DIVINE WORD MISSIONARIES COLOMBIA - PANAMA

Our men have three main stations here from which they fan out to cover the whole area. They built a church and roomy parish house in Vigia del Fuerte which were generously subsidized by Adveniat. Three sisters run the school here and work as catechists. Downstream from here is another station, and upstream, on a tributary, a third which is a four-hour boat trip from Vigia. All the people, both blacks and Indians, had been baptized. Some of them are polygamous. Their christianity consists in the cult of the dead, in venerating pictures and in using copious amounts of holy water - even for bathing the baby - as a defence against illness. Only about 5% of them observe Sunday for what it is. So the job in hand is to try to deepen their Christianity which is expressed almost entirely in externals. It was decided to concentrate on just a few villages for a start and to give them a thorough formation: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, medical attention, regular Sunday Mass, sermon and catechism - not only for the youngsters but for the grownups as well. The idea is to bring a few families to a full appreciation and practice of christianity, and then to form larger communities which in turn will influence others. This is real mision country despite all the entries in the baptismal register. To counterbalance this difficult mission, we were given a parish in the country's capital, Bogota, in 1976. It is a city of almost six million inhabitants. Our parish is in a new suburban area built up over the past three to six years; there are 60,000 people in it of whom 30,000 live in an area measuring scarcely more than a square kilometer. One street houses 1,700 policemen and their families; office workers live in another while a further one is the home of well-off wage earners. Laborers bordering on poverty are in a fourth. All of them have come into Bogota from elsewhere looking for work and a better standard of living. It is hard to form any kind of parish community out of such a heterogeneous lot of people who do not even know one another. It has proven somewhat easier to build community among the young people. During the 18 years we have been working in Colombia, applicants for the priesthood have been few and far between: at times there were one to three novices. Only a few of these reaqched first profession, and only one finally became a priest in the Society. But we have kept on trying. Two fratres were studying in Medellin at the beginning of 1980, and nine young men were starting their novitiate at Bogota. What is most lacking, writes the provincial, is a trained and experienced novice master; there are enough vocations. In 1979, it was decided to accept only those postulants for the brotherhood who had finished their secondary schooling. These do their novitiate together with the clerical novices, and when they have taken their first vows, they go on to full academic studies in order to eliminate what is called class distinction between fathers and brothers and to create a new image of the brotherhood. Today, the province totals 20 priests, 8 scholastics, and 1 novice.