October 16, 2005

We should celebrate the end of the Holy Year of the Eucharist simply by starting to live the rest of our lives. The Most Blessed Sacrament must be at the heart of all that we do. Daily for a year I offered Mass and often preached in the church where J.R.R. Tolkien used to go to Confession and daily Mass. He made his Lord of the Rings an allegory of Christian salvation. He wrote it as a myth, or story with a point, to lead people to Christianity which, as he said, is the one perfect myth because it is the only myth that really happened. His stories symbolize what the priest does at the consecration in the Mass: By describing Middle-earth which is permeated with the Truth of all Truths, he indicates how the entire story of creation and redemption is summed up in the moment that the bread and wine on the altar become the Body and Blood of Christ.

The suffering of Christ which gives us the victorious Mass is shared by many of our fellow Christians. As but one example, at the Synod in Rome the Archbishop of Addis Ababa spoke these words:

I do not have the statistics of these Christians who go to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Gulf States, and other Muslim majority countries. They are in the hundreds of thousands. Only in Beirut, there are more than 20,000 Ethiopians working there. We are grateful for Caritas Lebanon for the help it gives to these Christians.

Before they go to the Muslim countries, they are forced to change their Christian names into Muslim ones and, especially, the women have to dress in Muslim attire. Once they reach their destinations, their passports are taken from them and they suffer all kinds of abuses and exploitations. Many are forced by the situation to become Muslims.

They are forced to go to these Muslim countries because of the poverty of their own countries, and because the doors of other Christian countries are closed to them. We know that many African Christians die crossing parts of the Sahara desert or drown in the Mediterranean Sea attempting to go to Christian countries in Europe and America.

It is poverty which is forcing them to give up their Christian heritage, their Christian culture, and even their human dignity. They are denied their right of expressing their religion: the celebration of the Eucharist, and the Sunday Mass. It is one of the religious persecutions of the modem times.

I request that the Synod Fathers, especially those working in Muslim countries where poor Christians go in search of employment, extend their pastoral care to these Christians and ask the Muslim governments to respect the religious freedom of the Christians.