Bishop Celso Ba Shwe – bishop of Loikaw – participated in the celebration that each year, on the third Sunday of November, remembers the bond of solidarity between Japanese Catholics and the Church of ancient Burma, now wounded by war. Support for jungle schools through the Semillas de Esperanza initiative. Archbishop Kikuchi: “Hope springs from the hearts of those who walk together.”
Tokyo () – On November 17, the archdiocese of Tokyo celebrated Myanmar Day, an event of solidarity between the Churches that has been celebrated in Japan for a long time, on the third Sunday of November, but which has acquired a special meaning in recent years, with the war in which this country has been plunged after the coup d’état by the generals on February 1, 2021. What has made the celebration of Myanmar Day this year in Tokyo especially significant has been the presence of the bishop of Loikaw, Bishop Celso Ba Shwe, the prelate who –as he told in a testimony a few weeks ago – in the state of Kayah he himself had had to abandon his cathedral due to the fighting between the army and the local Popular Defense Forces and he lives visiting the communities of faithful in his diocese who have taken refuge in the jungle to escape the war.
Bishop Ba Shwe’s presence in Tokyo was also an occasion to thank the local Church for the support offered to the network of schools opened by five dioceses in Myanmar among more than 100,000 displaced people in the jungle through the Seeds of Hope initiative. It was also a moment of meeting with the Burmese migrant community that lives in the Japanese capital amidst a thousand difficulties in a country very reluctant to grant the right of asylum even to those fleeing war.
“The political situation in Myanmar remains unstable,” recalled the archbishop of Tokyo, Monsignor Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, in the homily of the mass he presided with Monsignor Ba Shwe in St. Mary’s Cathedral, “Monsignor Celso was forced to abandon his cathedral and lives with internally displaced people.” The reality is that the Church, which calls for peace, is exposed to violence.
Referring to the challenges posed by this and the other conflicts that stain the world with blood, Bishop Kikuchi – who will become a cardinal in the consistory on December 7 – stated: «We cannot bring hope by taking it from another place. Hope comes from the heart. The Church wants to be a community that creates hope. “We want to be a Church that supports each other, listens to each other and walks together.”
And this is the deepest meaning of Myanmar Day, which was born precisely as a result of the solidarity that the Japanese Catholic community had received in the country brought to its knees by the madness of the Second World War. In 1954 a twinning had been established between the archdiocese of Cologne and that of Tokyo, thanks to which even the Cathedral of Saint Mary itself, reduced to rubble by bombings, had been rebuilt. Twenty-five years later, the then Archbishop Peter Seiichi Shirayanagi – together with the then Cologne Cardinal Josef Hoffner – had the intuition to continue this bond of friendship by carrying out a solidarity initiative together. The choice fell on the Church of Myanmar, with which Monsignor Shirayanagi was in contact through a fellow student at Urbaniana University who had meanwhile also become a bishop. The serious needs of that time were those related to the expulsion of foreign missionaries and the need to support the formation of a local clergy. Thus was born Myanmar Day, which the archdiocese of Tokyo has celebrated every third Sunday in November since 1979.
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