Writings

[5444]
The news of your arrival in Cairo and that you have been sent by the mandate of the Holy Father, has given me great joy, because our wishes expressed in Rome have been fulfilled in the clearest manifestation of God’s will. So courage, my dear Fr Francesco; let us prepare ourselves with prayer, self-denial and sacrifice to save a large number of unbelieving souls, even at the cost of the blood of Jesus Christ: it was through efforts and martyrdom that the Church was founded.
[5445]
Pray for me every day, that God may help me in the immense difficulties that I must overcome to direct the most difficult, trying and important Vicariate Apostolic in the world. When you write to Rome, give my respects to your mother, my greetings to Pennacchi, and tell him to write to me.
[5446]
Excuse me for not writing more at length: I have everything on my shoulders and am busy day and night, as well as having frequent fevers and spending nights on end without sleep. But to suffer for Jesus and to win souls for him is the greatest resource of the true missionary’s heart.
I bless you.
All yours, most affectionately

+ Daniel Comboni
Bishop and Vicar Apostolic

[5447]
I am a little late in presenting my annual report on the Vicariate of Central Africa. But it is not my fault. This year has been the most frightful and terrible of all the years that have passed since the Vicariate came into being, and there is not even a memory in the history of Central Africa of so frightful and universal a famine and mortality as the one that has raged in the last two years in these unfortunate parts; though this year has been one of the happiest and most fertile in conversions and for the salvation of unbelievers.
[5448]
All God’s works, and especially those of the Catholic apostolate whose aim is to destroy the devil’s empire and to replace it with the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, must be born and grow at the foot of Calvary and be marked by the Cross. You, Gentlemen, are the most competent judges of this, for you follow and study with unequalled zeal and concern every phase of the apostolic Missions throughout the world.
[5449]
It is through the cross and martyrdom that all the Missions have been founded and have prospered, and Central Africa, which is the last of all, the most difficult and the most trying, was bound not to follow a different path or pace than other Works of God. It must follow the way of the cross and of martyrdom, in the same way as the Divine Founder of the Faith attained his glorious Resurrection through his Passion and Death, and as the Catholic Church emerged from his Immaculate Heart, sailing through the blood of the Martyrs to triumph over the universe.
[5450]
I will tell here, Gentlemen, of the horrendous famine and extreme shortage of everything, and of the ensuing mortality throughout Central Africa this year; a famine, drought and mortality that are more appalling and terrible by far than those in India, China or any other Mission in the world. As I shall prove in this report and, saying a few words about the fruits and hopes of this Mission’s apostolate, I will tell you the most urgent needs that trouble us, in order to preserve it and make it prosper.
[5451]
God’s mercy has chosen these times to call to the true faith this most abandoned and unfortunate part of the earth, “novissima inter omnes” and I am glad to grant a considerable part of my colossal Vicariate to the generous Missionaries of Algiers, founded by the admirable and tireless zeal of Mgr Lavigerie, a true apostle of Africa: I refer to the Equator and all the immense regions south of the Equator which, by Gregory XVI’s Brief of 3rd April 1846, had been assigned to the Vicariate of Central Africa, and thus the Propagation of the Faith and all the benefactors of the Catholic Apostolate will have more exact information on the enormous difficulties, the best founded hopes and the absolute importance of the apostolate of Central and Equatorial Africa and its over one hundred million unbelievers who still lie in the darkness and shadow of death.

[From § 5452 to § 5492 Comboni tells of the famine; see document N. 1005 (963)]


[5493]
Here in Central Africa, I am the only Bishop and Vicar Apostolic to have been able quite belatedly to raise his voice at a time when all the minds and gazes of affluent Europe were focused on the famine in other Catholic Missions in the world.
But my voice is weak, it is solitary, and my cries of despair have come too late, as a venerable Belgian benefactor wrote to me. As a result, my Vicariate has had to suffer all the horrors of the famine without being able to meet the most urgent needs.

[5494]
It was, however, with the generous offerings that did reach me that I could respond to the extreme misery and keep the Vicariate going, but the Mission and the Missionaries have suffered and endured the greatest privations, and this also applies to the admirable Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition. The Vicariate still has many debts, as you will see from the tables of statistics. There are also still many repairs to be made to the Mission’s Institutes, which are absolutely essential for the well-being and health of the Missionaries and the Sisters who have survived the horrible disasters and frightening mortality of this year, which, since I first arrived on this Mission 22 years ago, has been the most tragic of all, with a famine and mortality unequalled in history.
[5495]
Here I should give you the details of the good fruits of our laborious apostolate which has been more fortunate than in previous years, as you will see from the enclosed tables of statistics. However, since I am completely worn out and my health is quite undermined, I shall wait to send you this, the most interesting part of the report, until later when I have somewhat recovered my health. I therefore proceed with my request for the most urgent aid, badly needed by my Vicariate, and I am sure, despite all the difficulties, that your great charity will deign, under the impulse of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mary Immaculate, St Joseph and St Francis Xavier, to grant my humble and fervent prayer.
[5496]
This year, the resources of the other small European Associations (except for the Holy Childhood which over the last two years has granted me 5,000 francs a year) were much more modest than in previous years, because Catholic charity in Germany and Austria has been totally absorbed by urgent diocesan work due to the wicked tendencies of the liberal governments dominated by freemasonry, to Peter’s Pence and to some extent to the famine in India and China.
But in view of the extraordinary donations I received from you and also from elsewhere, like the offerings raised by L’Universo and by many newspapers in Italy, Germany and Austria, though small in quantity, these extraordinary offerings, added to the ordinary subsidies of the Propagation of the Faith, meant that this year’s resources were more abundant than those of previous years and reached a total of about 100,000 francs. But with these resources I had to cover the following costs:

[5497]
1. For the maintenance of the Institutes inhabited by European staff and by locals in much greater numbers. Also in the grievous circumstances of the famine and the general shortage of items of prime necessity, food and essential articles have reached five, eight, twelve, fifteen and even twenty times the prices of previous years, and this applies to the doctors and medicines for the Institutes, which were turned into hospitals.
2. Caring in every possible way, in accordance with the wishes of the benefactors, for the poor and the sick, thereby saving the lives of many, who are deeply grateful.

[5498]
3. The Missionaries’ journeys and the despatch of supplies, when possible, were 4 or 5 times more costly than normal, as was the loss or spoilage of many items.
4. For the payment of a part of the 46,736 franc debt I found in the Vicariate on 12th April, when I reached Khartoum; another 12,000 francs and more for the construction in Cairo, already completed and finished, of the two acclimatisation houses for Missionaries; and expenses incurred by the Vicariate and these two general houses, our headquarters in Egypt, entrusted to my Superior in Cairo, Rolleri.

[5499]
In addition, the six elephants Gordon Pasha sent to the Nyanza Lakes, here in Khartoum cost him 20 pounds sterling a day (500 francs) to feed, so that all six cost 3,000 francs in food alone because the food shortage was so bad here.
[5500]
You can understand, Gentlemen, my great difficulties and my dire predicament. Well, despite all these difficulties, the state of the Vicariate’s finances is not desperate at the moment, thanks to a miracle of divine Providence in which the Propagation of the Faith is the most potent agent and instrument.
The total debts I have in Central Africa, including the 6,000 francs I owe the builder-architect for the buildings in Cairo, are no more than 30,157 francs which I have to pay by 1st September 1879, with interest of 1,055 francs.
To reach this situation, which is not desperate,

[5501]
1. The late Fr Antonio Squaranti, my Administrator, and I made extreme savings and kept an iron grip on the administration of our resources.
2. We, and the various Missions of the Vicariate, have suffered greatly and have borne the most severe privations, sometimes lacking all necessities.

[5502]
3. After the death and the serious illnesses of the Missionaries, Sisters and European lay coadjutor Brothers, I provisionally closed the two Berber Institutes which cost more than 10,000 francs a year and, except for the chapel and a few rooms for the Mission caravans arriving from Cairo, I rented the rest out to a French trader for 100 francs a month and one or two Missionaries from Khartoum will go to Berber twice a year for the spiritual needs of the few believers in that city.
4. In addition, I have provisionally suspended the Mission in Kadaref which covers the whole territory of the vast provinces of Taka, Ghalabat, Fazoglo, etc. as far as Abyssinia, spreading over an area as large as France, and I recalled to Khartoum the staff I had sent out under the direction of one of my veteran Missionaries.

[5503]
5. I then brought from Berber to Khartoum the five Sisters belonging to the Devout Mothers of Africa from Verona, to assign them to Kordofan, recall from there the three Sisters of St Joseph who were in El Obeid, and reunite them with the three who have survived in Khartoum. Here, if the Mother General of this devout Marseilles Congregation sends me other Sisters, as I hope she will, I shall entrust another house to their direction: the government hospital in Khartoum which Gordon Pasha absolutely wants to entrust to me. In seven years, the Sisters of St Joseph have lost nine Sisters, seven in Khartoum, though some died of illness they had before coming here, and two died by falling from a camel and a mule.
[5504]
6. I have suspended the repair work here and in Kordofan, through lack of money. Please note, Gentlemen, that this too has cost us much suffering and illness, unforeseen and against our will. We are in a stormy sea and we have to swim.
[5505]
I must insist here again, that in the seven years during which I have directed the Vicariate, not a single European Missionary priest of those acclimatised in Cairo has yet died in Central Africa. The three who died during the famine from 1877 to 1878 had only stayed in Cairo less than two months and had not acclimatised because I needed them urgently in the Vicariate. However, since I know from long experience of the need for this acclimatisation in Cairo, at least throughout spring and summer, I have taken the most definitive decisions and have ordered that each Missionary, each Sister and each European lay coadjutor, before entering the Vicariate, must first be acclimatised in Cairo. This will preserve the lives of the Gospel workers in this difficult Mission which, after it has gone through the storm, will have a splendid future.
[5506]
His positis, I have shown the Vicariate’s most urgent and indispensable needs in the table of statistics.
First of all I must pay my debt of over 30,000 francs; otherwise, so as not to see the Mission weakened, I shall be forced to incur other debts (which I would never do), and here the interest on ordinary loans is 5%.

[5507]
I must now maintain the Institutes together with the Mission in Jebel Nuba which will have a great future. The famine is not over, and food will still be three or four times more expensive than usual, as will the expeditions. As an example, the journey of a caravan with 20 camels from Khartoum to Kordofan used to take 12 days and cost 900 francs. A dispatch informs me that the 19 camel caravan of my Verona Sisters which has reached Kordofan took 29 days and has cost 2,305 francs. The camels are weak and can only carry half their load.
[5508]
Two of Gordon Pasha’s good doctors who have visited our houses in Khartoum have assured me that I must make a second floor for the Europeans, otherwise they will all die here after the rains, since pestiferous miasmas rise to 4 or 5 metres, and we can avoid them on the second floor where the air is purer. It will therefore be necessary, by next September, to build at least four small rooms for the Sisters and another four for the men, and the cost will be at least 14,000 francs.
[5509]
For all the rest, please see the tables of statistics. Here we have to create everything out of nothing, since the people are primitive and we have to do everything, even the basics.
Now, after all the observations made in this report and the tables of statistics, I take the liberty of imploring you to grant me an increase in the subsidies you have been good enough to grant me over the last two years, that is 90,000 francs for 1879, if you can. With such resources and iron-fisted management, I hope to get my head above water and to breath. For the remainder of my great needs for this exhausting, difficult and interesting Vicariate, God will provide through the Bulletin of the Missions Catholiques and other journals.

[5510]
We never cease, Gentlemen, to pray God insistently for you and for all the members of this divine Work of the Propagation of the Faith, which is the true source and the direct channel of grace for the Redemption of all the unbelieving peoples in the world and the condition sine qua non of the existence, stability and preservation of the prosperity of the Apostolic Missions and the Christian civilisation of the African nations, still sitting in the shadow of death.
[5511]
It is through this divine Work that Central Africa will surely and very soon enter the sheepfold of Jesus Christ.
I send you my most heartfelt prayers and humble respects, as I remain forever in the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary

+ Daniel Comboni
Bishop of Claudiopolis i.p.i.
Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa

Do not think that I believe that you can decide this year on next year’s contribution. No. I am aware of your admirable prudence. If you can, please grant me at present what I ask for the period you are defining. For the rest, you will see in March or April 1880 what you can do for that period.


Translated from the French.


N.B. Comboni sent to Paris the same letter (N. 802) as the one to Lyons, with slight variations and without the post scriptum.

[5512]

I had just finished explaining my plans to the Superior General, the Reverend Mother Emilie Julien, a former missionary in Africa and the Orient, when she agreed to support me.
I left Marseilles in 1867 leading a small band consisting of three Missionaries, three Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition and sixteen African girls educated in various houses in Europe.

[5513]

On 26th January 1873, I left Cairo at the head of 30 persons, Missionaries and Sisters. We reached Khartoum after a successful journey of 99 days. We were received with great festivities by the Austrian Consul, the Pasha, the Governor General of the Sudan, by the Christian and Muslim populations and finally by the chief Mufti, who recited to me very correctly in Arabic a hymn in the style of the Psalms.

[5514]
The Sisters and teachers were housed in rented premises until I was allowed to buy or build a house consecrated exclusively to them.
Central Africa had never seen Sisters. The first who devoted themselves to this apostolate belonged to the Congregation of St Joseph of the Apparition in Marseilles and were originally from Asia. Two of them have now died, Sr Giuseppina Tabraui and Sr Maddalena Carcassian.

[5515]
Sr Giuseppina Tabraui, born in Tiberias of Greek Catholic parents and who grew up in Jerusalem, was in charge of the girls’ education in Jaffa, in Sidon and then in Deïr-el-Kamar. She devoted her youth and her strength to caring night and day for the innumerable orphans of the Christian victims of the 1860 massacres in Syria and to assisting cholera patients under the direction of the venerable Mother Emilienne Naubonnet, currently Provincial Superior of the Sisters in Central Africa. With her zeal for souls, Sr Giuseppina was a mother for the poor African girls in Cairo.
She went up the Nile, crossed the scorching Nubian deserts and spent her life in the trying apostolate of Central Africa. A model of the most heroic virtues, she was esteemed by the people and admired by the Muslim governors to whom she spoke relentlessly, with liberty and frankness, in defence of the human rights they were trampling underfoot. As the first Superior of Central Africa, she died on 16th April 1874 aged 33, full of merit and mourned by all, and she was honoured with a magnificent funeral.

[5516]
Sr Maddalena Carcassian, born in Erzurum, capital of Armenia, pronounced her simple vows in 1867 in Rome at the Institute of St Joseph of the Apparition. She made very perilous journeys and consecrated her youth to the conversion of Africans in Egypt and to the Missions in Khartoum, in Kordofan and in Jebel Nuba.
She spoke good Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, French and Italian. After nine years of self-denial and sacrifices, she died aged 27 in El Obeid on 27th August 1876.

[5517]
I had taken to Khartoum my relative Faustina Stampais, born in Maderno on Lake Garda (Brescia Diocese). She had been a member of our Egyptian Institute four years, knew sufficient Arabic and had devotedly applied herself to teaching the African girls in Cairo. I had given her two African teachers. While I waited to be able to buy them a large house, I put them up in the Missionaries’ house. Sr Faustina directed the Institute until the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition arrived in El Obeid in February 1874.
[5518]
In this way, in a short time and with the help of my excellent confreres, I had managed to found the two houses in Kordofan. On 11th December four Sisters of St Joseph reached Khartoum, accompanied by Fr Giovanni Losi, a priest of the Verona Institute and a few lay workers. They found the other Sisters in a house rented from the heirs of Mr Andrea de Bono, known as Latif Effendi. This house was very small, and besides, the owners wanted it back to house Mr Rosset, the Prussian Vice-Consul. Therefore, with the offerings from European benefactors, especially Their Majesties Emperor Ferdinand I and Empress Maria Anna of Austria and the Archduke of Este, Duke Francis of Modena, I built a house 112 metres long. I have established the Sisters of St Joseph there.
[5519]
In April 1875, Reverend Mother Emilienne Naubonnet, accompanied by a young Arab Sister, arrived in Khartoum via the Red Sea and the Suakin desert.
Mother Emilienne, born in Pau, came to direct the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition in Khartoum with jurisdiction over all the Congregation’s houses and Sisters in Central Africa. This woman religious was one of the first to work in the Orient since the Crusades. She was Superior in Cyprus for nine years and in Syria for twenty years, where she founded the houses of Sidon, Deïr-el-Kamar and Beirut.

[5520]
During the 1860 massacres, in her Institute built on the walls of ancient Sidon, she gathered hundreds of the orphans of the Christians slain by the Druses. After working thirty years in the East, this admirable woman took to the sea and sailed up the Nile, crossed the desert and penetrated Central Africa which today is the theatre of her tireless charity.
[5521]
In “Bene Pubblico” of 3rd October 1878, it says that the priests of the Institute of the Missions in Africa, founded in Verona, as well as the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition, are prepared to bear the privations, the dangers and the scorching climate of their sorrowful apostolate for the salvation of the poor souls.

+ Daniel Comboni


Translated from the French.