Experience of Emeterio Castañeda ( Peru)

I am Emeterio Castañeda from Peru . When I was 18 years old I decided to enter the seminary. I was deeply impressed by the way the pastor gave himself to the simple people, the campesinos, to the poor….

Before my priestly ordination, I came in contact with the Focolare Movement. New realities illuminated me: to see Jesus in others…; “You did it to me” (Mt 25). But what made me understand the Church and my vocation in a new way was above all the discovery of Jesus’ words: “Where two or three are united in my name, I am there in their midst.”

For the past three years I have been the pastor of Bolívar, on the Andes at an altitude of 3,000 meters. The parish, besides the small city, is made up of forty farming communities scattered over a vast territory without roads or means of communication. It takes three days by mule to reach the most distant community. The people live – as our bishops say – the experience of a long Good Friday: without light, without medical care, without a telephone, without television and in some places without schools. In this reality, the Church is the only living presence that offers hope for a better future.

When I arrived in Bolívar, in order to get to know “my parishioners,” I organized long missionary trips that lasted as long as three weeks. In some places I found ruined chapels, children and young people who had never been baptized, adults who had formed families without the sacrament of matrimony. The cry I heard everywhere was: “Why have you forsaken us?” But in spite of many years without the visit of a priest, their faith had not died out.

My first announcement, not only with words but also with small gestures, was: “No, you have not been forgotten; God loves you immensely; and where two or three are united in the name of Jesus and they love one another, he is present there; and when one suffers, he is even more present, because we all participate in his suffering on the cross. Wherever we went, we had to form catechists and organize “a Christian community” in which the presence of a priest would not be indispensable, but in which everyone would be a witness to our faith, living Church, even if the walls of the chapels were ruined. In other words, Church that is community.

With this new spirit of the Church as communion, last year we formed a team to bring ahead a course for catechists. So it was not only “one person” presenting interesting themes, but above all, the witness of our doing things in unity. This course was a formation event, but especially, a true family experience for our whole parish.

We were surprised by the fact that the sects are diminishing now and the youth are returning to the Church because they find that it has a new countenance: a Church-Family, a Church-Communion.