God, AIDS, Africa & HOPE

Reflections / Gedanken

08.06.2010 POZ and more…

An amazing day – already on the road shortly after 6 am this morning and somehow I manage not to get to the office until 4 pm in the afternoon. My cell is ringing constantly – even during meetings I hardly can handle it… 🙂

POZ meeting, we have to deal with the situation, that the SACBC is not in favor of our pastoral work. Somehow it seems that all the positive response we got before handing in the official proposal diluted within the closed meeting of the bishops. We are still awaiting the official response in writing, but it is indeed a setback that bishops are against pastoral care for their own fellow brothers and sisters working within the church. Well, “never give up” is one of my slogans and we will carefully try to more detail our offer and to get into a dialogue which at the end hopefully brings a benefit to the church. I am again and again amazed how difficult it is to bring initiatives serving the wider community of the church into the church. Only dialogue can bring a solution – we don’t want to work against any bishop, but we also know how necessary the work is we have begun.

Meeting with the DED in the middle of the day – discussion around the “weltwaerts” volunteers and the rules of engagement to get the right one who fit into HOPE Cape Town. In between and during the day several interview requests, lots of response on the “Beckmann” talk-show and a flood of emails to be tackled directly.

Only the failure of the internet provides a break – thanks to Telkom and MWEB which are more and more seem to fail their customers every given evening. The TELKOM lines are rotten and MWEB tries to squeeze so much internet traffic through a narrow bandwidth – it is amazing to see that they both sell services they cannot deliver on…

Filed under: HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, Reflection, , , , , ,

25.05.2010 A long way…

This morning meeting with the Archbishop of Cape Town regarding our working group on “pastoral work for HIV positive priests and religious”.  We awaiting a letter from the SACBC on our request for support and I hope, this letter will arrive in time for the next meeting, so that we can consider it and then our way forward. Before today, bishops we have spoken to have had a very supportive attitude, telling us, that nobody could reject pastoral work for those infected within the church. One bishop even offered to be the patron for the project. The indication today was that this attitude might have changed during the discussion amongst the bishops. So we are awaiting the letter with great anticipation, specially after all the willingness of the authorities within the Vatican to tackle this problem pro-active. Ecclesia siemper reformanda – we are at a defining moment within our church seeing all the scandals in Europe and else in the world – there is always hope – as the title of this block also clearly states.
I am sure there is always a way forward.. in an email, a colleague of mine mentioned my “gnadenlose Hoffnung” – my merciless hope.. – a very interesting expression. 🙂

Otherwise a day to catch up with all the emails lying in the mail box and lots of contacts with the HOPE Cape Town office – running an organisation means lots of small nitty gritties.. from banking problems to missing keys… it is real life….

Filed under: HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, Networking, Reflection, Society and living environment, , , , , , , ,

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