Brendan Carr C.S.Sp., Irish Spiritan Provincial
Alleluia!
My heart leapt when I heard that Pope Leo would visit Saurimo in Angola on April 20th during his Apostolic Visit to Africa.
Saurimo! My first mission, from 1983! I was delighted and almost incredulous that the Pope would be received by the people who once received me, and in the place where I served as their pastor for the first several years of my ministry in Angola. My mind was filled with competing emotions of nostalgia, sadness, delight and gratitude and a flood of memories of those with whom I shared life in those dark and bloody days of civil war.
Angola’s brutal conflict took place during the Cold War years. The communist MPLA, founded by Agostinho Neto and backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, fought against the rebel UNITA led by Jonas Savimbi, supported by the United States and South Africa. Both sides used advanced weaponry, devastating communities of innocent people. The government was able to control the cities via Portuguese-built airstrips, and the rebels held the rural areas through guerrilla warfare. Since 1975, civilians had been fleeing into overcrowded cities, facing severe shortages of food, water and medical care. The regime also nationalized Church-run schools and hospitals.
This was where I arrived after a language course in Portugal, one year after ordination. Young and enthusiastic, I felt privileged to be chosen for one of our congregation’s most difficult mission countries at the time. Missionaries speak of their first love, the place of their first assignment. I recall my family pulling out an atlas to find first Angola and then Saurimo and asking, ‘Could they send you any further?’
Over the years my late mother became an expert in its politics and conflict, and adroit at finding ways of sending parcels and letters with people and agencies travelling there. With acute shortages of everything, families and supporters at home began to arrange for the transport of containers filled with dry foods, medicines, children’s clothes and copy books.
Our mission was one of solidarity with a suffering people visited by a conflict not of their own choosing and which devastated families and communities. It was a Church of the people, a network of communities organised by the missionaries, men and women, from different religious congregations and different nationalities, with catechists – the local leaders who heroically defended their people against the violence of warring factions and the abuses of tyranny. Church was at its best in defending human rights, confronting the parties of war, caring for the hungry and the multitude of displaced, uniting people in the hope of peace through faith in the God who was on their side, and who experienced this through the miracle of solidarity.
Women religious were the unsung heroes in this catastrophe. They were essential in the organisation and distribution of food, held clinics under trees, badgered authorities for centrally held supplies often seeping to the black market. Their courage and commitment were an inspiration to us all.
Caritas International was the only aid agency permitted by the communist government, as it was locally based and managed at a diocesan level. This allowed the government to avoid admitting reliance on international aid to feed its people. Through remarkable organisation at village, community, town, and diocesan levels, Caritas delivered essential supplies – beans, dried fish, oil, salt, maize, and rice – shipped to Luanda and Benguela and flown across the country. These were distributed with precision to vast numbers of displaced people who had no land to sustain themselves. Time and again, Caritas achieved what seemed like a quiet miracle of feeding the hungry.
At the time, Angola’s population was 10-12 million; 4 million were displaced by war and approximately 1.5 million died. Many missionaries were killed – on roads, by landmines, or because of their work in organising communities. Jean Étienne Wozniak C.S.Sp., a young French Spiritan, was killed in an ambush on Pentecost Sunday 1984 while travelling to a remote community. His Irish Spiritan companion, John Kingston, was badly wounded, taken hostage and later released while Michael Kilkenny from Galway, was trapped behind UNITA lines for nearly two years, witnessing terrible atrocities among the people he served.
Those years in Angola were harrowing for all. Lives were marked by trauma, suffering, loss and grief – realities we continue to see in conflicts today, driven by the same pursuit of power and wealth. As Mahatma Gandhi observed, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
For Pope Leo to stand now in the church of Saurimo – where we sheltered from attack, prayed for peace, buried the dead, and still celebrated life in baptisms and marriages – must feel transformative for those who survived, and for the children of those who did not. The Pope’s visit honours a people who endured, who cared for the poor and broken-hearted, and who never abandoned hope. It is a moment of recognition: that their faith in darkness is seen, and their struggle vindicated.
+
