Some Reflections on the Community at Mass
By Rowena D. Cuanico
The author, from Samar, is a former Columban Lay Missionary who served in Fiji and the Philippines. She is a frequent contributor to Misyon and other Columban magazines.
Weng with her Fijian friends
I often go to Mass at a chapel located in a shopping mall in an affluent part of town.
People are dressed nicely in fashionable clothes and shoes, carrying fashionable bags. They come mostly with their families. Some also come with their well-uniformed nannies and caregivers in tow.
Sometimes I would wonder why nannies and caregivers have to wear their uniforms. Is this to set their employers apart and bestow on them some status or prestige? Or is this to distinguish these nannies and caregivers from the rest of the congregation and assign them their place in society? I feel sad that even in a faith community where there should be ‘no more Gentile or Jew, servant or free, woman or man’, you can still identify their positions in society simply because of the uniforms some have to wear. I can't help but wonder, is this how far we still are from the Kingdom of God whose dawning we have come to celebrate?
Fr Patrick McCaffrey was born in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland in 1944 and ordained in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Derry, on 20 December 1967. He went to Fiji in 1968 and moved to Pakistan when the Columbans opened a mission there in 1979. In 2000 he was transferred to Britain where he worked mainly with Muslims, some of them refugees from the Middle East, in Bradford. He also celebrated Mass regularly there with Pakistani Catholics. He moved back to Fiji and later was again assigned to Pakistan, where he died suddenly on 18 May this year.
As a child in the Philippines, there were about 30 Muslim families, mostly traders, who lived in my hometown. Two of these families were family friends, but I never had the courage to learn more about Islam and the lives of my Muslim neighbors.
