Today, at St. Kizito Pastoral Centre, Solwezi, we started one month course for women chosen in their parishes to be extraordinary ministers of the communion.
As I inquired about their expectations, the question came: What about the people who live very far away from the centre of the Parish? Who can take the Eucharist to them?
This is a difficult question, for which we don’t have an answer. The distances are enormous, and people live isolated in small communities. It is impossible for the priest to attend to those communities, even when he tries to visit regularly the centres of the Parish; and the priests are few. The extraordinary ministers of the communion will not solve that problem. If they live far away from the Parish Centre, how are they going to come to the church on a Sunday morning and go back the same morning in time for the Sunday service in their community? It is impossible. The same applies to the sick. If they live far away, who will take the Eucharist to them? They will die in God’s hands, trusting his love and mercy, without the sacraments of the Church.
We teach, preach and believe that the Eucharist builds the Church, putting us in communion with Christ and helping us to establish communion among ourselves. We believe that receiving communion is part of our spiritual journey towards salvation, and yet we don’t find a way to make it available for many of our Christians. It is like a luxury for the ones living in towns, with a church near by. On one side, the Catholic Church is closer to the less privileged than many other churches; on the other side, she is elitist, leaving a great number of people out of the sacraments. Our traditions about the sacraments and especially about the priesthood are so heavy that we have lost the creativity and the imagination to find new answers for people living in different situations.
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