In the last episode, the missionary and Bishop Paride pushed deeper into war‑torn South Sudan, slipping past bombers, nervous soldiers, and mined roads as they made their way toward Yambio. After days of tense travel—hiding in the bush, dodging shellfire near Maridi, and trusting a battered lorry to lead them through danger—they finally reached the town the missionary once called home. Along the way he wrestled with fear while the bishop, calm as ever, offered quiet courage and gentle wisdom about life, faith, and holding things lightly. By the time they arrived in Yambio to a church full of weary but hopeful people, both men had been tested, shaken, and strangely strengthened for whatever awaited them next.
For a brief moment he hesitated this morning when he was the guest of honour at our table. The table had been set by an Italian sister. We missionaries usually eat with knife and fork. Angelo took the knife and fork in his hands, paused, and then replaced them and took up a spoon. The spoon was a compromise for Angelo, who usually eats with his hands. When he noticed that I saw his hesitation, he smiled and said, ‘Barani Mathew, I am only a simple catechist, not used to being the guest of honour of missionaries’. This ‘simple’ catechist is not so young any more, close to sixty, I guess. He has been in the service of the church with the Comboni missionaries for a long time. His beard resembles the beard of many an Italian missionary. He is of service to the church without being servile. He is becoming the wise old man who is consulted by the local people and the missionaries alike.
A few hours ago, Angelo had welcomed the missionaries back to the parish which they had fled a year earlier. For many it was a very emotional return. During the celebration of a very solemn and long High Mass, Angelo had said a word of welcome to the old missionary who in Italy still had talked about ‘my’ parish and ‘my’ people in Sudan. And for him that was the truth; he loved the people here. He had spent most of his life in Sudan; when he had to leave the south in 1964, he went to work in the north for some time, but as an old man he had returned to Nzara. That is where he was when he and others had to flee last year. There had been a moment of comedy this morning when the missionary and Angelo were inviting each other to speak first, as if they did not know any longer who was really in charge here. When the priest stepped aside, Angelo had welcomed us and the people who had come from all the outstations to celebrate the return of the missionaries; one old priest and three sisters.
I am present as a visitor. I used to be stationed in this area, but now I also work for the NSCC, the New Sudan Council of Churches. Angelo had welcomed me yesterday at the airstrip. The sisters had brought some food from Nairobi, but the people have welcomed them with more food than they can eat. They have brought chickens, sweet potatoes, groundnuts and plenty of oranges. The people are coming out of the forest where they have been hiding for months. The fact that the missionaries have returned is a sign that it is safe again to live here in Nzara.
After this, Angelo had told us what had happened after the missionaries who, on the advice of the government, fled from the advancing SPLA troops who liberated this area a few days later. Angelo remembers it well. In the night of 25-26 November the SPLA reached Nzara. Not only the missionaries had fled, full of doubt and torn apart, but also the local priest and many people, who had heard horrible stories about the SPLA as liberators; all had fled to Zaïre or the Central African Republic. The old missionary was deeply moved and thanked Angelo for all he had done during the past year. Angelo had stayed behind. He had helped the missionaries to pack, received the keys of the mission and remained there as its guardian. He does not talk as if he performed an act of courage.
Angelo is in many ways a very humble man. For him, it was the obvious thing to do; after all, he was experienced in this field. Angelo knows that the missionaries leave when the situation becomes really dangerous. No, Angelo does not blame them for it, because he has known that things are like that since his youth.
As early as 1964 Angelo saw the missionaries leave when the Sudanese government proclaimed the Missionary Act, which forced the missionaries to leave the south of Sudan. At that time, Angelo was a simple catechist, as he calls himself. Most of his life was spent in the service of the church. The Italian Comboni missionaries gave him the Italian name Angelo when they baptized him in Lirangu leprosy hospital where Angelo’s mother was a patient. The missionaries were regular visitors to the hospital and Angelo got to know them and they got to know him. I don’t know whether one of these missionaries called Angelo to become a priest or whether he felt called himself. One thing I do know; Angelo went to the seminary in Bussere, near Wau. He was still very young and the seminary was far from home and there was hardly any forest there. Angelo was clever enough as a student, but his health was not too good: his legs were often swollen as they are today. It was at a time when missionaries, themselves often from strong peasant stock, thought that God only called physically strong men to the priesthood. This was a rule not only in Africa; I remember that in my own student days a fellow student had to leave the seminary because he suffered from varicose veins.
The missionaries sent Angelo home to Lirangu. Angelo told me a few years ago about it, saying, ‘For more than a year I kept my vocation at home, and I cherished it’. And I have not asked Angelo what he meant by that sentence, but I suppose he did not start a relationship with a girlfriend in the hope that he would be able to return to the seminary. But his health did not improve, and Angelo started to assist the local missionary in teaching his own people as a catechist. He worked well with the missionaries; he was liked for what he himself calls his simplicity. No, Angelo cannot be called a proud man.
It was not an easy time for the people in the south of Sudan. It was the time of the first civil war, the Anya-nya, in which the Azande people, to whom Angelo belongs, played an important role. Angelo was more of a church servant than a soldier. When, in 1964, the missionaries left, Angelo helped them to pack and stayed behind as catechist in Lirangu. Not long afterwards, many of the people, with most of the priests, fled to the Central African Republic and Zaïre. Again Angelo stayed behind to serve the people who remained. There is no blame in Angelo’s story; he does not judge others easily. He just did what he had to do. He buried the baptismal registers and the mass vestments in such a way that they could not be eaten by the white ants, which have devoured so many of the Sudanese monuments of the past. He would regularly travel to Zaïre to report to the priest on the needs of the people. As they themselves were not prepared to go back to Sudan, they in the end gave Angelo permission to baptize his catechumens. When Angelo told me about this a few years ago, we had laughed about the fact that we had both started our apostolic career at about the same time. When I was struggling in Kenya with my first African language, Angelo was baptizing people in Lirangu. On the commemoration card for my ordination in 1963 I quoted the Letter to the Hebrews: ‘Every high priest is chosen from his fellow-men and appointed to serve God on their behalf. If that applies to me as a priest, then it also applies to Angelo, especially to him who is not judgemental of others. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews continues: ‘Since he himself is weak in many ways, he is able to be gentle with those who are ignorant and make mistakes’. Angelo is a very understanding man. Here is a man fulfilling a ministry proper to its own state, not secondary to, nor opposed to the ordained ministry in the church. I wonder where the church in Sudan would be without the catechists?
But Lirangu was not any longer a safe place to stay; most people, including the leprosy patients, fled to Nzara. ‘What was to be done? Should a shepherd not be with his flock?’ Angelo had asked himself. And that is how Angelo became catechist in Nzara. Among catechists he was not exceptional in this. In many other parts of southern Sudan the church blossomed under the leadership of the catechists. They usually did not receive a salary, but cultivated their fields like everybody else. True, now and again the catechumens helped with weeding, and it was not uncommon that Angelo would receive a chicken at the time of a baptism. Angelo and the many other catechists lived closer to the people than the missionaries or even the local priests ever could. He became a leader of his people. But in 1972 the local priests and a few missionaries returned, and Angelo welcomed them and handed the mission back to them again. It often happens in Sudan that one receives formal training following many years’ experience. Angelo went for a short time to Juba to take a course in catechetics. He is very grateful that he had that chance to investigate the Bible in depth. Angelo loves to tell Bible stories and in his own way he puts them in the context of every-day life. He returned to Nzara where I met this ‘simple’ catechist for the first time in 1988.
Regularly Angelo and I would meet in the catechetical centre at the edge of the forest. We would talk together. In one way or another he was very interested in the story my life and that gave me the right to inquire about his. He would talk about his wife and children. It took some time before he told me that these children of his were all adopted from relatives. He had no children of his own. In this situation, many other men would have taken a second wife. Angelo can understand that and he does not judge such men, but as head catechist he remained faithful to the wife whom he had married long ago. Priests would come to Nzara for a few years and then they would leave, but Angelo remained. The new priest often would have been helpless without him.
After the exodus of the foreign missionaries in 1990, Angelo knew what he had to do. Wood already touched by fire is not hard to set alight. He locked the house of the sisters and the priests and buried some of the fuel and supplies which had been left in the stores of the mission. When the SPLA drew closer, the people took to the forest. Angelo stayed in the mission and every morning he would beat the big wooden drum to let the people know that he was well and still at his post. When the feared liberators, the SPLA arrived, Angelo put on his white cassock and welcomed them. He opened all the doors for them, so that they did not have to break them down, as they had in many other places. “They only took what they needed’, Angelo told me later. I still have the impression that they needed quite a lot as I survey the ransacked mission. But Angelo explains that the local people also looted the mission, and he is inclined to defend the SPLA.
With no priest left in the diocese, Angelo started his apostolate again. He led the people in prayer services. On his old bicycle and with his bad legs he visited not only the outstations but also the neighbouring missions. For the people he became a respected church leader. Among the SPLA he was highly respected and they gave him the title Abuna; it means Father, and it is usually the title of a priest. The local people have started to address him as Barani, the Azande title for a priest. Angelo never asked to be addressed like that; a simple catechist does not insist on titles.
It is about half a year since I visited Nzara with Bishop Paride Taban. We were the first visitors from outside after the liberation of the area by the SPLA. Again it was Angelo who had received us, and he had asked the bishop for permission to baptize the many catechumens. No Eucharist had been celebrated and Angelo asked us to consecrate enough hosts, so that he could take Holy Communion to the outstations and the neighbouring parishes. Not long after us a Comboni sister, Sr Natalia Gomes, had visited Nzara from Zaïre to see whether the time was ripe to return and work here again. Angelo also made her welcome. Now the missionaries are back and we are celebrating the fact today, and Angelo is the guest of honour. I ask Angelo about the past year; how did he survive, he and the people of Nzara?
But Angelo is an Azande and they hardly ever give you a direct answer. Angelo licks his fingers (he has set aside that spoon). He wipes his beard and starts his story. He is quite solemn, formal, as he talks. I have heard him talking like this when he is teaching his catechumens.
‘The Church, the Body of Christ, that is us, went through a very hard time here in Nzara and other places in Western Equatoria. We were crucified. We were cut off from the rest of the world. The people outside must have thought that we were dead. Many people, including the priests, had fled like Christ’s disciples on Good Friday. They had been afraid that this was the end. Yes, it was as if we were in the grave, cut off from everybody with no access to the sacraments. Then six months ago Bishop Taban and Barani Mathew arrived, and it was as if they rolled away the stone from the grave. We did not feel as dead as before. We hoped and waited for our priests and missionaries to return. We waited and we prayed, and we prayed and we waited. And then all of a sudden Sister Natalia arrived from Zaïre.’ Angelo glances over at Sister Natalia who is with us today, and he goes on, ‘Your visit, Natalia, was like Mary Magdalene visiting the open grave. Mary Magdalene talked to the gardener and saw that we, the Church, were alive and she rushed back to Zaïre and to Nairobi to tell everybody the good news, that the Church here is very much alive. Her good news gave you the courage to come back. And we are very grateful that soon our bishop will be back and that our Church will be complete again.’
We all chuckle about this biblical analogy of Angelo, but people often laugh when they don’t know what to say. Angelo reads his Bible continually, and from that Bible he tries to understand his own life and the story of his people. It has struck me how closely many people in Sudan identify with the stories in the Bible.
Angelo tells us how he had buried the barrel of fuel which he had returned to the sisters yesterday morning; that amuses the table. But he has a more interesting, far-reaching story: how in every outstation he started communal gardens for the support of the church. In that way, the church and chapels had been able to care for the poor and the leprosy patients, without the aid of the missionaries. He had started to make the church self-supporting. This also happened in other parts of the south of Sudan. Western money is not always a help. So often we missionaries underestimate the resourcefulness of the local people. I remember praising the people in Upper Nile, where for more than ten years no priest had been able to visit the area. I told them that they had done a tremendous job, in spite of the fact that they had no priest or missionary to guide them. After our meeting one of the church leaders had corrected me and said: ‘You say that we have done well in spite of the fact that we did not have the support of the priests. I think we have done well thanks to the fact that no priests and missionaries were here. Now we were challenged to take responsibility ourselves and that is what we have done.’ That is straight-forward Nuer talk. Angelo, an Azande, is a lot more diplomatic than that.
We listen to the many stories of Angelo and we celebrate the return of the missionaries, but we also celebrate this ‘simple’ catechist. Then when Angelo stops for a moment one of the sisters says to Angelo, ‘I hear that the people call you Barani now, do they think that you are their priest?’ ‘Barani’ is used for both a priest and an honourable old man. Angelo laughs about it and says, ‘Sister, what do people know? I am just a simple catechist.’ I seldom disagree with Angelo, but now I am not so sure. Just a simple catechist, but I know from the story of his life that being a simple catechist is not so simple. This man addresses me as Barani and I let him, but since this morning I have joined the people and call him Barani Angelo. What do people know? I am inclined to think that people know a great deal.
In the next episode, the missionary finds his quiet routines upended when a familiar face arrives with unsettling news, pulling him once again toward the heart of a land still trembling from conflict. As he sets out on this unexpected path, rumours of new dangers mingle with whispers of hope, and he senses that whatever lies ahead will test not only his courage, but the very convictions that brought him here. One thing is certain: the road he’s about to take won’t leave him unchanged.
