By Pat Haggerty

I have no sense of direction when it comes to driving.  It’s always been my downfall.  I can never figure out if I should go north or south or east or west.  I am a terrible map reader as well.  I think that had to have been a deficit in my education.  I don’t recall doing much with maps except for coloring them and making land forms with salt, water and flour.  That has been no help to me in my adulthood when looking for a specific route or exit.

With great hope, the Augustinians of the Assumption together with their lay associates in Chile are preparing for the canonical visit that Fr. Benoît Grière will begin on March 13.

Already the members of the Lay-Religious Alliance have held a meeting to organize their rendezvous with Fr. Benoît.

On this site you have read about the kidnapping of three Assumptionists priests, Jean-Pierre Mumbere Ndulani, 50, superior, Anselme Kakule Wasukundi, 41, pastor, and Edmond Bamtupe Kisughu, 53, pastoral associate, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, abducted from their rectory on October 19, 2012, nearly six months ago. No reliable contact has been made with their kidnapers since.

(This article first appeared in the April/May/June issue of the Assumptionist magazine, L’Assomption et ses oeuvres. Br. Gwenaël Petton spent forty years as a missionary in Brazil. He speaks here about “his” Brazil: the initial difficulties in learning Portuguese and adapting to a new culture and then his pastoral work in a favela, the experience of living through a military regime, and finally the renaissance of Assumptionists vocations in the 80s.)

I arrived in Rio on October 8, 1963, after a thirteen-day transatlantic voyage on the Louis Lumière of the Chargeurs Réunis line out of the port of Le Havre. Four religious were waiting for me on the dock. The welcome was warm and fraternal. I was only 29 years old and timidly began to know this community that awaited me.