Cover Story

Finding Our Way in Colombia

When St. Gaspar del Bufalo founded the Missionaries of the Precious Blood in 1815, he did so far away from his birthplace in Rome, and certainly with something less than an army of followers. Counting himself, there were five members in his new Congregation.

When the Congregation heard the call in 1843 to come to the United States, its arrival would scarcely have been noticed by anyone. The leader of the new mission, Fr. Francis de Sales Brunner, made it to the frontier land of Ohio with just 14 shivering priests, brothers and seminarians.

So it’s not unusual for the Congregation to start small, and dream big. When two members who had ministered for years in Chile and Peru struck out in 2005 for Colombia to form an experimental mission without knowing exactly how or when that mission would ever grow and flourish, some must have thought they were crazy. At a time of contraction in religious life, when many congregations were giving up ministerial obligations because of a lack of people power to staff them, why would anybody take on anything new?

Because to strike out for new places, with few prospects and little chance of success, to put faith in God, who can make everything out of nothing, to find a new way to deliver the Good News, that’s what a missionary does.

Why Don’t You Come to Colombia?

One could say the C.PP.S. first went to Colombia because of the internet. A group of lay people based in Bogotá devoted to the Blood of Christ searched the internet for resources and found the C.PP.S., a Congregation of priests, brothers and lay people that was dedicated to Precious Blood spirituality. The people in Bogotá got in touch with the C.PP.S. Why don’t you come to Colombia? they said. We could really use what you have to offer.

The C.PP.S. considered the question. Colombia is a country of great diversity and great culture, great promise and great problems. Bordered by Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Panama, its geography includes mountains, jungle, plains, desert and shoreline. It is one of the world’s leading producers of coffee and emeralds. While it has much to offer the world, it also faces many challenges. Colombia’s national motto is Libertad y Orden (Liberty and Order), but its people have suffered through decades of civil unrest. Many families bear the scars of husbands, wives and children who were kidnapped then murdered. Guerrilla forces still fight to maintain control of portions of the countryside.

So it seemed natural that a country so in need of the healing power of the Blood of Christ would reach out to the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. Welcomed by the bishop of Bogota in 2005, two Missionaries, Frs. Ernie Ranly, C.PP.S., and Abelardo Ibaceta, C.PP.S., established a tiny toehold for their Congregation in a country where there was no shortage of work for them. They felt compelled to find a way to bring a message of reconciliation through the Blood of Christ to the Colombian countryside.

They called it an ad experimentum mission, experimental as the Latin term implies, as the Missionaries learned their way around a new country and a new culture. They made great strides, then suffered setbacks. Fr. Mauricio Restrepo, C.PP.S., a Colombian-born priest who had joined the Congregation, was a multi-talented, charismatic young man who held the bright hope of the future of the mission in his hands, but he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 37 in February 2008. Fr. Ranly had to return to his native United States in 2008 due to health reasons.

Fr. Ibaceta, who was born in Chile and ministered there for 20 years, remains in Bogotá with three other C.PP.S. members, Fr. Armando Rivas, C.PP.S., a native of El Salvador; Colombian-born Fr. Angelmiro Granados Acevedo, C.PP.S., and Fr. Magnus Tegete, C.PP.S., a Tanzanian formerly in ministry in Chile who arrived in Bogotá in December. Oscar Makala, a candidate for the priesthood in special formation from Tanzania, also arrived in December to spend a year in Colombia.

A Full Schedule

Working out of the Community’s central house in Bogotá, Fr. Ibaceta holds down at least four jobs that keep him very well acquainted with the Bogotá bus system. On Tuesdays he slips into St. Marta Church, a busy urban parish, at 5:30 a.m., where he will hear the confessions of parishioners until 1 p.m. “This is my office,” he tells visitors as he pulls back the curtain of a confessional in the parish church.

It is estimated that between 80 and 90 percent of Colombians are Roman Catholic, although far fewer practice their faith. Fr. Ibaceta finds Colombians to be a very conservative people, very hospitable to newcomers but slow to embrace new ideas. Bogotá, a city of seven million, has a burgeoning population of country people, who came to the city to escape the fighting in the countryside, which reached its peak in the 1990s.

In telling of this, Fr. Ibaceta points to a man curled up on a plastic tarp on a Bogota sidewalk. “You can see how that worked out for them,” he said.

The country is still trying to heal itself. The government only recently established a presence in all of its departments (similar to U.S. states), some of which were formerly under total control of the forces of insurrection. The wounds from all those years of fighting run very deep.

In Their Greatest Need

In addition to his ministry at St. Marta and another urban parish, Fr. Ibaceta is also the afternoon chaplain at the large hospital attached to la Javeriana (Xavier) University in Bogotá.

He finds the work interesting and fulfilling, he said, but it stretches him. There are 350 beds in the hospital, all filled with suffering brothers and sisters in Christ. “The challenge is how to meet all the patients and their families. There are only two of us, and we sometimes feel we can’t get around to everyone,” he said.

The other chaplain at the hospital is Fr. Armando Rivas, C.PP.S. For many families, he said, a serious illness is a time of great upheaval, “and there is no tranquility. The family looks to the priest to bring some tranquility to the situation. I am reaching out to people in their greatest need.”

Fr. Rivas and Fr. Granados also minister at Monserrate, a famous mountainside shrine just outside of Bogotá. There, they preside at Mass and hear the confessions of the many pilgrims who ride the cable car or climbing the hundreds of stairs up to the shrine. Monserrate has become a place of reparation in the hearts and minds of many Colombians, who go there to pour out their sorrows over the things they saw and did in the years of bloody fighting.

Teaching the Young

Fr. Rivas has another important job. He is the head of the C.PP.S. house of formation in Bogotá. The Congregation sends its priest and brother candidates from throughout Central and South America to Bogotá to study theology at the well-respected la Javeriana (Xavier) University, where they would receive a solid education at the renowned Jesuit school. Currently, there are nine young men from Central America, Peru and Brazil living at the formation house who have made a formal commitment to the C.PP.S. Another candidate, a Colombian, is in initial formation with the Community.

Fr. Rivas, who was born in El Salvador, ministered for many years with the C.PP.S mission in Guatemala. He has a gift for working with young people, and the young men at the house look up to him as a mentor and guide as they continue to discern their vocation to the priesthood.

Fr. Grenados, surrounded by students. He keeps the needs of the poor before their eyes.

Also in youth ministry is Fr. Granados. He
is the chaplain at the Collegio San Tarsicio,
a school for children in grades K-11 in
Bogotá, and at a second school as well.
Most of the families of San Tarsicio are
middle-class, and Fr. Granados works to
keep the needs of the city’s poor before
their eyes. Each year he takes the 11th
graders on a week-long service trip to an
impoverished area of the city; the school’s
students are raising money to build a
church for the people there. Each Advent,
he leads a mission trip to a village four
hours from Bogotá.

Everywhere he goes at the school, the children crowd around him. “It’s always like that,” said Liliana Arango Gonzalez, the school’s administrative director. “Everybody loves Fr. Angelmiro. The students, the teachers and staff members—even the parents—all seek him out when they need to talk to someone.”

What is Not Good Can Be Healed

Like most Colombians Fr. Granados is very sensitive about his country’s reputation outside its borders as a place of uncontrolled violence. (Actually, the murder rate in Bogotá is far lower than in Washington D.C.) News reports of drug wars and guerrilla fighting are all that many people in the U.S. ever hear about the country. There is so much that is good about Colombia, despite all its problems, that he wishes more people could see.

And what is not good, can be healed by the Blood of Christ, he said. “It is a reality in Colombia that there has been a lot of violence in the past 60 years,” he said. “The reconciliation offered by the Blood of Christ can heal those wounds. The spirituality of the Precious Blood fits very well here.”

It’s crucial, he said, to encourage the people from the city to reach out to those in the countryside who have been most affected by the violence and poverty. The times that he has spent on mission trips to Colombia’s rural areas have been the most rewarding of his life, he said: “I gain so much more on those mission trips than I ever give.”

Rebuilding Faith Families

The work that the men do in the city and the salaries they earn from parishes, schools and the hospital help support their parish missions to the Colombian countryside. The students, who are far enough along in their studies to have committed themselves to the C.PP.S., join enthusiastically in the planning and carrying out of the parish missions. In that way they see themselves carrying on the work of the Congregation’s founder, St. Gaspar, who spent much of his life traveling to Italian villages, bringing the Word of God to people far from the city centers.

The C.PP.S. members and students return as often as they can to the same areas outside of Bogotá because they want to help create a faith family there that will be strong enough someday to stand on its own. Clergy in the countryside (like clergy in the city) are stretched very thin, and rural people sometimes receive only the most rudimentary religious education. Many of the children in the villages don’t even know how to make the sign of the cross, the students said.

The students have embraced the work of the missions, when they can step away from their school work and enter into ministry with the people. They travel out into the countryside, an arduous 13-hour, bumpy, twisting journey by bus then minivan, and settle in among the villagers for a week of prayer and preaching, visiting and connecting.

“Our spirituality and a plan of action to help the people improve their lives have to go hand-in-hand,” Fr. Granados said. “We have a project in the village of San Juan where the people in Bogotá raised money to fund a water project in the village. The people of the village provided the labor. It was a good way to build community among the people.”

“I Never Felt Alone”

Guatemalan-born Felipe Caal Coy, C.PP.S., now
in his third year of studying theology in Bogota,
helped coordinate a mission trip to the village of
Casanare over his Christmas break. It was his
first mission trip outside his own country, but he
immediately felt at home among the people who
welcomed the Missionaries very warmly.

“I never felt alone. There were always people
with me,” he said. “I experienced God’s presence
in my life, because he never abandoned me
although I was very far from my family. I felt very
much at home with the people who opened their
hearts to me.”

These missions reach out to the faith communities
in several small villages, as many as the
Missionaries can reach from a central location
where they set up camp. On the Christmas mission, Caal, Fr. Tegete and another student, German Romera, visited homes and invited families to the Christmas novena the students had planned. In the afternoon, they met with children and young people, teaching them prayers and talking with them about their faith.

As they visited with the people, Caal said, talk often turned to the sorrows they had suffered through the many years of violence. “The fighting caused great upheaval and sadness for families; some lost husbands or wives,” he said. The people are seeing a glimmer of hope now as the political situation stabilizes somewhat, but it is always a tenuous peace. Caal hopes the missionaries’ presence offers them an affirmation that they are part of a larger family, valued members of the Body of Christ.

The Mission is Small

It’s a small group, the four priests and eleven students. The Missionaries of the Precious Blood are studying the situation in Colombia carefully, trusting that God will guide their work there and that the mission will grow in God’s time, along God’s path.

Big things can sprout from small seeds. The Missionaries trust that in everything they do, at churches, schools, at the shrine and in the Colombian countryside, they are helping the people of Colombia see that they are not alone in their struggles.

The most important thing, Felipe said, is that they remain open to the Spirit, and open to the needs of the people of God. “We must open ourselves to those who need us,” he said. “As missionaries we cannot remain in only one place. St. Gaspar, our founder, pointed the way for us when he told us to go where others don’t want to go. I believe that our spirits should burn to be missionaries for the whole world.”