Fr Robert McCulloch doesn’t look shocked. Given the kind of news he is receiving down the phone line from Hyderabad in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh, one might have expected he would be. It’s September 17 in Rome and outside thousands of tourists are strolling past Propaganda Fide, the global headquarters of the Catholic Church’s missionary work.
“The Sisters’ driver and another woman were shot,” Fr McCulloch says, looking up from the desk with the phone receiver pressed to his ear, repeating what his former right-hand man, St Elizabeth Hospital Administrator, James Francis, has just told him.
“Were they fired on directly or was it a case of bullets ricocheting,” Fr McCulloch asks. It turns out it was the latter. At the time of the phone call, protesting mobs of around 500 people were still marauding the streets outside.
“When did this happen,” the journalist from Fides, the mission society’s news agency, asked.
“Now,” Fr McCulloch replied. “It’s happening right now.”
More than 9,000 kilometres away from the place he called home for 34 years, the Melbourne-born Columban priest still has his finger on the pulse of Pakistan, even after almost a year of being the Columbans’ Procurator General, their chief diplomat, in Rome.
The night before, an angry crowd of around 8,000 people had gathered at the gates of Hyderabad’s St Francis Xavier Cathedral in something of a ramshackle response to a far-right political party’s call for nationwide protest.
Shots had been fired haphazardly into the cathedral grounds and two people had been injured. After years of balancing local sensitivities and now, operating at the heart of Church diplomacy, Fr McCulloch knows the importance of describing things correctly.
“It would not be accurate to say Christians were ‘persecuted’ in Pakistan,” Fr McCulloch told me when we first met in Perth in late August. “Violence against Christians in Pakistan is so common you can’t call it incidental but nevertheless it is not happening in every city; it’s not happening in every place."
St Columbans Mission Society's initiatives are supported by Australians and donors throughout the world. There is the work of the diocese-owned St Elizabeth’s Hospital, on whose board Fr McCulloch still sits, having previously been its Chairman.
The hospital provides free medical care to around 12,000 villagers and to more than 20,000 impoverished people through its Mobile Medical Outreach program; providing pre and neonatal care as well as pioneering home-based palliative care training in the outlying areas.
Marginalised young women from underprivileged backgrounds can train to become professional midwives, benefiting from heavily-subsidised fees, food and accommodation at the hospital’s school of midwifery which receives no financial assistance from the Pakistani government.
Then when the region was hit hard by flooding in 2010 and 2011, the Columbans mobilised to build more than 800 new houses for desperately poor tribal minorities, descendants of the Dravidians, whose social status is so low as to be outside the existing caste system.
In March, the Governor of Sindh presented Fr McCulloch with the highest civilian award that can be given to a foreign national for his services to Pakistan’s health, education and inter-faith relations.
Although he was honoured by the award, he baulks at the idea that mission is principally about achieving social and economic justice.
“After Vatican II there was a temporary loss of nerve. I think the encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, was very good in reaffirming the necessity of mission,” he told The Record.
There are two principal ways of missioning, as he sees it – direct proclamation and works of charity and compassion, but “whatever it is, it is a manifestation of the love of God.”
“A person becomes a missionary priest because of the conviction one has about Christ, Our Lord. Without that, I don’t think anyone could survive as a missionary – I don’t think anyone could be happy as a missionary – because there can be “one step forward and two steps back”; so much digging and digging and you might not see much for it,” he says.
“We labour but God gives the increase.”
He believes Australia’s foreign aid would be better spent if the government were more comfortable with aid groups who had a religious base.
“I think the Australian Government has got be able to accept the “G” word,” Fr McCulloch says. “I would really like to see the Australian Government have confidence in the NGO sector. [Our medical work] is simply an act of compassion; it’s not aimed at conversion or anything, it is just the compassion of God for all,” he said.
Too much aid is being poured down the open throat of governments, he feels. He suspects that recent commitments to a doubling of Australia’s foreign aid budget will likewise be government-to-government, sidestepping non-government organisations (NGOs) that might have a greater presence on ground.
“I just don’t know where the Australian money is going.”
That is not to say that the Columbans haven’t been thankful for Australian aid.
Although his location might have changed from Pakistan to Rome, his seemingly insatiable desire to meet the myriad challenges remains.
Author: Robert Hiini for 'The Record' newspaper.
Fr Robert McCulloch has been a missionary in Pakistan since 1978. He now resides in Rome after taking up an appointment in late 2011 as the Procurator General for St Columbans Mission Society. Fr McCulloch returns to Pakistan several times each year.
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