PIME in Indonesia, shared mission
By the end of the year, two priests and three nuns from Italy, India and Myanmar will set up a new outpost in the Diocese of Tanjung Selor, Indonesian Borneo, together with other congregations established elsewhere in the world inspired by PIME’s charism. For the Institute’s Superior General, Fr Brambillasca, this is “a project to renew in everyone the desire to leave for the mission.”
Missionaries from the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions (PIME) are getting ready to travel to Indonesia, a huge Asian nation where they have never been present before. But they will not get there alone.
By the end of the year, PIME’s first mission should be up and running in the Diocese of Tanjung Selor, on the island of Borneo, thanks to a joint journey with the Bounded Missionaries Families (BMF), a body that has brought together over the past few years various male and female congregations from around the world centred on PIME’s charism.
PIME Superior General Father Ferruccio Brambillasca announced the new initiative in a letter sent to all the confreres on Easter Sunday.
For PIME, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world with almost 280 million people and with the largest number of Muslims, will become the twentieth nation in which its missionaries are present.
Borneo is an extremely important place today. The large island is shared with Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei, and it is where Indonesia is building its new capital, Nusantara, which will be officially inaugurated next August.
Some 15 Church groups are part of the BMF, from China, Myanmar, Italy, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and Bangladesh.
Their journey began with a shared intuition from PIME general directorates and the Missionaries of the Immaculate, which led to a first meeting in 2019 in Hyderabad to get to know each other.
A second meeting was held three years later, again in India, at the house of the Catechist Sisters of St. Ann, a congregation founded in 1914 by Father Silvio Pasquali. At this event, the idea of a shared missionary presence emerged.
“Criteria were identified back then to choose the site of a mission,” writes Father Brambillasca in the letter. It “had to be new for every BMF group, in a place where no one was already present, but one that was relatively well-known and a typically missionary area, without the presence of other institutes. The first team for this joint project had to be inter-congregational, made up of at least five people provided by our institutes, congregations, and organisations.”
After initially examining a number of venues, the choice fell on the Indonesian Diocese of Tanjung Selor, in North Kalimantan province.
“Bishop Paulinus Yan Olla asked for the presence [of missionaries] to serve in Apo Kayan and Pulau Sapi, a remote area of his diocese, reachable only once a week by a small plane,” writes Father Brambillasca.
“He laid out in clear terms the priorities of the missionary area that he wants to entrust to BMF missionaries.” This would see the “creation of a Christian community, the empowerment and improved conditions of women and children, youth education, migrant care, ecumenical dialogue, and dialogue with Islam.”
With this in mind, two PIME missionaries, Father Xavier Lourdh of the General Directorate, and Father John Berchman, visited the Diocese of Tanjung Selor in October 2022, where they learnt about the local Church, where Christians represent about 11 per cent of the population, but can count only on 17 priests in a vast region with many small communities.
Catholics are mostly migrants from other parts of Indonesia, who work as day labourers in the palm oil sector; their situation appears very vulnerable and they are often victims of exploitation.
The first five missionaries will leave for Indonesia next December. This team will include members from different countries and congregations, led by a member of the PIME general directorate, who has a long experience in missionary work in Thailand and India.
He will be accompanied by a young Indian PIME missionary; an Indian sister of the Missionaries of the Immaculate from Hyderabad province; and two other religious sisters from Myanmar, one from the Sisters of Reparation,[*] and the other from the Zetaman Sisters of the Little Flower.[†]
In the coming months, these five missionaries will be busy getting to know each other and preparing for their departure.
“The project in Indonesia is fascinating. It is ad gentes, according to our charism, which has given rise over time to other institutes, congregations, and organisations. It is above all a response to the needs of a local Church that asks for help in the field of evangelisation,” said Father Brambillasca.
“There is certainly no shortage of challenges and difficulties, including material ones. This is an inter-congregational project, not only PIME’s, on which we work together, in a synodal style, which is the real challenge but at the same time a real need for the Church today.”
“I entrust this new project to each of you and to your prayers," the PIME Superior General added in concluding. “In addition to being a project that responds to the particular needs of a Church that still needs missionaries, it is also a project that I hope will help rekindle the desire to leave for the mission, and proclaim the Word where it has not yet been proclaimed.”
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[*] A congregation founded in Italy by Father Carlo Salerio, one of the missionaries who returned from the first unfortunate mission in Melanesia in the mid-19th century.
[†] A Myanmar-based congregation founded in 1961 in the Diocese of Taunggyi at the initiative of the then Bishop Giovanni Battista Gobbato.
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