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From Xaverian Mission NewsletterJuly 1, 2010
On March 31, 2011, Father Bruno Orrų died at the Mother House in Parma after battling cancer. He was 75 years old. He began his studies with the Xaverian Missionaries in 1949, completed the last three years of theology and was ordained a priest in Milwaukee on September 29, 1963. After his ordination he was engaged in teaching in Holliston, MA and from 1972 to 1976 he assisted our missions through our office in Wayne, New Jersey. From 1977 to 2011 he worked tirelessly in Indonesia, involved in pastoral care (pastor Bagansiapi-Api, the Padang Cathedral, and Jakarta): training of seminarians (Master of novices, 1990-2006) and as Regional Councilor for five terms. May he rest in peace!
Often parishioners or friends ask me how long I’ve been living
in Indonesia. I answer: “Same number of years Jesus lived on earth”. “Wow” is
there response, but then to be humble, in the oriental way, I say that some of
our priests have been stationed in Indonesia for over 54 years.
Looking back at my thirty three years in Indonesia there are many memories and
feelings, and overall, I can say that all of them have enormous meaning and I
thank the good Lord for all and each of them. I experienced working for nine
years in villages along the Malacca Straits, traveling through the rain forests
of the Sumatra Islands to reach a few communities there, taking care of lepers,
then leading a large parish in Padang, West Sumatra.
After that, I suddenly was
asked to be the formator of our Xaverian students in Jakarta, and that for
fifteen years. In between two periods as Master of Novices, I had a brief stint
as pastor of a large parish on the outskirts of Jakarta. Now I am back in that
same parish, this time not as pastor, but as assistant.
Indonesia is a young nation, a republic since 1945. I experienced a number of
years under Suharto’s dictatorship and also the beautiful days when democracy
started blooming; up to this day I very much rejoice in being part of this young
and vibrating Church, so well structured and with lay people involved in all the
fields of Church life.
It wasn’t easy to take in and adjust to those worlds, but it was beautiful. I was all the time on the road and in continuous contact with my people, visiting them even though it took me up to four days to look for and visit just two Catholic families.
Indonesia is so diverse: over two hundred and fifty ethnic groups which means as
many languages and cultures, one different from the other. In my first years I
had two different parishes, which I served at the same time, 200 kilometers
apart one from the other and so different from one another culturally. One was
made up of almost exclusively Chinese people whose ancestors came by boat more
than one hundred years before from Fukien province in China and spoke the same
dialect as in Taiwan. The other parish was made up of mostly Tapanuli People
from North Sumatra, along with a good number of Javanese People: three
languages, two races, three cultures.
It wasn’t easy to take in and adjust to those worlds, but it was beautiful. I
was all the time on the road and in continuous contact with my people, visiting
them even though it took me up to four days to look for and visit just two
Catholic families. Even though they spoke their language which I did not
understand, we could understand each other beautifully because we used the same
Indonesian national language, the Indonesia Malay.
And this is the great miracle of the Indonesian people: in the span of only a
few decades they succeeded in accepting and using with pride just one language
for literature, books, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and church
communication. While some other nations went through civil war over the language
problem, the Indonesian people overcame this problem peacefully.
Making the Gospel known has been facilitated not only by the use of the same
language but also by the open and hospitable character of the Indonesian people,
their tradition of musyawarah untuk mufakat. This means that they discuss and
debate a problem together in order to reach a single decision in the end,
accepted by all. Interreligious dialogue which is going on all the time fits
perfectly with the tolerant attitude of the Indonesian people.
