Keeping our eyes on the cross.
Our Response to Religious Persecution
This has been a very dark time for me as I hear from our people, priests and bishops from around the world about the religious persecutions we are facing. This includes harassments and threats of jail and even death. It comes mainly from Latin America, but also from Europe. After working through my shock about how another Church can do this to us, and my anger and bitterness at being subjected to this, I believe I have finally come back to the Gospel Perspective.
As I ruminated about the fact that this is so similar to the experience of the Primitive Church, I began to consider what they did about it. We have called our Ministry “Apostolic” to remind all of us that we have as our goal: returning to the Vision of the Apostolic Church, the “Church” that began at Pentecost and spread like wide fire across the world.
The Apostolic Church suffered immense persecutions, as we all know; from being put in jail to being fed to lions. Some of our people are presently facing jail, some are facing death threats, and I am sure that many feel like they have been fed to lions. The First Christians in responding to this had Jesus’ words echoing in their ears and so were much better prepared than we are to react as Jesus would. It seems to me that their main reactions to this religious persecution was a deepening of Prayer and a tightening of Community.
Unlike us who sometimes feel the illusion of power, they were well aware that their only power was Jesus and His Holy Spirit. Having recently been in a terrible accident where I was hit so hard from behind that my van was shot through the air, I know that we are often powerless, except for Jesus and His Holy Spirit. I was saved from death and paralysis not by any power I had, but by the simple blessing of God.
So I am going to do two things to continue our response to this religious persecution. The first is to ask all our people and friends to pray for our persecutors and for an end to persecution. We have people throughout the world and so can have someone at prayer all 24 hours. I would ask that everyone pray for these intentions at noon each day so that we will literally have our prayers going around the world. And I would ask that anyone who commits to this write me and I will publish a list of from whom and where prayers are going up for our people. I believe this will be a huge boost to those on the front lines of this suffering.
I would also ask all our people and friends to make a deeper commitment to our/their Community. A letter from a priest in Chiclayo said, “I am not afraid of going to jail for preaching the Gospel, I am afraid for our families.”
If our people go to jail, their families will need to be supported emotionally and financially by us. If our people are killed, their families will need to be supported emotionally and financially by us. The only way we can claim to be Apostolic is to act Apostolic. (I experienced this personally when I was lying paralyzed in a Peruvian hospital four years ago and Karen told me how a Community had taken up a collection for me.)
I am asking each Bishop who is aware of this Persecution in his/her area, to begin to set up a way to help the families of anyone who goes to jail or whose life is lost.
Some, I am sure will call this a naïve response; hopefully most will call it a childlike response. But I really believe it needs to be our basic response! (“You need to become like little children.”)
We will also need to have an adult response, and that will involve helping provide legal support and publicity support. But these should never be our main support. Our times are very different from the Apostolic Times, so we have to use different avenues; but our main Paths needs to be the two pointed out by Jesus: the Path of Prayer and the Path of Community.
PS After finishing this letter I “happened” to see the interview that Bill Moyer did with Archbishop Tutu from South Africa. The thing that struck me most about this man, who was under a death threat to him and his entire family for 16 years, was his saying that to really forgive we must give up our right to revenge. My first reaction to these different news reports was plotting some retribution/revenge.
It was quite interesting that Archbishop Tutu said that to give up the right to revenge is not for the person we believe has offended us, but it is for our own heart. A heart full of revenge is never happy, and we don’t want “them” to be able to make us unhappy.
