There are people who help missions and missionaries from home, with prayer, or with generous donations.
and there is people who go to the mission, are kidnapped, held captive for years and beaten, and want to return. We are not talking about heroic medieval Mercedarians or Jesuits among the Iroquois of the 17th century, but about missionaries of today, like Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez, Colombian from the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary Immaculate, a missionary in Mali, where she spent more than four years kidnapped since February 2017 by a jihadist group. She was released a year ago, in October 2021, and she has dedicated this time to telling her story of faith and resistance.
Gloria Cecilia Narváez, recently released, with Cardinal Zerbo, from Bamako, in October 2021.
“They told me they were kidnapping me because of my religion”
“The head of the kidnappers He told me that they kidnapped me because of my religion,” explained the nun to ReligionInFreedom, on his way through Madrid to receive a OMP Domund Prize.
“The boss He told me: ‘This is a Muslim country, you have to convert to Islam. We don’t want money, we just want to talk to the president of Mali’. That’s what they kept telling me.”
She He suspects that many of the kidnappers of that group were Arabs or from other countries, because they did not have, by far, such black skin as is common in Mali. Some Muslim chiefs in the area were not at all comfortable with the jihadist gangs.
“I ran away several timesbut they had vehicles and they always caught me in the desert. I met a local Malian chief who was an honest and religious Muslim. He was trying to help another abductee, a Protestant Christian, return to her country. I managed to get close to him. ‘Boss, why don’t you help me get released? These people are very violent I told. He was the one who helped me out of the desert and handed me over to the president of Mali.”
The circumstances of Gloria Cecilia’s release, after four years and 8 months in captivity, remain unclear, but it seems that her kidnappers exchanged herand other captives, by some of his men who were imprisoned.
whipped for praying
One day, at the beginning of his captivity, in his first or second week, he went out to the edge of the camp to contemplate the desert and pray aloud some Psalms. “A boss came with a piece of plastic hose and hit me, like with a whip. I told him: ‘Boss, if I did something wrong, forgive me and tell me’. But he kept hitting me and then he put chains on me. Another of the kidnapped women told me: ‘it’s because of your religion, because you pray’. And I said: ‘Well, I’m going to keep praying, I’m a nun and I do my prayers’. Then the boss questioned me. ‘Will you pray the prayers of Islam?’ ‘No, I am a Catholic nun, and I say my prayers.’ And he insulted me a lot, but he didn’t hit me anymore. I, since then, prayed, but with more prudence”.
“Afterother hostages were happy to pray with me, to listen to the Psalms, to see my medal, my ring… they were signs that they helped Today I say that we all live hard experiences, and we must express our feelings to God, and that will give peace to our hearts. He will heal us with his presence in trusting and unceasing prayer,” he adds.
After her release, Gloria Cecilia Narváez was received by Pope Francis.
Real and powerful force in prayer
The Colombian nun for 56 months he had no access to the Bible, the sacraments, or a crucifix… He only had his little medal and the prayers and parts of the Bible that he remembered by heart. With them he prayed and also with a minimalist spirituality, of gratitude before the beauty of nature. A spirituality of the desert.
“I prayed with confidence, and I felt that the presence of God rose like the sun. I felt it that way inside me. Every day I made spiritual communion, praying those Psalms that I knew by heart, such as Psalm 22. She recited them and savored them, slowly: The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing… Once I saw a big snake and I prayed with it Psalm 91: He who dwells in the shadow of the Most High… will tread on lions and serpents. I felt that God delivered me from danger. “Save us, Lord, we perish” like the Apostles in the boat. Y “Lord, take this cup away from me.” And listened to the voice of God in the silence, a silence that was my school of prayer“.
Being a peacemaker under the insults
As a Franciscan Sister, she also leaned on a spirituality of docility. “If they flog you, bless them; do not return evil for evil. I was silent and loved even though I was hated. I forgave when they insulted me. It had to be light in that darkness, live the Beatitudes and the “prayer of peace” They say he’s from San Francisco. My body was kidnapped, but not my heart or my spirit, “he details. He followed the teaching of Mother Charity, founder of his congregation:” Be quiet, so that God may defend us.
Gloria Cecilia remembers that the Islamists, to recite their prayers, put their machine gun before them. “I, on the other hand, put my hands before me before God.”
It also relied on the beauty of Creation and a grateful spirit. “The contemplation of sunrises, starry nights, a small flower… I gave thanks for that beauty, and received peace and serenity from God,” he recalls.
When the bombs fell on everyone
There were times when their vehicles were attacked by helicopters and drones, which dropped bombs on them. He never knew if they were from the government or from another faction or group.
“Under the bombs and shootings, all fleeing, I saw that the kidnappers trembled with fear and I told them: ‘Chief, don’t tremble, God is great’. I prayed that none of us would die in those high-speed chases and gunshots. ‘Lord, let us not die, neither I nor them, may the protection of the Virgin keep us'”.
With the Domund, the missionaries reach many people
Sister Gloria Cecilia She was a missionary for several years in Benin, the country of voodoo, and in 2010 she went to Mali, where almost everyone is Muslim. In both places it has been verified that Domund’s aid multiplies through mission projects.
Gloria Cecilia and other sisters with children in the Mali mission.
“In Benin, With donations from Missionary Works, we maintained a home for a hundred children, that they could thus eat, sleep, get up with drinking water next to them and receive an education. Later, in Mali, this aid helps us to support an orphanage for sick children, who are born malnourished or with serious, very hard diseases. In those cultures, a child with deformities is considered a beast,” he explains.
“We are also dedicated to teach women to read, write, craft workshops, create workshops… A literate woman is completely different. She wins in security, joyfully receives her diploma, organizes a party and invites the bosses, the imam. They proudly tell how they get up early, prepare the household chores, and then go to their course. They learn to read and do accounts and with that they can already maintain small businesses and sales. The Muslim woman is very honest and careful in that. He returns all the microcredits and gives them profitability”details.
Sister Gloria Cecilia with the women they teach to read, count and organize.
The example of the missionaries touches many hearts in Africa. “I want to be of the religion of that priest,” some say. “Or I want to be good, like the sisters, many girls say.” In Mali, on the feast of Our Lady of Africa, on November 22, Muslims and authorities come on pilgrimage and the Minister of Culture makes a speech and thanks the work of the missionaries, explains Gloria Cecilia.
“I see a lot of hope in Africa, there are many vocations for missionary service, many girls from those countries who feel called to serve the mission, and young people called to be priests,” he adds.
While explaining this to ReL, Fides published the figures of Catholics in Africa: twice as many as twenty years before, today there are about 260 million. The Church in Africa has nearly 78,000 schools, and each year it opens 1,700 more schools. It educates some 26 million minors in its African schools, and each year it incorporates half a million more. It is a colossal effort, sustained only by the generosity of donors and missionaries.
Afraid to be a missionary?
There are families who listening to these stories of kidnappings and bombs be afraid to have their children become missionaries. But the Colombian nun has a reassuring message for them.
“Let no one be afraid. God never abandons us! It is nice that a family can give a vocation. My vocation was cultivated in my family. A family must set an example, as volunteers, as consecrated persons, in so many forms of mission.. The apostles were also afraid, but the Lord told them: ‘I am always with you’. I lived four very hard years, yes, but always full of hope and passion.”
Missionaries who have been to Africa always want to return. She doesn’t know if she is going to return to Africa or perhaps go on a mission in the Colombian Amazon. As always, the harvest is great and more workers are needed.
read HERE on Fides the complete statistics on The Catholic Church in 2020, presented in 2022.
Support Catholic missionaries around the world and their communities with a donation to Domund HERE.