In Tokyo with the bishop of displaced people on Myanmar Day

Msgr Celso Ba Shwe - Bishop of Loikaw - took part in the celebration that every year on the third Sunday of November recalls the bond of solidarity between Japanese Catholics and the Church in former Burma, now wounded by war. Support for schools in the forest through the Seeds of Hope initiative. Archbishop Kikuchi: ‘Hope is born from the heart of those who walk together’.

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - On 17 November, the archdiocese of Tokyo experienced Myanmar Day, an event of solidarity between Churches that has long been celebrated in Japan on the third Sunday of November, but which has taken on a special significance in recent years, with the war into which this country has plunged after the coup d'état of the generals on 1 February 2021.

What made the celebration of Myanmar Day particularly significant this year in Tokyo was the presence of the bishop of Loikaw, Mgr Celso Ba Shwe, the prelate who - as he told AsiaNews in a testimony a few weeks ago - in Kayah State had himself had to abandon his cathedral because of the fighting between the army and the local People's Defence Forces and lives by visiting the communities of the faithful of his diocese who have taken refuge in the forest to escape the war.

Bishop Ba Shwe's presence in Tokyo was also an opportunity to thank the local Church for the support offered to the network of schools opened by five dioceses in Myanmar among over 100,000 displaced people in the forest through the Seeds of Hope initiative. It was also a moment of encounter with the Burmese migrant community living in the Japanese capital amidst a thousand difficulties in a country very reluctant to grant the right of asylum even to those fleeing war.

‘The political situation in Myanmar is still unstable,’ recalled Archbishop Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo in his homily at the Mass he presided over with Bishop Ba Shwe in St. Mary's Cathedral. ’Bishop Celso was forced to leave his cathedral and is living with internally displaced persons. The reality is that the Church, which calls for peace, is exposed to violence'.

Referring to the challenges posed by this and the other conflicts that stain the world with blood, Bishop Kikuchi - who will become a cardinal in the consistory on 7 December - said: ‘We cannot bring hope by taking it from somewhere else. Hope comes from the heart. The Church wants to be a community that creates hope. We want to be a Church that supports each other, listens to each other and walks together'.

And this is the deepest meaning of Myanmar Day, which was born precisely as a fruit of the solidarity that the Japanese Catholic community had received in the country brought to its knees by the madness of World War II. In 1954, a twinning between the archdiocese of Cologne and that of Tokyo had been established, thanks to which even St Mary's Cathedral itself - reduced to rubble by the bombings - had been rebuilt. Twenty-five years later, the then Archbishop Peter Seiichi Shirayanagi - together with the then Cardinal of Cologne Josef Hoffner - had the intuition to continue this bond of friendship by carrying out a solidarity initiative together.

The choice fell on the Church of Myanmar, with which Bishop Shirayanagi was in contact through a fellow student at the Urbaniana University who had also become a bishop in the meantime. The serious needs at the time were those related to the expulsion of foreign missionaries and the need to support the formation of a local clergy. Thus was born the Myanmar Day, which the archdiocese of Tokyo has celebrated every third Sunday in November since 1979.