No man is an island but I do sometimes feel like something of a lone ranger in the City of God. When I left London for Rio I had been expecting to work closely with my colleague Fr. Eduardo Costa. Eduardo is a first-class clergyman who rides a motorbike, wears his hair like Jesus, prefers Black Sabbath to Bossa Nova and will soon become a black belt in the Japanese martial art of Aikido. But last year Eduardo decided he wanted to be a dentist and now much of the week he's at university.
Rooting around in someone's mouth may seem an easier task than delving into somebody's soul but Eduardo isn't doing it because he's lost interest in the priesthood. It's just that at the age of 30 he can't be sure any longer that he has any financial security for himself and his family in the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil.
As well as being Rector of the Parish of Christ the King - I'm really his curate - he's also responsible for Holy Trinity, Meier, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. But most months his small stipend arrives very late and whilst the Anglican Church is far from finished here, it's not clear what the future's going to be now that the American money which once funded the whole operation has all but gone.
And Eduardo isn't alone. When I met up with the 16 other priests of the diocese to take part in a two-day retreat at the beautiful Roman Catholic Monastery of St. Benedict, I met clergy who had other strings to their bow in order to get by: one an engineer, another a teacher and so on.
Until recently even the Bishop spent most of his day working as a psychologist at his clinic in Copacabana but thanks to the support of the Diocese of Atlanta the new Bishop of Rio de Janeiro can focus full-time on the task.
Born a Pentecostal, Eduardo is just the kind of charismatic clergyman that the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil badly needs and it's sad to see young people who want to dedicate their lives to building the Kingdom of God struggling to make ends meet. It's good for the church to have priests with one foot in the 'real world' but without a core of clergy available seven days a week to form their communities I wonder how viable it will prove to be.
1 comments:
It's sad to hear that priest in Brazil are forced to "moonlight" in order to make ends meet. I witnessed a similar situation in the Episcopal Diocese of Honduras last summer where many thriving parishes don't even have a full-time priest. Often, the pastor is not yet ordained and has a second job to support family. Ordained priests are usually assigned many parishes and often travel to a different parish each Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist. It's another example of how the extreme imbalances between the developed and developing world extend far beyond material posessions.
I love reading your blog, by the way. It's heartening to know that the Anglican Communion is firmly planted right in the middle of Cidade de Deus!
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