Writings

[5975]

For your information, I advise you that I have long since satisfied all the obligations and debts of my Institutes in Verona contracted under Rev. Fr Paolo Rossi, who temporarily held the office of Director of my Verona Institutes for 20 months; and I declare that I present the administration of my above-mentioned establishments to you free from any debts or financial burdens which the above-mentioned Fr Paolo may have incurred in my name or with my authorisation.

+ Daniel Comboni
Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa

[5976]

You will have received my telegram from Turin in which I told you that as of Friday, 7th May, I sent the sum of 5,400 Francs in a bill of exchange on a Turin bank. I received all your letters and it seems to me that God’s infinite goodness is helping you to fulfil your duties; and I am very pleased about it. I hope that (given what you wrote to me about Mr Holz’s kindness) you will now be able to meet all the expenses. I am left without a cent. But St Joseph will remedy everything. Pray and have prayers said for me, both that he will send me what I need, and so that we shall all become saints and save Africa.

[5977]

With regard to the Arab teacher, I cannot satisfy his request to increase his salary, because I am not in a position to do so and have too many expenses on my plate: the Lord will provide in some other way.
I gladly bless Moron, who is not very well. Encourage him, and make him take the necessary precautions.
As regards bills for the house or garden, I leave it to your discretion and wisdom to spend the necessary on them. It seems to me that those who sold the pipes etc. should have guaranteed their efficacy as is done by everyone. However, I shall write to Fr Bortolo about this.

[5978]

Please do whatever you consider appropriate for the decorum of the Lord’s house; but remember we are poor and have many other expenses in Verona and in the Vicariate.
For the time being, I am not sending the Sisters; for this Summer I have settled them at Sestri Levante, in the Genoese Riviera: instead, I shall send Fr Rosignoli (I hope next Saturday, from Naples) and some other lay brothers with two catechists from Verona.

[5979]

Regarding the Abbot of the Maronites, tell him:
“What interest would the Very Reverend Abbot of the Maronites charge for 350 Pounds Sterling from 1st May to the end of December? Or for six months?
Tell him too that I will give Ibrahim Khalifa 4 per cent a year of all his money deposited in my hands in Khartoum, starting from 1st September 1879, the expiry date of the promissory notes of almost 18,000 francs, until the day when the 450 were paid off by Fr Bortolo, which I believe was in April last year, or the end of March.

[5980]

Then Fr Abbot wrote to me that through his kindness he agrees to wait a little longer for the payment of the rest. If he should consent to leave us the 358 Guineas outstanding for a few months, perhaps six, etc., I would like to know first of all what yearly interest would he charge? By July (should the letter of exchange from Cologne for 10,000 francs not arrive), I will be able to pay any sum. Moreover Fr Abbot is a gentleman and very honest and a conscientious man. I am a gentleman, and I want to pay my debt. Ibrahim Khalifa is an excellent gentleman and my friend, I think none of us will have cause to complain of anything. Fr Abbot knows what loans cost in Cairo among good Christians (not among the Jews, or bad Christians), and thus you have a margin for negotiation. I will send Fr Abbot the chalice via Rosignoli.

[5981]

I recommend you to pay off the Frères as soon as possible, fully clearing my debt with them.
If Zucchinetti has not yet come, I think that he might be satisfied with a little money to pay off his debt, and tell him that I will pay him the rest here in Italy or in Rome. Zucchinetti has a good, a very good heart; if I were in Cairo he would certainly be sorry for my sorrows.

[5982]

The buckles you gave Fr Gennaro for the Vicariate towards the expenses of the Church of the Sacred Heart were handed to me by him only the day before yesterday in Turin, and not before; and I shall send them to Rome via the catechists.
I have no more time to write. Tell Dichtl that he shouldn’t worry about what he wrote to me and what Walcher wrote to him: it’s nothing; but he shouldn’t mention it to anyone.
I bless the sisters, and everyone.
Affectionately,

+ Bishop Daniel

[5983]

Although I am very busy, I have chosen the favourable occasion of the return of Genièsse to Belgium to write you a couple of lines to thank you infinitely for your kindness to me, and I shall wait until my next journey to England and Belgium to consult your great apostle’s heart, face to face, about the concerns of Central Africa and the Apostolic School you have founded in Turnhout.

[5984]

Mr Genièsse, who had always assured me he was very satisfied with my Institute and to dedicate himself to Central Africa, six days ago came to tell me that he did not feel like becoming a Missionary and had come to Verona intending to enter a religious order. You know that my small Congregation is modelled on the Seminary for Foreign Missions in Paris, and those who belong to it must have all the virtues of religious and be disposed at every moment to die for the salvation of the Africans, etc.
Nevertheless Genièsse is an excellent, pious and capable candidate, who loves orderliness and wishes to sanctify himself; I very much regret losing him and should he want to enter my Mission later (which I think unlikely), I would be willing to take him back.

[5985]

When I founded my Verona Institute (to which the Holy See has entrusted the whole of Central Africa) I myself covered the office of Rector and subsequently placed other very capable Superiors there until December 1877, when I temporarily left Fr Paolo Rossi in charge until the return of the former Rector, Fr Antonio Squaranti. But since the latter died, for two years the Institute has been without wise direction.
It was under Fr Paolo Rossi that Grieff, still immature, was admitted to the priesthood and sent to Egypt. When I returned to Cairo from Central Africa, I found Grieff there, and later sent him back to Verona, not deeming him suitable for the Mission in Central Africa. He still has a long way to go to be well trained for a life of sacrifice and martyrdom and I hope that under the wise direction of my current Rector, Rev. Fr Giuseppe Sembianti of the Institute of Missionaries who are “in obsequium Episcoporum”, that it will be possible to train him. Grieff has some admirable qualities and talent; he needed another three years to be properly formed.

[5986]

Before accepting two students from this admirable Congregation in obsequium Episcoporum, founded in Verona in 1816 (this Congregation is the eldest daughter of the Jesuits, has the same spirit as the Society of Jesus and was founded to help the Bishops), I turned to the Most Rev. General Becks, the head and star of the Jesuits, asking for three Fathers to direct my Institute; but for the moment he has been unable to give them to me. Perhaps later.

[5987]

Be good enough, my dear Father, to get in touch with my Rector, Rev. Fr Giuseppe Sembianti, Rector of the African Missions of Verona, when you have some good candidates to send me. This Rector is more Jesuit than the Jesuit Fathers themselves. But I beg you, dear Father, to grant me the best students you have, the most virtuous, the purest, the holiest, because Central Africa is the most difficult and trying Mission in the whole world.
I have been to the East Indies, to Syria, etc., but these Missions are nothing in comparison with Central Africa: Central Africa needs martyrs, so my dear Father, please send my Institute good students who have not been in other Congregations.

[5988]

Experience has taught me that those who leave their Order or Congregation to go to another will never do any good. After all Grieff’s prayers, I accepted a certain Englishman, John Hanifan, and sent money to him in London to come to Verona. Well: as long as he was under the guidance of Grieff (who satisfied him in everything and turned a blind eye to his faults), he got along all right, but when Fr Sembianti took over the direction of the Institute, he declared that he could not submit to his discipline and asked to return to London. So I who was in Turin agreed to his request (because I had realised much earlier on that he did not have God’s spirit) and I had him come to Turin where he told me he had been a Jesuit for three years, three years in America, then at Mill Hill and then with you. In the five days that he was in Turin at the Apostolic School, the Superior told me that Hanifan was not a good character, which I myself had noticed, so I paid 135 francs to send him back to London.

[5989]

My dear Father, prepare some good students for me who have the spirit of Jesus Christ. I will come and see you and we shall agree on everything for the best for our works. The heart of Jesus must help you in order to help me and to come to the rescue of Central Africa.
Until we meet again at Turnhout. Pray to the Heart of Jesus and of Mary for
Your devoted friend

+ Daniel Comboni,
Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa


Translation from French.

[5990]

Thanks expressed to the Catholics of Turin, a city of faith, charity, Catholic Action and the apostolate of Central Africa
1. General information about Africa…
" " about Central Africa
2. Efforts made by the Society until today… by the Church until 1846
3. Establishment of the Vicariate in 1846 and an outline of its peoples
i. Islam and its propaganda
M’tesa and Stanley
ii. Fetishism, and its branches
Bari and Mighela
Tiet
iii. Slavery and the slave trade
hunting of Africans
Abd-el-Samak Daniel Sorur

[5991]

4. The great problems of the Apostolate
i. Material
a) Climate
b) Difficulty of communications and journeys (2 months’ journey to visit the nearest Bishop)
c) Language
d) Lack of crafts and skills
e) Deprivations (food); the Famine and the Plague 1878 [in the margin] Sr Anna at Malbes
ii. Formal
a) Nature and character, and superstitions
b) Islam
c) maintaining the priesthood in their country

[5992]

5. Means of evangelising them
i) Not the explorers
ii) Not the English Protestant Societies in Nyanza,
Protestants in Khartoum and Gadaref
[in the margin] Malzak Dr Nachtigal
iii) Results from Ponset to Stanley
American writer
Baker Pasha…
Ourselves in Gondokoro
Prout in Nuba
Ourselves in Nuba
(Akol Gorgieb)
Instead

[5993]

6. The only method and the Catholic apostolate, that is, faith and civilisation
i. Faith, God, heaven, hell, morality ii. Civilisation, that is, love, crafts and skills, agriculture, clothes, Sisters, trade (Milanese), agricultural colonies (Malbes) [in the margin] Michele Lado
7. The Catholic Apostolate is the way
i. Because it seeks the glory of God and the good of souls and not interests or ambitions
ii. Because it is stable and lasting, and not transient, shooting star iii. Because the Catholic Apostolate, and not Protestantism which preached polygamy, is the true Christianity

[5994]

8. Progress achieved Material
a) Buildings
b) Clothing (Sisters)
c) Agriculture
d) Business (Milanese company) Spiritual
a) Souls saved and helped
b) Slave trade reduced in Nuba and Obeid
c) Moralisation
d) The Malbes agricultural colony
e) Good example, unlike Patrik, and others
9. = The sublime Work is worthy of the Catholics of Turin
i. For prayer
ii. For alms


N.B. N. 892 in the 10–volume edition is an extensive summary, not written by Comboni, of the Lecture, which was given at S. Carlo in Turin.

[5995]

How I implore your forgiveness for not having written to you, as I had resolved; the illnesses and suffering that afflicted me as a result of the famine and the epidemics that devastated my Mission obliged me, as did business matters, to come to Europe, but I am about to return to Central Africa very shortly. I am infinitely grateful to you for the wonderful gift you sent me which will be a great help. I am also very grateful for the sums that you have given us to redeem slaves and for the maintenance of poor slave children; we have a large number of them as well as poor little African girls who need to be educated and fed. In this way we can gain many more souls for the good Lord.

[5996]

Your Society has several times sent me bottles of Bordeaux wine; this dispatch is infinitely precious, since it is impossible to obtain wine in the heart of Africa. We are therefore obliged to do without it, in the case of illness or undermined health, but this would be nothing; our great and terrible privation, and it still happens all too often, is to be reduced to being unable to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of Mass except on Sundays, because of the lack of wine! Ah, ladies, if you have been able to continue this activity of sending wine, please do us the greatest kindness of letting us have a few cases; you will earn the right to a large part of our prayers and holy Sacrifices.
I commend myself warmly to your holy prayers, ladies, as I have the honour to declare myself in the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
Your most devoted servant,

+ Daniel Comboni
Vicar Apostolic of Central Africa


Translated from French.

[5997]

I am on the cross, but Our Lord was there too. I have just received two of your letters in one of which you tell me about the dispatch from the Apostolic Work; please have it sent to me in Verona at my address; and I am writing to the Countess d’Erceville, President of the Apostolic Work, as you wisely advised me. Seven days ago I was on the point of coming directly to Paris from Piacenza, when a letter from my Cardinal at Propaganda summoned me to Rome for a week.

[5998]

Have the kindness, dear Madame, to write to me here in Sestri Levante (on the outskirts of Genoa) when I return here from Rome in eight days, or write to me in Rome, Piazza Margana, 18, the house of that Superior who is an angel and the image of Mother Emilia, her great friend. I am sorry that you have been unwell and somewhat suffering, but I hope that the journey will do you good. Tell me about the journey you are undertaking, where you are going, the towns, the route, etc., so that I can work out where to join you. Oh, do give all my affection to my dear Auguste and Madame Pauline; every day I pray for them and for you, dear lady, whose firm faith has always been the object of my admiration. It is a sublime grace which the good Lord has given you and the safest talisman of your sanctification.
A thousand compliments to Mademoiselle Anne and to all your nephews and nieces etc.
Pray for your most devoted

+ Daniel Comboni
Bishop and Vicar Apostolic


Translated from French.

[5999]

From the investigations which I diligently and conscientiously made regarding the petitioner two weeks after his ordination and departure from Verona, it is clear that he is a false young man, deceitful, and hic et nunc unworthy of promotion; since I have evidence that Agostino Lotterman, after being expelled from a Belgian College, entered the Verona Institute, pretending that he wanted to devote himself to our missions of Africa, with a mind to obtain sacred ordination by trickery, and then, to return to his homeland, abusing the oath he had made, etc. My humble opinion is that violators of the kind concessions of the Church should not be protected, so as not to encourage others to do the same.

[6000]

It would therefore be appropriate for Your Eminence to give the petitioner a refusal and to send him back to me, making him understand that he is obliged to refund my Institute of Verona the expenses he incurred in more than three years of residence (1500 lire); I will then release him from the obligation of serving the Mission, grant him the Exeat requested and entrust him to the conscience and judgement of his Bishop, the Bishop of Gand, for his future, etc.

+ Daniel Comboni
Bishop and Vicar Apostolic