CHEY My name is Chey Mattner, Executive Director of Australian - PDF document

CHEY My name is Chey Mattner, Executive Director of Australian Lutheran World Service (the overseas aid and resettlement agency of the Lutheran Church of Australia), and with me is Sister Anne McGuire, Head of Mission at Caritas Australia (the Catholic Agency for International Aid and Development). We’re honoured to be able to join you today. Anecdote In 2009, I asked my wife Libby to join me on a monitoring visit of the programs we support in what was called Sudan at the time, now South Sudan. My clever strategy was to reassure her that even in the most hostile countries (it was suffering the effects of internal conflict after a peace agreement a few years earlier) I would be looked after by colleagues there, and so when I visited any other country – all safer in comparison – she would not have to worry. I had just proposed to her, and thought this was the best way to address any concerns she had. It turned out it was not such a clever strategy. We were caught in crossfire between a farmer and cattle raiders, then local police and cattle raiders 2 nights in a row, and later stopped by soldiers on a bridge over the Nile who called us out of the vehicle after a team member was caught taking a photo of what we later found to be a strategic military position. It is only now, 8 years on, that she’s starting to come to terms with me travelling to these places. I’m pleas ed to say we still got married – and… we’re still married today. During that visit, in a small township called Torit, where reportedly the first and last gun shots were fired in a 50 year war, Libby and I were put up in an old safari tent. The tent was in the compound of the Catholic Church’ s aid agency, Caritas, because the Lutheran compound nearby still only had an office and a generator – little else. We spent most of those nights fending off a rat and her litter nested between the window flap and the tent wall. Here we were: two Lutherans in a Catholic compound in a Catholic tent with a Catholic rat. Symbolism Between the Catholic compound and the Lutheran compound lay half a kilometer of road. Along those 500 metres, families had been killed by machine gun fire, machete and air strikes during the war. While we were there, along those 500 metres the South Sudan People’s Liberation Army would jog-march in the early morning, singing in deep melody as a united front against anything that would come their way. And in the afternoon along those 500 metres, children, women and men rode on the back of United Nations trucks pre-positioned to receive people returning from neighboring Uganda after years, sometimes decades, of living in refugee camps. 1

It was 500 metres between the Lutherans and the Catholics. 500 metres of dirt and dust where blood had been split, where people had lost their lives, and where others began theirs again, anew. It seemed that out there in the middle of nowhere, in an environment where you look after each other, 500 metres was 500 metres too far away. Were it not for the local government’s request to zone them apart, and if they had their way, they would have been neighbours. In the middle of nowhere, 500 years of bloodshed and disagreement between these two churches made no difference at all. Reformation never came up over a cup of tea conversation. It was never cause for division or disagreement. It didn’t keep them apart. Instead, what made them work so well together was their common purpose to help someone who was suffering. This was their imperative, as humans, as Christians in a broken and uneven world. Catholic and Lutheran aid workers in South Sudan, indeed the world over, are committed (often at great personal expense) to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give water to the thirsty, as Matthew asked of us 2000 years ago. As you and I, they believe in salvation and eternity. But that is not what motivates them. They also believe in life before death. It is the 500 metres of hurt and hope between these churches which united them, not the 500 years which has divided others. One of these aid workers, a lean wiry Dutch man called Arie had worked in Sudan most of his adult life. He was a Catholic but worked for the Lutherans. In 2013, in the aftermath of an horrific civil war, Arie was asked by the United Nations to lead a team into a township called Bor to count, retrieve and dispose of the bodies because no-one else was left to do it. Afterwards, he told me that the only thing that got him through that was telling himself that as a Christian it was the right thing to do. Never did he question whether as a Catholic he should be working for the Lutherans. Never did he question whether as a Christian he should be removing bodies which may have once housed souls committed to a different Christian denomination, or even another faith. You can find people like Arie everywhere across the world working for the Lutherans and Catholics, working together to have a greater impact on the lives of the poor than if we were to work alone. In 2002, 119 people attending church in a small town in Colombia, many of them children, were killed by an explosion laid by a local terrorist group. Another 89 were seriously injured. The explosion tore the arms off a statue of Christ which is kept in the village as a reminder of the massacre. It also serves as a comfort to victims as a shepherd who still looks over them despite the travesty. Last year, LWF and Caritas, accompanied the victims of the massacre through a long and painful court case. 2

Using their international connections, the two churches worked hard to bring this case to the world’s attention, especially the United Nations Human Rights Council. "Caritas has been a strategic al ly for LWF in the country,” said LWF Country Representative in Colombia, Saara Vuorensola-Barnes . “T he Catholics and the Lutherans are united by the desire to continue working together to improve the living conditions of these people and we know we can do much more together. " "Our joint work has led us to understand th at the gospel’s values go far beyond any religious denomination, and that ecumenical work for the well-being of people is very important, ANNE Working together Examples of us working together are not limited to other countries. At an Australian level, Lutherans and Catholics have joined hands to win government support for disaster responses, and a long-term development program in Papua New Guinea. At a global level, the Lutheran and Catholic aid agencies sit on the highest aid committees in the world. In fact, they are two of the largest, oldest and closest faith-based partners to the United Nations today. In Malmo, Sweden, last year, these agencies confirmed their pledge to partnership by signing a Declaration of Intent. In it they commit to looking for opportunities to cooperate, share and learn from each other in work with refugees, the internally displaced and migrants, in areas of peace building, reconciliation, disaster response and interfaith action. The Declaration of Intent was built on the Lutheran-Catholic study document, From Conflict to Communion, which states “Ecumenical engagement for the unity of the Church does not serve only the Church but also the world.” Single mandate But Christ reminds us that the poor will always be with us. So why do we bother. Why don’t we simply give up if that’s the case? The answer is two-fold. First, to help others is the cornerstone of social Christian teaching. In Greek, this is called Diakonia – or ‘service’ and stretches as far back as Moses in Deuteronomy: 3