SPEAKING ABOUT MISSION
Speaking about missions you normally always refer to some statistics. Some positive, some negative, some still very shameful.
Thus we hear about the declining church and christian values in our continent Europe and western countries but we enjoy reading figures that show the flourishing church in Africa and Asia. We are so preoccupied about the drastic decrease in vocations among the churches of old tradition (like ours in Malta) but at the same time we know that seminaries in India, Sri Lanka, The Philippenes, Vietnam, Myammar and many other mission countries are full. In fact it seems that in the near future we will have a kind of u-turn in missionary movement. Missionaries from receiving countries will be coming to re-evangelize the sending countries of yesterday. After all we already have hundreds of priests, religious and nuns from mission lands, not only studying as before but also working in western countries. Most encouraging of all is the fact that now we have an impressive movement of missionland missionaries evangelizing their own territory and going to other mission lands. Thus Africans evangelizing other Africans, Indians from the South proclaiming the faith to the North.
But the problem of poverty, corruption and bad management is still very real and the consequences very painful. It’s enough to mention the situation of children:
Six million children under five years of age die each year from lack of food.
180 million children under 10 years of age suffer from malnutrition.
One million eight hundred thousand children die each year from diarrhea caused by lack of clean water.
Mgr. Salvinu Micallef
National Director