Photo - CanvaToday is world refugee day. It is a day on which I remember my years as a member of the Catholic chaplaincy group that visited the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney. I was part of this group from about 1998 to 2003 and I said mass in the visitors' section of the low security section of the Detention Centre.
Because there were people, most of them refugees, from all over the world, I would keep the homily very simple because most would have very limited English. One day the reading was about Moses going up the mountain. So I asked them the question, "Do you have mountains in your country?" As we went around the group, the people from the Middle East and from Africa spoke about the mountains in their countries. We came to a fellow from Nepal and he said, "We only have little hills in our country." I replied, "What! You have the highest mountains in the world!" And we all laughed. It felt good to laugh behind those barb wire fences that surrounded the detention centre.
After the eucharistic prayer, I would invite everyone to say the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus' teaches his disciples in today's gospel from Matthew 6:7-15, and to say it in their own languages. It was always like a Pentecostal experience to hear everyone join in the Our Father in the various languages around the world. Please pray for the refugees around the world and remember in particular the Rohingya people from Myanmar who survive in refugee camps in Bangladesh and the Palestinian people who have had to flee from Gaza and those who die at sea trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and so many others.
Fr Tom Rouse (Regional Councillor of Oceania) lives and works in Aotearoa/New Zealand
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