must do what I promised when I applied for a visa: a student. That means four hours of lectures  every day, compulsory attendance, books to be read, reports to be prepared. Etc…

I personally do not feel less missionary than others. Times are changing and the way of being missionary changes. The word itself “missionary’ has become a byword. If people does not like the word missionary, we will drop it. If we can no more go to teach we will go to learn. If we cannot preach, we will witness in silence, but for us it is not possible not to share with others the love that God has for us.

    I will tell you that there is always something to learn from every person. From an old civilization like India there is always to learn. We have here a tradition  more ancient than the European.

They also have Holy Scriptures, larger than the Bible. They can be assessed from different point of view, but to assess them you need to study them, and it needs a lot of years; you need to learn Sanskrit, their ancient language. At the moment I am not doing this kind of studies, I am studying sociology and Indian social problems as the Vatican Council document on missions says: “we need to have a knowledge not so much towards the past as towards the present”. The formation of the missionary, it says, “must be completed in the mission lands, so that the missionary should know the history, the social structures, the customs of the various peoples; they should look inside the moral order the religious norms, the deep insights the various peoples have, according to their traditions, about God, about the world and about man.”

    Since the Vatican Council had acknowledge that in every religion there is something “good and true”, the first duty of the missionary is “to learn well the religious traditions of the nations, glad to discover and ready to respect the seeds of the Word that are hidden in them.” So the problems is not only to “save the souls” and to give baptism, but to identify those human values that are better expressed in the East than in the West and so they can be an enrichment for the Church and they can help us to better understand our revelation.

     For example, after reading the life and the writing of  Mahatma Gandhi, I did discover that the idea of non-violence is very much present in the New Testament. The Word, the power of God is manifested to us as a vulnerable infant, as the Lamb of the Apocalypse. Then one is bound to wander how the Christian West had develop the theory of capital punishment, of just religious war (Crusades) and a violent imposition of truth. Unfortunately, since five centuries, the Gospel had traveled on the ships of the Christian colonial powers, announced and defended by the rumbling of the guns.

We must also say that the missionaries had often been a stumbling block for the colonial powers because they had opposed their wrongdoing. Never the less in the eyes of the peoples, particularly in Asia, the missionaries had been part and parcel of the colonial system. We missionaries are still suffering from the anti-colonial revolution and feeling.

     So, as I spent my time studying, I do not feel it is a waist of time or a simple trick, although in my heart, I wish to be out and start working for people.

But I have a good piece of news for you: I started working for leprosy patients. The PIME Sisters, here in Bombay, are already taking care of leprosy patients. With their help we started doing survey of a big slum that is near my Tata Institue and where I go for practice of social work. In this slum, Janata Colony, there are more than 50,000 people. With the help of the Sister we have a weekly dispensary and we give treatment to the people that we discover with early signs of leprosy. I took out my diploma in Leprology, obtained after a course at Fontilles in Spain, and steeling some time to my studies I do this work that nobody likes to do.

      What about you ? I am very happy when I receive your letters although I can answer you only once a year. Thank you also to those who do not write but send donations.

 I wish you a Happy Christmas. If you make a crib. this year you can add also a leprosy patient, Jesus like them, sot here will be a happy Christmas also for them.

     A big hug for all of you in the Lord.