While in Ireland we are acutely aware of the falling number
of clergy available to serve in parishes, in Panama, they have never really had
a large number of priests to begin with.
That, in fact, is why my being able to work in the seminary is
important. They have students but they
don’t have teachers. In fact, with a
growing Catholic population there is a real issue with regard to how these
people will be ministered to. The
training of those who are preparing to be involved in this ministry is, obviously,
of great importance.
One very striking thing here is the amount of various
churches that are springing up everywhere – even in the smallest of villages it
is not unusual to have several: Evangelical Protestant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 7th Day
Adventists are particularly common (as a matter of fact, the other day I saw a
church of 9th Day Adventists – quite a good illustration actually of
how splintered, and splintering, many of these groups are). There are approximately 22,000 different
Christian (non- Catholic and non-Mainline Church) groups operating in South
America.
It is interesting that mainline churches such as the
Anglican Church (here called Episcopalian) or the Lutheran Church, while they
are present in Panama, are very small.
The biggest group is, undoubtedly, the Evangelical Protestant groups –
probably what we would normally refer to as sects. These are run as private enterprises by both male
and female pastors (among them, many sincere and committed people, and also, a
large number who are in it for the money) and are proliferating at a huge rate
and are, almost without exception, very anti-Catholic – of course, their adherents are generally
ex-Catholics. A survey conducted by the
Catholic Bishops Conference of Latin America in the 1990s concluded that
something like 8,000 Catholics a day leave the church to join one or other of
these groups. Some of the names of these churches/ groups/ sects are quite
interesting, for example: Evangelical Pulpit in the Street, Missionary Centre
of Jehova Jihre, Apostolic Community of the Ark of Salvation, Corporation “God
is Faithful”, Christian Church of the Generation Without Limits, Cuadrangular
Church (very widespread), Church of the Siesta,
Apostolic Ministry of the Guardians of the Pact… and so on.
Many of these ex-Catholics, it seems, tend to drift away from
Catholicism because they are lost in the crowd in their parishes of origin with
the result that their personal needs cannot be met by the parish. Parishes here can be huge. The largest parish in Panama has one priest
and almost 200,000 adults in it, not counting the children – and yes, the
priest is an adult before anyone asks.
These parishes can have huge numbers of Communities (villages, suburbs
of cities, even whole towns) spread over extensive geographical areas. These parishes also only have one priest –
and sometimes, not even that – it is not unusual for a Permanent Deacon or a
Religious Sister to be running the parish on a day-to-day basis, finding
priests from time to time who can come and preside at the Eucharist.
Finding people, missionaries, to come from other countries
was never an easy task but nowadays, when countries like Ireland who always had
large numbers of missionaries are no longer able to provide priests, things are
probably even more difficult for bishops who face the impossible task of
providing religious services and trying to do this in the context of huge
social inequality and widespread squalor.
That is why it was such good news that the Agustinas del Amparo (Augustinian
Sisters of Our Lady of Help) announced that they are going to come to work in
Panama. This congregation was founded on
the island of Mallorca and are present already in Honduras and Peru. They will come to work in the town of Chitre,
alongside the Augustinian friars, in a parish-based ministry. Their Provincial and another sister came last
week to meet with the local bishop to finalise arrangements for their new
mission which, it is hoped, will begin in Panama next year. In the photos you can see the two sisters
being given a quick visit to the old part of Panama as they took a break from
their meetings.
That’s all for today.
As always, comments welcome
N
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