Two days before Mother Teresa’s canonisation, Sister Isabel Sola Matas was running an errand in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. She sat at the wheel of her old white SUV as traffic crawled towards a busy junction in the Bel Air region of the city. Suddenly, a group of men approached the car, shot the Catalan nun twice in the chest and made off with her purse.
Sister Isabel died instantly. But the 51-year-old left behind an indelible record of goodness. After entering the Congregation of Religious of Jesus and Mary, she had served in Equatorial Guinea. She moved to Haiti in 2008, working as a nurse, feeding the hungry, helping to build houses and founding a workshop making prosthetic limbs for amputees after the 2010 earthquake. “In killing her they didn’t kill just one person,” a local priest said, “they killed the hopes of many people.”
The nun’s murder is not an isolated event. According to the Vatican news agency Fides, between 2000 and 2015, 396 pastoral workers were killed worldwide, mostly during attempted robberies. Last year alone, 22 workers died violently: 13 priests, four Sisters and five lay people. This year that figure could be higher: four of Mother Teresa’s Sisters were killed in a single attack in Yemen in March and 2016 seems an unusually blood-stained year.
While most of us regard the Middle East as the world’s most dangerous place for Christians, the Fides figures suggest it isn’t. For seven consecutive years, more missionaries have been killed in the Americas than in any other continent. In 2015, eight were murdered there, compared with seven in Asia, five in Africa and two in Europe.
Most missionaries are well aware of the deadly risks they face. But, as Sister Isabel might have said, that is the price of answering a divine call to share the lives of the poor and downtrodden. “Haiti is now the only place where I can be and heal my heart,” she wrote in 2011. “Haiti is my home, my family, my work, my suffering and joy, and my place of encounter with God.”
Why would God allow someone so transparently good to die so horribly? There is no glib answer. But as Christians, we believe that there is a meaning to our sufferings and sacrifices, no matter how dimly we perceive it in this life (as Cardinal Pell argues powerfully on our Books pages this week).
Missionaries like Sister Isabel are remembered long after their attackers have perished. If we view them with the eyes of faith, we see that they are, in some sense, triumphant. As Fr Christophe Lebreton, a French Trappist murdered 20 years ago in Algeria, put it in a prayer-poem: “You deliver our enemies/into our open praying hands.” Victory does not ultimately belong to the violent, but to the gentle and compassionate such as Sister Isabel.
What exactly is the Church’s teaching on internet pornography? While the teaching on pornography itself may be well known, the latter’s proliferation on the internet presents new challenges.
Unlike the pornography of old, this new type is completely unregulated, widely available to all age groups, and, in a market where each obscenity competes with ever greater other obscenities, more extreme than ever.
And with the advent of this new type of pornography have come new kinds of depraved human behaviour, such as sexting: the sharing of obscene pictures of oneself via social media, something that has recently brought down an American public figure, but which is also endemic among our young people, some of them barely in their teens.
In 2015, the US bishops’ conference produced a teaching document entitled Create in me a Clean Heart: a Pastoral Response to Pornography, which is suitable for audiences all over the world and freely available online. Everyone needs to read it, especially parents of teenage and pre-teenage children. It confronts the corrosive effects of using pornography, drawing on a wealth of modern research about the effects of frequent pornography use.
More recently, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, the former Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson, writing with her friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has also pointed to the damage pornography use can inflict on society and families, in language no less powerful than the bishops’. Anderson’s intervention is to be appreciated, not least because pornography is a matter that should concern everyone, not just Catholics and their bishops.
Given that Anderson has spoken out, is it not time to hear from other opinion-formers, and for action from governments which can, and should, disrupt the pornography supply? Interventions from either would be welcome; and the more this is discussed, the more governments will feel impelled to act.
And is it not time for parish priests (with tact, of course) to warn, advise and counsel their parishioners from the pulpit about the dangers this modern scourge poses to both adults and children alike?
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