Center Art for Peace - Suchitoto

Sister Peggy O’Neill, a Sister of Charity from New Jersey, is a visionary and a risk-taker.

In 1987, she joined several Dubuque Franciscan sisters to work in El Salvador, first with internally displaced refugees in a camp outside San Salvador and later in the parish of Suchitoto.

At first she taught part of the year in Iona College in New York, but for many years now she is spending all her time in Suchitoto.

She is the founder and director of Centro Arte para la Paz – Center Art for Peace – which I find a symbol of hope.

The Center seeks to introduce young people to the arts – dance, drama, instruments (including the harp). Currently there are three volunteers from the US helping with music classes.

The center has also worked with young people who prepare exhibitions that seek to recover the historical memory of tis zone which had been devastated by the Salvadoran civil war.

The Center is on the grounds of the former Blessed Imelda School, which Dominican sisters had run from many years, fleeing about 1980 in the face of threats and an expanding civil war.

It is now an oasis of peace – and a place where many, especially the young, can grow to be real peacemakers.

There are small rooms for sleeping, classrooms for instruction, a conference hall, and a café.

I stayed there during my visit to El Salvador this month and saw a little of their work.

You can read more here. Their Facebook page is here. If you want to contribute, which I strongly suggest as an alternative Christmas gift, contact them here.

Here are a few photos of the center.

Chapel bell tower - in need of repair

A morning breakfast companion at the Café Museo at the Centro

Map of Suchitoto in the Center

A change of pace

The last ten days have been quite a change of pace for me – much needed.

December 6 I headed out to Dulce Nombre. Since it was the feast of Saint Nicholas, I put on a red sweatshirt and my Santa Claus hat and armed myself with a bag of candy. As I drove out of Santa Rosa I kept passing out candy to those I passed in the street. Then, at the police road block, I made sure the police got a bit of candy. And, of course, in the parish meeting candy abounded.

I guess I’m returning to my childhood – or, better, getting more like my father who loved to do crazy things like this.

December 6 and 7, the Dulce Nombre Parish had its annual evaluation and planning meeting. It was very productive and we look forward to a new year, full of challenges, but also full of hope.

 

small group discussion at Dulce Nombre planning meeting 

I’ll have a lot of work since we will begin to form teams for formation and spirituality in the four zones of the parish. I’ll be part of the team helping in the formation of these teams.

One of our biggest challenges will be to form these leaders in a methodology that is participative and “popular,” that speaks to their situation and uses processes and language that they easily understand. They are so used to education, even religious education, that emphasizes intellectual concepts and memorizing – concentrated on information. As I see it we need a style of religious education (at all levels) that is not only information but also formation, so that God can work a transformation in us.

On Sunday, I headed to Suchitoto, El Salvador, where I have visited innumerable times and where I spent 7 months in 1992.

I was going to go straight to the town, where I would be staying at the Centro Arte para La Paz, Center of Art for Peace, which Sister Peggy O’Neill founded several years ago. (If you are looking for a place to give a donation this Christmas, consider helping them. Click here for info. They do great work, especially with young people.)

Centro Arte para La Paz 

But as I passed near the turn off to the village of Haciendita 2, I decided to drop by to let them know I was here. I saw Rosa Elbia, in whose house I had lived in 1992. Her husband, Esteban, had died almost three years ago and I had a photo of them I wanted to give her. We arranged to meet the next day.

As I headed to Suchitoto I was about to pass San Antonio, but decided to stop and see Lucía briefly and arrange a visit later this week. She too had lost her husband recently and I had a photo of them that I shared. We arranged a Thursday afternoon visit.

My visits to Rosa Elbia and Lucía and their families were delightful.

Rosa Elbia prepared a delicious lunch – with the large thick tortillas which are so common in the Salvadoran countryside.

I spent a lot of time talking with her children.

Two are teachers in nearby villages – with college degrees. Another daughter is beginning her final year at the university for a degree in accounting. One son had come in from Chalatenango and we talked at length. He was going to get married the next month (at the age of 38), but we talked of many things. I remember that he had liked to play chess – but he told me he hadn’t played for a while. And as he walked about the family property he sang, as was his custom. We ended up exchanging Facebook pages and are now officially “friends.” Yes; because his sister has a computer and an “internet modem,” he can connect from his family’s home!

I spent about 45 minutes talking to the youngest son, Tebito – now 24 years old. When I had arrived in the house in 1992 he was a timid three year old who cried whenever he saw me. Now he was a tall young man who had recently finished high school. He had lots of questions, which I thoroughly enjoyed discussing with him.

Tebito and his mother, Rosa Elbia

At Lucía’s, I had lunch and then took a welcome nap in a hammock. As we left to visit, I noticed that her granddaughter was working on a computer. One of Lucía’s daughters, who has been a teacher for many years, was away for a meeting. she had been a teacher as a teenager during the Salvadoran civil war. Her daughter is now studying in the university.

I spent a bit of time with some of her children, grandchildren, and even a great-grand child.

Lucía and some children, grandchildren, and a great grand-son (and me)

It was good to see them but it was sad to see that one of her sons-in-law is seriously disabled, perhaps by a stroke that has left him unable to move or walk and with constant trembling. One of her daughters is also disabled, but is loved and accepted by her cousins.

What impressed me is how seriously these families value education. The parents had few opportunities but have encouraged their children. Now there is a generation that has had the opportunity to study – and many of them are now helping others.

I had time to visit in San Salvador as well as in the city of Suchitoto. I also got to know a bit more about the work of the Centro Arte para la Paz. I’ll write more about these later, as well as on the celebrations in Suchitoto for the feast of Santa Lucía on December 13.

On death and freedom

Two weeks ago mayor of Concepción was shot at on a road leading into Dulce Nombre. He was uninjured, but a two month infant in the truck was killed and the infant’s mother wounded. My initial reaction was fear.

The next morning I learned that he had been receiving death threats and so the attack was probably planned.

But that night I began to have some doubts about my plans to move out to the countryside net year, specifically since I’m planning to move to the village where the mayor comes from.

I would be driving the road where he was shot. I learned later exactly where his car was shot up. It’s not far on the road out of Dulce Nombre toward Caleras. I often pass the site.

I began to ask myself whether I would be risking my life by doing this.

It was not an easy night.

But after much thought and prayer, I felt at peace with my decision to move out. I will die eventually but I don’t see moving out to the parish as really dangerous. Most of those who have been shot at were specifically targeted.

But I realized also that it was the thought of death that opened up my heart to come here to Honduras.

When I was in New Orleans with a group from St. Thomas Aquinas in March 2006, we emptied out one woman’s house onto the sidewalk to be carted away to the dump. As we did this I wondered what would become of all my “stuff” after I died.

I think that fear of death and concern for security are obsessions of many in the United States.

But that fear can paralyze us and not open us to the workings of the Spirit. In The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, Dean Brackley, S.J., wrote of fear as a disordered inclination:

Insecurity stirs our fear – of hardship, rejection, and death. Fear “disorders” our desires: we grasp for idols which promise security, but fail to deliver it. Idols enslave their devotees and demand human sacrifice.

In addition, reflecting on fear and freedom, I thought of this passage from Hebrews 2: 14-15:

the death [of Jesus] destroyed the one holding the power of death, that is the devil, and freed those who remained in bondage all their lifetime because of the fear of death.

The power of death holds us in bondage. Jesus, taking on flesh and suffering death, offers us a way to live in freedom.

It was, therefore, a blessing to read what Pope Francis said in his November 27 General Audience:

 One who practices mercy does not fear death. Think well of this: who practices mercy does not fear death! Do you agree? Shall we say it together so as not to forget? One who practices mercy does not fear death. And why does he not fear death? Because he looks at it in the face in the wounds of brothers, and overcomes it with the love of Jesus Christ.
If we open the door of our life and of our heart to our littlest brothers, then even our death will become a door that will introduce us to Heaven, to our blessed homeland, toward which we are directed, longing to dwell forever with our Father, with Jesus, Mary and the Saints.

“One who practices mercy does not fear death.”

Mercy pulls us into the lives of the poor and suffering – as Christ Jesus moved into our lives, becoming flesh and suffering with us.

And so I pray for mercy – for the grace to be merciful – and for the freedom to live that mercy with the poor.

In all this, I am at peace.

Looking out from a window of the church in Bañaderos

The mud of the streets

In his Apostolic Exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis speaks clearly of the missionary vocation of all Catholics, a mission to go beyond our “comfort zones,” to go out to those who are not like us.

He also proposes what I would call a “spirituality of the missionary.”

In paragraph 45, he writes that a missionary heart

…never closes itself off, never retreats into its own security, never opts for rigidity and defensiveness. It realizes that it has to grow in its own understanding of the Gospel and in discerning the paths of the Spirit, and so it always does what good it can, even if in the process, its shoes get soiled by the mud of the street.

A missionary must accompany the poor, be in direct contact with them, listening to their joys and sorrows, being at their side and breaking bread (or tortillas) with them.

There is a beautiful story about the time when Pope Francis (then, Father Jorge Bergoglio, S.J.) was superior in a Jesuit seminary in Argentina, found in Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads” by Chris Lowney. (p. 58)

Soledad Albisú recalled in a Tablet article that Fr. Bergoglio “always insisted that the seminarians should go out at the weekends to the poor barrios to offer [religious instruction] to the children. He said that someone who is able to make the catechism simple enough for a child to understand is a wise person.” And when the seminarians returned from the barrio, he “would look to see if they had dusty feet. If they came back with clean feet, he took it as a sign that they’d done nothing.” 

Are your shoes dirty?

Ninety-two catechumens

Last September catechists in about twenty towns and villages in the parish of Dulce Nombre began to prepare hose who were 14 and up for baptism.

Today, 92 arrived in the parish for the rite of election into the catechumenate. They will continue their journey in their villages until the baptism at the Easter Vigil next April.

The catechumenate is the process of initiation of adults into the Catholic faith. Here it involves weekly meetings with the catechists as well as two rites before their baptism.

I was very impressed at the enthusiasm of the young people. It was a great joy to see them.

I am also grateful to the catechists who continue to prepare them for their Baptism and First Communion.

These days I can look with hope on our ministry in the parish.

Here are some photos.

Padre German greets the candidates and their sponsors and catechists at the entrance to the church

They are greeted in the name of the church.

They come to the front of the church where they are signed with the Cross - on their foreheads...

They are signed on their ears, eyes, mouth, chest, back,

hands, 

feet.

Some received a cross from their sponsors.

The Advent wreath was blessed

A catechist lit a candle for the first week of Advent.

Padre shows the solidarity banner from St. Thomas Aquinas, Ames.

Bibles were blessed 

and given to the catechumens.

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More photos of the acceptance into the catechumenate can be found here.