I believe it is important for missionaries to have a personal vocation focused on effort and self-improvement. The mission of every friar has always been and will always be a challenge, requiring dedication, renewal, and finding strength in community life.
From my experience, after eight years of service in this mission of Lábrea (Amazon, Brazil), I can say that the challenges of living the consecrated and community life in the Prelature of Lábrea are varied and come from different areas.
For example, in some things the mission remains the same as before, always challenging: widespread poverty complicates everything and providing care to riverside communities and indigenous peoples is especially difficult, given the distances and isolation.
This same isolation fosters a certain indifference among our people toward social and religious matters. Regarding religious experience, this is compounded by an attraction to neopentecostal prosperity theology. There are many who end up “believing” in this system that mixes materialism and religion and so many other social prejudices.
In some areas, things have improved: where oars and the typical slow and inefficient two-stroke outboard motors were once common, now you see many high-horsepower outboard motors. Infrastructure, institutions, and communication have also evolved. I remember when I first arrived here, the internet was very slow; now it’s like in any major Brazilian city.
In this context, the missionary is neither a leader, nor a healer, nor a builder, nor the mind that will solve everything. He is a person who needs time to adapt, to let go of the presumption of wanting to do many or great things, or of feeling like “the savior of everything and everybody.”
It is necessary to walk alongside and accompany the people with humility, and to share in their struggles and sufferings. This requires faith and trust, love and dedication to the people, inculturation and adaptation to this concrete reality, a strong and profound missionary spirit, poverty and detachment, and a touch of adventure.
I have always been impressed by the example of those missionaries who, wherever they went, knew how to manage themselves and, quietly and without making a fuss, exhausted themselves and gave everything for love of this people, for this mission.
