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

‘THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST’

 Letter No. 46, April 1995

Dear Friends,

                    When I came to India, 25 years ago, and I went to Tata Institute of Social Sciences for a degree in social work. I remember that in front of the gate they were broadening the road to make it a highway. At the side of the old road there was a big stone, painted red by some devout Hindu and worshiped every morning. Enlarging the road that stone was coming to stay in the middle of one lane. Works on that lane were stopped for long time. I could not understand what they were waiting for. With my western mentality I consider that a classic example of superstition blocking the road of progress. To worship a stone, I was thinking, was the grossest form of idolatry.

    Later on I came to know that the Muslims, the most pure example of monotheism, go to bow in front of a black stone in Mecca, and in their mosque they bow in front of a wall.

    A few days ago I was reading the first letter to the Corinthians and I was thunder-struck when I came across the affirmation of St. Paul: “That rock was Christ”. Paul in chapter 10 speaks about idolatry and about the lessons of Israel’s history. He says: “Our fathers (…) all drank from the spiritual rock that followed them as they went, and that rock was Christ”. Not only he sees Christ in a rock, but reading history a posteriori, with his Christian mentality, he says: “they all passed through the sea, they were all baptised”. I was shocked because as Christian and as missionary, I have to do like Paul, discover Christ where already exists, in the religions, in the mythologies, in the symbols of peoples and in their history.

    The Second Vatican Council  confirmed what John already said at the beginning of his Gospel: “The Word was the true light that enlightens all men”. This light, naturally, will come to the particular man, from his own environment, his own symbols and his own religion. If a stone can play the role of Christ, why Christ cannot make use of a person, like the founders of religions, or mythological symbols, so rich in meaning, like the Hindu deities?

    Then what I is the role of the missionary? To carry Christ or to discover him? He has to play both roles.

Knowing the historical Christ he must witness to him, but knowing that his Spirit has always been working in the world, he must first of all search, discover and acknowledge him wherever he is. The missionary must not destroy the other religions but to turn them to account, if purification and changes are needed in other religions, their own followers must do it. Jesus ask faith and conversion, but never asked anybody to change religion. The purpose of missionaries is to prepare that unity of the Kingdom of God that is in the plan of God as told us in the first chapter of the letters to Ephesians and Colossians: to unite under him all things in heaven and on earth. One God, one Christ, but many religions.