Lebombo
Diocesan Press Service. August 3, 1972 [72107]
Jeannie Willis
(Designed to highlight one of the areas remembered during the month indicated in the Cycle of Prayer for Anglican Use as it appears in Response.)
"We are not a ' foreign mission' in this land. The terminology -- so unwise -- persists from an ecclesiastical past which has definitely died. It must not impede our clear vision of what we are today: The Anglican Catholic Church of Mozambique." The Rt. Rev. Danile Pina-Cabral was addressing a meeting of the Diocese of Lebombo. What he summarized therein is more than his goal for the diocese; it also summarizes the man.
The Bishop of Lebombo is a Portuguese lawyer in his late forties. Given 24 hours leave from an Army prison in order to be ordained, he later served as a worker priest of the Lusitanian Church in Portugal, while working as a corporation lawyer in Oporto. Twenty years later, he was consecrated Bishop to serve in Lebombo, the first Portuguese Anglican Bishop in this Portuguese Territory. Perhaps this history explains why he relates with equal ease to the Governor-General, the rural African, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Portuguese military commanders. It certainly explains much of the loyal affection with which he is regarded by his staff of 27 priests and a few missionaries, who care for the 45,000 Anglicans in this country.
Lourenco Marques is the political and administrative capitol of Mozambique. Like all cities around the world, it is experiencing a tremendous influx of people from rural areas, and is producing a new inter-racial class of professionals. Some of this is due to its University, the only one in the country, and which also serves students from Swaziland and Malawi.
The capitol, will, hopefully, be the site of the Chamanculo Centre project which will replace a church and two houses that are dangerously deteriorated with a new all- purpose Diocesan Center. Father Clovis Rodrigues, a missionary from the Church in Brasil, now working in Lourenco Marques, will be assigned to the planning which involves Brasil, England's USPG and the Church in the USA. Funds toward the Chamanculo project are also from many sources, including the Church in Canada and the Diocese of Upper South Carolina.