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

WHY I GO

Letter No. 47, February 1996

Dear Friends,

    I am just come back from Italy where I had been called by our financing agency, Amici di Raoul Follereau, to give witness during their anti-leprosy campaign. I got the chance to speak in many cities in Sicily and Veneto. Specially speaking in secondary school I had been often asked why I decided to go as missionary and why I choose to work with leprosy patients.

    Every time I get this question I feel embarrassed and I don’t know how to formulate my answer. Not because I miss the motivations, but because they have so much evolved during the years and they are so personal that I always fear I will be misunderstood.

When I was an altar-boy we were told that missionaries are needed in Africa and Asia to save the souls of the pagans. But now, after 27 years that I work with poor in Mumbai I understood some sentences of the Gospel like the one who says: “the last will be the first” (Mt. 19,30; Mk. 10,17; Lk. 13,30) Living with leprosy patients rejected and discarded by society, I understood the meaning of the fact that the Kingdom of God is founded on a stone rejected by the builders, that is Jesus Christ (Acts 4,11). So it is better for me to go with  the last, with the rejected.

 I understood why the “landlord of the vineyard” (Mt. 20:1-16) pays all the workers with “one denarius”, that is with the eternal life, but he starts from the last.

Then I understood that if I want to save myself I must stay with the last and the least, because they are suffering now like Jesus, who suffered to save us.

I do not remember why I left my family and my country 27 years ago, but I know why I leave now: not to go to save the infidels, but to save myself.

Every time I come to Italy I get the impression that our western world is getting choked up by the consumerism. It is a mad competition to sell more and more and to convince the others to buy more and more. The fashion show are an example: the most strange dresses, the most expensive, the most eccentric to make you changing your wardrobe every season. TV advertising canned food for dogs and for cats. Pets become more and more exotic. Dogs with pedigree that cost one fortune. But where are children in our cities? The schools are empty. In the morning you can see more people taking their dogs to the gardens than taking children to school.

I have the impression that our consumerism will end up to consume also our western society.

That is why I go to India: to save myself sharing the life of the last.