Aid to the Church in Need: The Founder of ACN celebrates his 90th birthday

The Founder of ACN celebrates his 90th birthday

Posted by Press Release on 10/1/2003, 7:10 pm
Board Administrator

Celebrating a life of love for the Church in Need
UNSTOPABLE, passionate, fearless – a Dutch monk has blazed a trail which has made him a living legend in the modern Catholic Church.
For decades on end, the priest beloved of Pope John Paul II has stopped at nothing to serve the needs of Christians suffering for their faith.
Nothing less than a whirlwind of activity – Father Werenfried van Straaten has led the charity he founded from obscure of beginnings to become Aid to the Church in Need, a charity supporting Christians worldwide – a people now facing a level of oppression never seen before.
As Father Werenfried celebrates his 90th birthday, John Pontifex a press officer with with the international Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, assesses the life and work of a man who has spent more than half a century shining a ray of hope for Christians facing their darkest hour.
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UNFUSSED by the shackles of age and illness, a man works at his desk into the depths of the night, his mind consumed with the cause that he has made his own.
This white-robed priest, nicknamed "God’s Beggar", is writing yet another appeal for funds, deploying his extraordinary flair for communication to encourage the faithful to support the Church in Need.
As it is now on this dark, wintry night, so it has been for decades long since past.
As he approaches his 90th birthday, his zeal for the cause so dear to his heart remains utterly tireless.
"Look into your heart and look God in the eyes! Would you dare to look your own father in the eyes if you had allowed your brothers and sisters to die and had not lifted a finger to save them?"
And elsewhere:
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph were the first refugees of the Christian age. Since that night in which [they fled to Egypt], the world has been filled with the homeless, the persecuted and the refugees, in whom Christ pleads with us for love and support."
With words such as these, the man who started out as a monk in his monastery, has set out across the globe and led generation after generation to serve the needs of Christians terrorised by oppression of unimaginable type and description.
In that time, almost 40 million child’s Bibles have gone out to youngsters worldwide. Thousands of seminarians have been trained, sisters beyond number supported in all sorts of ways, churches of all shapes and sizes have been built and priests provided with everything from a roof over their head to a motorbike to reach their flock spread far and wide.

The man who made it possible – Father Werenfried van Straaten – has a reputation which continues to spread far and wide.
Describing him as someone for whom he had the "highest regard", Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, praised him on the eve of his 90th birthday, saying: "In times of difficult political change, [Fr Werenfried has] made himself an apostle of peace."
And Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor sent a birthday greeting to Fr Werenfried: "Aid to the Church in Need has been a marvellous instrument for providing pastoral relief and care to needy and oppressed Christians. As its founder, Father Werenfried deserves our grateful thanks and good wishes.."
AMID the praise and adulation, it is perhaps hard to imagine the harsh and terrible realities of history without which Fr Werenfried’s charity would never have come to be.
The Germany of 1945 - blitzed by war and ground down by poverty – was a land filled with refugees, a people displaced at the stroke of a pen in the spoils of war divided up by the victorious powers.
Unloved and unwanted, the refugees themselves begged the Church for help and Rome in turn sent appeals to religious institutions.
One such religious establishment was the Belgian Abbey of Tongerlo where the young monk, Fr Werenfried van Straaten, learned of the suffering of his neighbouring countrymen and women.
In the Abbey’s Christmas letter, he appealed for help from the people of Flanders.
The response exceeded all expectations. Father Werenfried followed it up by trips to Germany – no easy task in a country whose infrastructure was shot to pieces.
What he saw horrified him. "Here in Germany, the outcast Christians are huddled together in bunkers. Four families chosen at random are cast into each concrete cave…nowhere any homeliness or family life…Here, families waste away, sallow, shrivelled babies as well as grandmothers of 80."
He returned determined to relieve their plight. First he had to find people willing to give funds. He even stood outside factory gates to meet workers during their lunch hour.
His rousing talks to everyone from schoolchildren to women’s institutes had remarkable results and soon Fr Werenfried’s Abbey became a base from which aid parcels were sent out.
For the starving people he sought to feed, Father Werenfried collected all kinds of food – in particular meat – and as his reputation grew so did the use of his nickname: the "Bacon Priest", one still used today.
For priests without churches and for a faithful without sacraments, Father Werenfried converted trucks into mobile chapels, which travelled the country bringing spiritual solace to thousands.
With Eastern Europe disappearing under the iron grip of Communist control, Father Werenfried’s charity soon expanded its work to respond to the needs of a Church cut off from the rest of the world.
He himself made daring trips into Eastern Europe, once reportedly wearing a disguise including a false moustache.
The urgency of the task before him and the success he brought to the role meant that Father Werenfried and Aid to the Church in Need soon came to the attention of the Pope.
Impressed by the fledgling charity, Pope John XXIII (1958-63) called on ACN to help Christians in Latin America.
By then, Father Werenfried’s boundless energies had led his charity to respond to the plight of the Church in Asia and it wasn’t long before work began in Africa.
Well on into his 80s, Fr Werenfried was still pushing back the boundaries of possibility by working with the Catholic and Orthodox Church in Russia, then just emerging from the long night of Communist oppression. The task has filled ACN with a new dynamism.
THE dawn of the new Millennium has brought to the fore a new form of threat to the Church in Need.
In his letter to ACN supporters last month, Father Werenfried identified fundamentalist Islam as among the forces ranged against Christianity, one whose impact is no less significant than the enduring threats of communism and secularism.
Research showing that the 20th century saw the worst Christian oppression is bad enough. But the signs are that the new Millennium may be no better with secularism and intolerance determined to render the Church either irrelevant or abhorrent.
And yet Fr Werenfried’s message for the Church in Need remains one of hope even amid the depths of despair.
To him, the suffering that animates their faith bestows on them a dignity that makes them God’s favourites.
He once wrote: "I believe these suffering souls will be happy for all eternity because they are the least of His little ones and so are God’s most beloved children."
And yet the struggle continues daily for us to respond to their plight. For inspiration, we need look no further than the man who still stays up late at night to write appeals for charity just as he did when his campaign for action first began.
May our prayer be that of Father Werenfried himself: "And when at the last day, He draws up the final balance-sheet of your life, may He recall that your love has covered a multitude of sins and that He can forgive you much because you have loved much."

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