4.3. Present-day Issues

The main difficulties in applying this new vision are the obstacles to mobility and the constraints resulting from the internal evolution of our Congregations.

In principle, missionaries ad gentes help the Christian communities established thanks to our proclamation until they are sufficiently dynamic and missionary to proclaim the Good News in their turn. But, it is not easy to withdraw once we have committed ourselves. Whereas we should limit ourselves to build the foundations, the temptation is great to settle down in the house we have built.

4.3.1. Structural Difficulties

We have dedicated ourselves to the first evangelization, but in a certain sense we have become the victims of our success. It has happened that we became the prisoners of the Church structures we built. Meanwhile, territories have become dioceses, but we continue to keep up what we started. This is especially true for the dioceses that we helped to set up and even more so if we are the only clerical Congregation in the diocese. There are parishes that we started a hundred years ago and for which we still assume the pastoral responsibility, either because of a shortage of personnel, or because we fear to transfer often very heavy structures to the local clergy, who most probably will not be able to maintain them. Too many missionaries have become "parish priests" abroad, or managers of charitable works, and they feel good in this situation, though we respect their efforts to inculturate themselves, to learn the language, and to integrate in an environment that is not very comfortable.

Is this not an invitation to encourage the presence of different Congregations in a diocese so as to make room for charisms?

4.3.2. Tension between Integration and Mobility

Acculturation requires both time and serious efforts. By integrating ourselves in the local culture we will be able to help the people to receive the Gospel as a divine power which enables them to transform their society from within and avoid to be an obstacle to the inculturation of the Gospel. Wherever the Message has been proclaimed with concepts of a foreign culture, we will assist the people in reformulating it according to their ways of thinking.

4.3.3. Psychological Difficulties

A missionary is like a sower. But it is not easy to leave and to entrust to others the work we started successfully, and to start all over again somewhere else. Adaptability decreases with age. The problem becomes still more complex when young members coming from the local Church consider a certain activity as part of their patrimony and object to what they call an impoverishment of their Province.

4.3.4. Presence in view of Recruiting

Missionary vocations will not come from the territories of first evangelization but from the Churches we helped to grow. When we started to recruit local missionary vocations we felt the need to "settle", to have "basic structures" and insertions that can serve for the pastoral training of confrères in formation, and that are chosen according to criteria that are not always missionary (At times it is only a question of having a house or a formation center nearby).

A task which seems to be specifically ours in the fairly established dioceses is the missionary animation of the local church. However, this requires further reflection and study. Apparently, it will not be possible to imitate what is being done in Europe for example.

4.3.5. Financial Implications

For many years our missionary commitments have been supported by the generosity of the Christians of the First World. The missions had their own self-financing activities: plantations, cattle breeding. The Christians of the Third World were more used to benefit from the assistance than to contribute to the upkeep of the mission.

Our Guidelines for financial Administration foresee that we should rely more and more on local contributions. This goes for the well established parishes, but they are precisely the first ones we give up. Financial viability is one of the criteria taken into consideration when deciding on the transfer of a parish or an activity to the diocese. Meanwhile the help of benefactors seems to be decreasing.

Service in the periphery, commitment to frontier situations, interreligious dialogue, first evangelization have financial implications: it is no longer possible to rely on local resources. And our missionary urgencies do not necessarily match the priorities of the funding agencies.

4.3.6. The Formation of Missionaries

Most of our missionary Congregations have no formation centers of their own to form their priests. Hence, we send the students to other centers or to consortia that adopt the Ratio Studiorum of the University to which they are affiliated. In this context we can hardly ensure a specifically missionary formation. The formation given aims more often at traditional parish pastoral and does not prepare the youth for authentically missionary commitments. We should recognize the need of a specific Ratio Studiorum preparing for mission ad gentes, so as to form the future missionaries for this purpose.

4.3.7. The Age Structure of our Congregations

The priority granted so far to diocesan vocations entails that today we are short of confrères ready for our base structures (formators, superiors, ...). And it happens quite often that the best of them are chosen for the episcopacy in their diocese of origin. On the other hand, the crisis of the seventies has deeply affected the European and North-American groups. The age group of 40-55 years that should assume responsibility for leadership and formation and that is in a position to launch new foundations is particularly small.