Aid to the Church in Need: MOURNING THE BACON PRIEST

MOURNING THE BACON PRIEST

Posted by Press release on 12/2/2003, 9:57 am
Board Administrator

Feature for Universe (1000 words)
MOURNING THE BACON PRIEST
TRIBUTES have come in from far and wide in honour of the man who built up from nothing a massive relief programme helping Christians in crisis throughout the world.
Father Werenfried van Straaten, the founder of Aid to the Church in Need, died on Friday (31 January) just two weeks after his 90th birthday.
ACN’s JOHN PONTIFEX believes the “Fighter for Peace’s” legacy sends out a clear message that the Church is capable of rising to the huge challenge of increasing persecution against Christians in so many parts of the world.

“MAYBE, just maybe, come the New Year I will be able to start my appeals for the Church in Need. It is time I started my tours again. Perhaps I could come to England soon?”
It was difficult to know what to say. There he sat, the victim of so many illnesses - strokes and heart attacks. He was so severely incapacitated.
But the hands of time which had so ravaged his body had done nothing to wane the zeal of this extraordinary man.
I deflected his anxious, hopeful glances in my direction by staring through the window, watching the dusk fall.
It was late November – what turned out to be just two months before his death – the end of the legendary Fr Werenfried van Straaten.

HIS story began in ways so inauspicious that few could ever have imagined what would befall him.
But the young van Straaten or Philip, to use his Christian name – he chose Werenfried on becoming a monk – was his own man from the beginning.
His more conventional and studious brothers fulfilled their father’s dreams by entering the Church but, wanting to go his own way, Philip went to university in his native Holland.
In a sudden change of plan, he too decided to become a priest only to find his frail health prevented him from joining the order of his choice – the Capuchin Franciscans.
Doctors insisted upon a less demanding regime and so at 21 he joined the Norbertine Tongerlo Abbey in Belgium, and he seemed destined to live a life of quiet seclusion in his flowing white monastic habit.
A simple Christmas letter in the abbey’s magazine was to change his life forever.
His appeal for donations in support of refugees in neighbouring Germany was so successful that it evoked from Father Werenfried a phrase that would follow him for the rest of his life: “People are better than we think. And God too is better than we think.”
He took to the roads in search of funds – even standing outside factory gates during the workers’ lunch-hour in the hope of a donation or two.
Soon he ventured behind the Iron Curtain, responding to the unheard cries of Christians suffering for their faith in Eastern Europe.
What he found appalled him. He spoke of people “wasting away”. The ever-watchful eye of a regime that knew no mercy reeked of a level of suffering that frequently teetered on the brink of despair.
Back home, he confronted people with a message that shocked his audience to the core.
“Should we not be troubled by the gruesome fact that millions of people live through the darkest hours of their lives without experiencing the love of God because millions of others…remain hard-hearted and indifferent.”

SUCH was Father Werenfried’s success that the Pope himself was taking a direct interest in his work and so it was that in the 1960s John XXIII requested his help in Latin America.
By the end of that decade, the charity was also at work in Africa.
A staunch opponent of what he termed “that heresy: Communism”, Father Werenfried found his closest ally in Pope John Paul II.
The Pope remembered how as Archbishop of Krakow he had turned to Father Werenfried’s charity for funding to build a church, constructed in the face of staunch opposition from the Polish authorities.
Father Werenfried became a key player in the Pope’s mission for the 1990s by working closely with the Russian Orthodox Church, then just emerging from the long, cold night of Soviet oppression.
For the priest, by then in his 80s, the issue remained unchanged from his charity’s earliest days: “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 help them?”
By then, Aid to the Church in Need – and its founder – were well and truly on the map of the world Church.
With more than 7,000 projects in more than 130 countries, Aid to the Church has expanded its work to the point where its work of spiritual and pastoral consolation is present anywhere from the Philippines to Brazil.
And yet in the final years of Father Werenfried’s long life, the persecution of Christians has intensified.
Revelations of a Christian world battered by the twin evils of Communism and religious fundamentalism mean that ACN’s challenge at the start of the 21st century is perhaps greater than ever.
The tributes that poured in for Father Werenfried’s 90th birthday from prelates and presidents alike show that the charity he founded is recognised as a sign of real hope for a Christian people who have become the most persecuted religious group in the world.
In recent days the same sentiments have come across louder and clearer from the many mourning Father Werenfried’s passing.
FATHER Werenfried is no longer here to carry out the fund-raising appeals he was so determined to carry out this New Year.
But for many years to come his life-story is sure to inspire many to act in the name of the persecuted and oppressed Church.
That source of inspiration could not come at a better time when so many Christians face their darkest hour.
Father Werenfried’s words of sollace for the Church in Need amount to a call for action from Christians in the West.
“They are being tested in faith. We are being tested in love.”

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Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148 ABN: 62 418 911 594
Ph/Fax (02) 9679-1929 e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org web: www.aidtochurch.org