SAFCAM Communique #53 - English

SAFCAM Communique #53            22/05/2021  

Dear Subscribers

Happy feast of Pentecost!

From Pentecost, all Christians became individually and collectively the Temple of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is no longer an occasional ‘squatter’, but becomes the master of our being, the permanent guest of our souls and our bodies. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us to give us a taste of what it means to dwell in God for eternity. Since Pentecost, in the Church, the Spirit, the breath of God, is like the air we breathe. It is infinite grace! However, we sometimes may have the impression, these days, of suffering from apnea, and breathing with difficulty, as if a ‘spiritual’ Covid has infected us! Is it the Spirit abandoning us? No. In the hearts of the saints, the Spirit is still burning. Through the Spirit, the Church proclaims the Gospel and celebrates the sacraments, without which holiness is not attainable. Let us not only ask that the Holy Spirit descend upon us again in abundance on this feast, but that we again our hearts to him in order to be radically transformed, and strive to set the world ablaze with divine love.

SAFCAM update

Fr Camiel is now in Libreville continuing the extraordinary visitation there.

I have had the privilege of preaching a retreat to the third-year theology seminarians of Utume this past week, and today attended the ordination of 11 of them to the diaconate.

We have at last crossed the 100-mark of subscribers to the website after 14 months in existence. We expected to reach at least half of our 1500+ confreres in the region within a short time! Many confreres tell us they have never heard of this SAFCAM website whenever we mention it. What a pity!

We need to change our focus or strategy? There is a fair amount of traffic and some posts have garnered over 900 views, but that comes not mainly from confreres.

Even though the English section attracts many more visitors than the French, yet when we advertise online sessions, we around 120 francophones register, including many lay collaborators, but hardly ever more than 30 anglophones. Obviously, there is a lot of online competition and so much other much more professional and attractive resources. I have been observing a number of popular catholic YouTubers. They are achieving some impressive evangelizing. One young Franciscan priest, Fr Casey OFM, barely 2 years ordained, has a weekly clip posted on his YouTube channel called Breaking the Habit that has attracted 212,560 subscribers – I’ve occasionally watched a clip which he posted 2 hours previously and which already had over 20,000 views! One of his clips posted 4 months ago, has received 426,156 views as of today. He has no professional studio. He just records himself on a smartphone. He also has Facebook and Twitter accounts, and maintains a regular blog. Maybe we would need to change strategies, and instead of targeting a Salesian audience, try reach the broader public, and then SDBs might join in.

The sexuality webinar organised by the Youth Pastoral Sector of the congregation, which we advertised last week and placed on the SAFCAM website, lacked the zoom link required to join, and I was not able to obtain it in time to join the first session. Because of the risk of gate-crashers sabotaging a session, the link is not made public. If you wish to join, request the link from Fr Patrick at paalexander@sdb.org - Next session is on Thursday 27 May.

Some interesting stats

Worldwide, there are about 62 million children enrolled in Catholic schools;
6 million students are being formed in Catholic higher education institutions;
more than 50% of catholic primary school pupils are in Africa;
India is the country with the highest number of children enrolled in Catholic schools, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Uganda, Kenya and Malawi.

In Salesian schools, in 134 countries of the world, 940,000 students are educated annually, and there are 200,300 students in salesian vocational training centres.

Wishing you a wonderful celebration of Mary Help of Christians… -  Camiel and François