Cardinal
Alexandre José Maria dos Santos
(Archbishop of Maputo, Mozambique)
In Mozambique, of the 16 million inhabitants, only three million are Catholic. Therefore, the mission we must face is important and urgent! With a reduced number of missionaries, foreign and native, the Church in Mozambique counts more strenuously upon the involvement of the laity, which since Vatican Council II has understood and assumed its evangelizing mission within the Church. It is through the "Small Christian Communities" that the Church in Mozambique has placed the pastoral priority and which are in authentic ferment among the people, through the Movements such as the Legion of Mary, a force of the apostolate of the laity, through the "Commissions of the Laity and of Active Families" in the parishes and in the communities, the laity is carrying forth a preponderant action within evangelization.
In truth, we can see that good will exists, but the good will of the people is not sufficient. For the efficient action of the mission there must be adequate formation. and because of this, there is a need for the construction of adequate infrastructures: centers for the formation of the laity, where biblical, theological, pastoral, of social doctrine, of the Church courses must be held. An absolutely necessary formation not only for the evangelizing mission of the laity - since nobody can give what they don’t have! - but also for the authentic inculturation of the Gospel in Africa, to avoid in such a manner the danger of religious syncretism in the African Church. But these infrastructures of formation do not have the financial means. In fact, after 16 years of civil war which has destroyed everything and which has created a migratory flux of around 5 million persons, refugees, one cannot expect something from a people who must receive!
Therefore we still continue to count on the North. The North where good and evil come from: the good of the assistance which guarantees our spiritual and material progress and the bad of the weapons and of the bombs which cause our destruction. Bombs and weapons are sent to us to destroy our people and to create insoluble debts in payment of what they have sent for the goods for reconstruction that those same weapons have destroyed.
We would like to conclude with a plea to the producers of weapons to cease to furnish weapons to Africa and in paraphrasing the Prophet Isaiah (Is 2,4), that they transform their factories of weaponry into factories of agricultural instruments or modem technologies for the good of humanity.
Original text in Portuguese
