"Land, blood and the deceased"

This is how the Bishop of Porto described the people of the north, and the Portuguese people, in general, to missionaries during a conference. Such a profound knowledge of the idiosyncrasy of the Portuguese people does not seem to have been well translated by the bishops themselves when they preferred to keep the Assumption of Our Lady as a national holiday to the detriment of All Saints' Day.

Saying this does not make me suspect of being one of those clerics who think that expressing love and gratitude to our heavenly Mother makes us less Christ-centered. I pray the Rosary every day and always at the end of Mass I invite the people to say one Hail Mary, to thank her through whom the bread from heaven and the incarnate word of God, Christ, came to us.

I have lived in and visited many countries in the Catholic world, and in nowhere have I seen a cult of the deceased like that of the Portuguese, both in Portugal and abroad, in communities scattered all over the world. Our people are so generous that, after having a Mass celebrated for their loved ones, they always add another Mass for the most abandoned souls in Purgatory - those who have no one to remember them by. In abolishing this holiday, is the Church not shooting herself in the foot?

The faithful departed and All Saints, that the holiday brought together, for the convenience of the people, are an expression of the Communion of Saints expressed in the Apostles' Creed. In my village of Loriga, and in many parts of Portugal, people express this same Communion of Saints in the community procession to the cemetery, to visit the remains of their loved ones.

The feast of All Saints is our feast... the only one in the liturgical calendar that does justice to and celebrated the efforts, not of the beatified nor the canonized, but of so many Christians who, in their daily lives, seek to become more like Christ by responding to the call to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).

In the civil world, in matters of general interest, governments consult the people in a referendum -- "Voice of the people, voice of God". This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council: a council that made the Church less pyramidical and more circular; less hierarchical and more of communion; less ecclesiastical and more accessible and available. Could not the people have been consulted on this matter in some way? After all, the feast of all the saints of God was our equivalent to the tomb of the unknown soldier that all countries have and proudly maintain.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Wealth that generates poverty

The secondary school in the municipality of Amares, district of Braga, celebrated this year on 17th of October with great emphasis the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. In this context, I was invited to help raise awareness among students on this topic, which is one of the Millennium Development Goals.

If the world's population, today at 8 billion and counting, were all to consume and pollute at the combined rates of the Americans, Europeans and the rest of the wealthy countries, this planet of ours could only last for 3 months, otherwise we will need the resources of 10 planet Earth to keep this going.

The level of poverty in which 80% of the population lives is neither fair nor healthy; there is still a lot of infant mortality, people still die of malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhoid fever and other infectious diseases, that have long been eradicated in wealthy countries, diseases for which cures have long been found.

On the other hand, the standard of living of 20% of humanity is neither fair nor healthy; it is our standard of living that causes us to die of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and many others.

Some die of poverty and others die of plenty. Isn't the world globalized? And isn't globalization something like the principle of communicating vessels? – Do not two vats of water, one full and one empty, naturally level when there is a communication between them? Why don’t we see this?

Because the rich countries applied a valve at the intercommunication channel so that the flow can only occur in one direction...

If we lowered our standard of living while the poor increased theirs, we would all live better, with more justice and health; neither will we die of diseases linked to poverty, nor will we die of diseases linked to wealth. But since we do not want to lower our standard of living, then we have to find mechanisms so that they will always remain poor. Die Martha, die full...

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Year of Faith

What do I have that you seek my friendship?
What are you interested in me, my Jesus,
that at my door, covered with dew,
you spend the dark winter nights?

Oh, how hard my heart was,
for I did not open it to you! What a strange delusion,
if from my ingratitude the cold ice
dried up the sores of your pure feet!

How many times the angel said to me:
"Soul, lean out of the window now,
you will see with how much love to call”!

And how many, sovereign beauty,
"Tomorrow, we will open it” she would reply,
to answer the same thing tomorrow!
Lope de Vega

We always hear it said that faith is a gift from God, and in a way, it is, because as St. Paul says, it is the Holy Spirit who cries out within us, ‘Abba! Father!’ (Galatians 4:6); or as Jesus says in John 15:16, "You did not choose me, but I chose you...". However, if faith is fundamentally a gift from God, would not God be seen as unjust because He did not give this gift to those who call themselves atheists or agnostics?

God only loves those who love him, I like to repeat rhetorically in my sermons. Of course it is false, but it is only false in theory; in practice, it is as if it is true. What warms us is not the sun directly, but rather the feedback or response from the earth. In fact, the higher up and the further away from the earth we are, the colder we get (some of us may have seen on the information panels that the outside temperature of a plane at 10,000 meters is minus 50 degrees Celsius).

Salvation is free but it is not automatic; God feeds the birds of the air but He does not put the food in their nests; they have to look for it. What saves us is not so much faith as a gift of God, but faith as a choice and as a response to God's gift. God loves everyone equally; He loved Hitler and Francis of Assisi in the same way. The difference between them lies in their response to God's gift: negative in the former, positive in the latter.

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. Revelation 3:20

The door can only be opened from the inside, Jesus has no way of opening it from the outside. It is in accepting God's grace that we are saved, it is in rejecting God that we are condemned. Faith can be a gift from God, but it is also a human choice. In the face of our freedom, Almighty God is powerless because He created us to be free. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Missionary Animation or Mission?

In the days when Europe was mostly Christian, it made sense for the missionary institutes “Ad Gentes” to make the people of God aware that the Church does not exist for herself, but for the Mission, and that the purpose of the Mission is to build the Kingdom of God. As a result of this missionary animation of the people of God, Europe took the Gospel to the four corners of the world.

While still maintaining a Christian worldview, Europe is no longer Christian. To be a missionary, one must be a believer; it is not possible to carry out missionary animation among non-believers; what one does among non-believers is Mission.

We cannot give what we do not have; in other words, we cannot exhort those who do not believe, or who doubt, or have a weak faith to share their faith and be missionaries. That is why the best way to do missionary animation here and now is to do Mission, and the best missionary witness is to be here and now what we once were a long time ago. Someone once said that the best way to honor a father is to be a good father.

The number of faithful has fallen and the number of priests has fallen even more, but the places of worship have not. The few existing pastors have several parishes under their care, and are often absorbed in the pastoral care of a small and scattered flock. Faced with this problem, many members of missionary institutes ad gentes have exchanged their nets for their staffs.

Is it by shepherding the few sheep that remain that we fill the void of the many that have left the flock? Those of us who are fishermen must adapt our hooks, nets and fishing techniques to the new situation, not change our profession; we cannot stop being what we are by vocation. But if we had to be shepherds, we should at least be Good Shepherds, and a good shepherd is like a fisherman, because he is the one who leaves the 99 to go in search of the 1 lost sheep.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Banner of the Itinerant Mission

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives... (Lk. 4:18)

Hello, I am a priest from the Portuguese Consolata Missionaries who have worked in Ethiopia, Spain, England, Canada and the United States. I have always seen myself as an itinerant and since the age of ten I have never lived in one place for more than four years; only God knows what lands I will be sent to yet. Meanwhile, while working in Portugal, I heard Pope Francis say that the Internet is now the sixth continent so I took this message and created a blog in Portuguese three years ago, in 2012.

This year a group of Canadian pilgrims I met in the Holy Land challenged me to do the same in English. Initially I refused but when one of them offered to do the translation, I had no more excuses. I ask God’s blessing upon the translator who wants to remain anonymous for helping to reach the people of goodwill in this World Wide Web.

The Dove - Represents, obviously, the Holy Spirit.  The Mission is Trinitarian because it started with God the Father who sent His Son and is being continued in the "here and now" of the human history by the Holy Spirit who animates, inspires, gives strength and courage to the mystical body of Christ which is the Church. The Author and the Landlord of the Mission is always God.

The Heralds - The three gospels, Mark, Matthew (10:10) and Luke (9:3) agree that the disciples should not have two tunics, bread, money or bag. Mark though to make the journey easier and faster, adds staff and sandals as we see in the picture. Since Mark (6:8-9) wrote his gospel long before the others did, we take his account as the one that is closest to what Jesus commanded.

The City - Is where the majority of the world's population lives nowadays. Centre of power and government even for those who do not live there. To better spread the Good News,  Peter and Paul set up camp in Rome, the capital city of the world at that time; nowadays disciples must also take the salt and the light of the gospel right into the power and decision-making centres of the world.

The Paschal Candle - Is the "i" of Mission and the "i" of Itinerant. Represents the Good News that the heralds are carrying into the city:

• The faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus;
• The proclamation that he is the Lord;
• The declaration that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of the universe;
• He is also the way, the truth and the life and the most reasonable and convincing answer to the questions that every person who comes into this world asks himself: "Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of life?"

The atheists and the agnostics who answer these questions by saying that they come from nothing and are going nowhere, what answer could they possibly give to the third question? Surely they will have to admit that something that springs up from nothing and ends up being nothing cannot possibly be something other than nothing or nonsense. 

"Go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt. 10:6) - Europe was entirely Christian when the gospel spread to the other continents; today, far from being Christian, it even denies its Christian root. Re-evangelization of the western civilization, which continues to exert power and influences over the rest of the world, has become a form of mission “Ad Gentes”.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC