Connecting with our global family
If you consider yourself a member of one human family, then a foreign land more than 5,000 miles away is not too far to travel to get to know your brothers and sisters. That’s what Archbishop Roger Schwietz and seven Alaska Catholics did Dec. 4-7 when they visited the Butuan Diocese on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
The visit followed the formation of a "global solidarity partnership" between the two dioceses that has been in the works since last summer.
The partnership program, facilitated by Catholic Relief Services, links American Catholics with people they serve in other countries. Catholic Relief Services is the U.S. bishops’ overseas relief and development agency.
"Through this partnership a new way of caring for our sisters and brothers in our global family is born," the archbishop wrote last month from the Philippines. "Indeed, it is care for the poor, justice and harmony that we seek to achieve through our partnership," he said in his Dec. 19 column in the Anchor.
Traveling with him were Medical Mission Sister Joan Barina, pastoral associate at Our Lady of the Angels Parish in Kenai, Father Fred Bugarin, pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Anchorage, and five lay people.
Doug Ryan, Catholic Relief Services’ representative to the Philippines, came to Anchorage in October during Butuan Bishop Juan de Dios Pueblos’ weeklong Alaska visit. Ryan, who lives in Manila, was also on the ground in Butuan to facilitate the partnership.
"Our greatest asset as American Catholics is our capacity to share and provide a sense of hope for the future," Ryan told the Anchor last week via e-mail.
One of the five lay people on the trip, St. Anthony parishioner Joaquin Barbachano, said that when he first joined the global partnership program, he didn’t expect to one day be sharing coconut milk with Filipinos who would transform his whole idea of church.
"The typical American Catholic goes to church because it’s an obligation," he said, "but once it’s over, it doesn’t carry over into their lives and their families like it does in the Philippines," the retired military man said.
He noted also that the people he met didn’t consider themselves poor, even though the average annual income in the Philippines is $1,030 and 40 percent of Filipinos live in poverty.
"They struggle but they consider it an opportunity to share Christ’s love with each other," he said.
Barbachano, who taught business courses in the U.S. Army Reserve, plans to return to Butuan in the spring and will help his new friends in a farming village market their native crafts.
"The people who left are not the same people who came back," said Father Bugarin, who was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Alaska with his family when he was 14. He returned to the Philippines as a priest and spent eight years with Maryknoll missionaries in Mindanao.
At the request of Archbishop Schwietz, Father Bugarin culled about 15 young adults and a group of older adults to explore the concept of solidarity and raise funds for the partnership project.
The purpose, and the call for Catholics, Father Bugarin said, is to carry out the "vision of Jesus, who said, ‘I came that you would have life and you would have it to the full.’ " That means working side-by-side with people who struggle to improve their quality of life even in remote regions of the world, the priest said.
In Butuan, the Alaska delegation crept along muddy roads by jeep to rural areas where Catholic Relief Services organizes grassroots efforts to help farmers improve food production or help infants survive into their childhood or to foster peace and reconciliation between Muslims, Christians and indigenous people.
The church’s presence in the area is essential to the survival of the people, who face environmental degradation, the extraction of resources by outside developers and the militarization of opposing factions, Father Bugarin said.
"If the church doesn’t stand by and walk with them, who else would?" he asked.
In the Butuan Diocese, parishes often sponsor ecology programs and land-use seminars and spread awareness about traditional medicines. Parishes respond to justice issues and document graft and corruption, crime inflicted by the military, murders and rape, the priest said.
The Alaska delegation met with their "mirror image," the Butuan Diocese’s partnership members.
The two groups discussed issues affecting the quality of life in the Butuan Diocese and in the future will partner on a project that addresses some of these issues.
Father Leonardo Guiritan, a Filipino diocesan priest, rides a horse or a motorcycle to reach the 52 parishes he serves. Through those parishes he organizes neighbors who work on each other’s farms and make the most of land that would otherwise lie dormant due to one family’s lack of a labor force or equipment or resources.
At Mass, instead of presenting cash during the offertory, bunches of bananas, mangos, tropical fruit and rice were heaped at the altar.
"Since they have so little, they learn to share with each other," St. Anthony parishioner Claudio Glooschenko noticed. "They only have so much rice for the month but they’ll give you half of it."
Everywhere the delegation went, they were treated "like royalty," Barbachano said. Banners and banquets of roasted pig, tropical fruit and desserts wrapped in banana leaves greeted them at every stop. Leaders of indigenous Manobo and Higaonon tribes in Esperanza adorned the group with beaded necklaces, making them honorary members of the tribes.
Since their return, the Anchorage travelers have been discussing projects they might undertake with their distant friends, and are hoping to find a way to bring members of the Butuan Diocese on an exchange visit to Alaska.