Gozo Bishop Mario Grech’s proposal that every Gozitan parish should adopt a family of persecuted Christians fleeing Syria or Iraq is exactly the kind of initiative that breathes new life into our Church and Christian communities.
Everyone has watched in horror the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East as the Islamic State, formerly called Isis, overran vast swathes of land and declared a new caliphate. Among their victims were an estimated 200,000 Christians who were left with no other option but to flee.
In a homily, Mgr Grech drew parallels between the sounds of trumpets and fireworks in our traditional village festas and the sounds of war in Syria and Iraq. The comparison he made could not have been more appropriate for he was appealing to the parishes to move beyond the external manifestations of Christianity to one of the roots of Christian faith – charity.
The bishop is calling on Gozo’s generally close-knit communities to adopt a family each and provide them with shelter and the means to live.
He said he would be writing to the civil authorities and to the apostolic nunciature to inform them of the availability of the local Church and to ask for help with this project.
If necessary, the parishes would fork out the funds themselves, he said.
The Gozo Bishop’s proposal is true Christianity in action. It goes far beyond the mere phone-in donations that we witness from time to time on our television screens.
Well-meaning and useful as those televised marathons might be in raising much-needed funds for our many charities, there is no denying the clinical distance between donor and recipient. The bishop’s proposal, on the other hand, would be hands-on Christianity in action, charity in its purest form and a daily sign of solidarity with people in need within our communities.
It would also serve as a sign of solidarity with the numerous Maltese working in missions abroad, sometimes at risk of life.
The appeal comes in the wake of a similar message by Archbishop Paul Cremona who spoke on the need of extending solidarity to the poor.
Mgr Cremona stressed the importance of each human being receiving due respect and said that, sometimes, entire families were at risk of poverty and unable to purchase even their most basic needs. He called for national unity based on the principles of justice, solidarity and subsidiarity.
The Archbishop too pointed at the many blood-stained conflicts in the Mediterranean basin and there is hardly a more unifying cause than one where a country helps people whose lives are in danger, in this case because of their faith. For Mgr Cremona, justice demands that everyone receives his due as a human being irrespective of colour, race, gender, religious beliefs or political affiliation.
The Gozo Bishop’s initiative brings the reality of the injustices in the world literally to our doorstep and gives us an opportunity to do something about it.
The French government, known for its stringent secularism, has already offered asylum to Iraqi Christians forced to flee by Islamic militants in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. We now await the response of the authorities to Mgr Grech’s commendable initiative.