Regina Lynch, President of Aid to the Church in Need

Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, Reverend Fathers, Dear Friends,

Thank you for the warm welcome and for the opportunity to speak here today.

The ongoing formation of priests is very important for Aid to the Church in Need and in order for you to understand why this is so, I need to tell you something about the history of our Foundation.

When it was founded in 1947, Europe was in a very bad way following the Second World War. Germany was in ruins and had 14 million internally displaced people, who had come from those territories in Eastern Europe originally occupied by Germany.  The neighbouring countries in the Western part of Europe were marked by deep wounds resulting from the terror inflicted upon them by the Germans. The founder of Aid to the Church in Need, a Dutch Norbertine priest, Fr. Werenfried van Straaten, was deeply touched by this suffering and also by the plight of the Germans. He sought ways to bring about reconciliation between the different peoples. His answer was to ask the Dutch and the Belgians to donate food, clothing, and money that he would distribute among the IDPs in Germany. It was an audacious plan, but it worked, for as he often said, “people are better than we think, and God is better than we think”.

An important part of the plan was to bring not only material aid to the German Catholics but more importantly spiritual assistance and healing.  But in order to do that, first and foremost their priests had to be helped. They were exhausted, some even to the point that they died. You have to imagine how it was. The Catholics were scattered all over a country that had been bombed and where basic structures and infrastructures often no longer existed. Churches, presbyteries and convents had been destroyed. Therefore, we gave the priests motorcycles at first and then later second-hand cars. Then old Dutch army trucks were turned into mobile chapels with space also for holding food and clothing donations and were sent out with priests all over the country.

Aid to the Church in Need was never intended to do more than that but as news started coming about the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe, we could not ignore the call to help those Churches and in particular their priests, to withstand the growing persecution. It was not easy. It was impossible to help in an official capacity. Money and bibles had to be smuggled in through the Iron Curtain. Sometimes, all we could do was to pray for the persecuted, as many bishops and priests paid the ultimate price of death or imprisonment or expulsion to the gulags of the Soviet Union. Later Catholics in countries like China and Vietnam were added to the list of the persecuted.

In the 1960s Pope John XXIII asked us to extend our help to the developing world and so today we support the Church in Africa, Asia and Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. We particularly help the Church in those countries where she is suffering persecution or oppression and sadly, they are now increasing at a faster rate than ever.

So how does Aid to the Church in Need work? We have been a Pontifical Foundation since 2011 with His Eminence Mauro Cardinal Piacenza as our President and with canonical statutes approved by the Dicastery for the Clergy. Our international headquarters are in a small town near to Frankfurt am Main in Germany. This is where the central management of the Foundation has its seats and where our International Ecclesiastical Assistant is based.

We only receive private donations – no government funds - and in 23 countries worldwide local offices reach out to benefactors for prayers and donations for the suffering Church and to inform them about the persecution and discrimination of Christians in the world. Most of these national offices are in Europe but we also have six offices in the Americas – North and South -, one in Australia, in South Korea and in the Philippines. We currently have around 350.000 benefactors and it is really the case of the Widow’s Mite. In Brazil, for example, there is a woman, who lives in the slums of Sao Paulo and who washes clothes for a living and whatever she earns on Saturday, she donates every month to Aid to the Church in Need.

The money that is collected in the national offices is sent to us at the headquarters in Germany for funding the projects. We rely completely on Divine Providence and make promises to fund projects before the money has even been collected! It rarely lets us down and in the last few years, we have had an average amount of EUR 100 million available for grants. This is a really impressive amount of money, but you have to know that each year we receive approximately 7.500 project applications and if it is a good year, we manage to support more than 5.000 projects.

In our Project Department we have divided the world into five regional teams, each one is headed by a Team Leader, who are here with me for this conference. They are supported by other colleagues, who are responsible for particular countries within the teams, and we also have a very good group of administrative staff.

Aid to the Church in Need describes itself as a pastoral charity. This means that through the projects that we fund we are seeking to serve the Church in her mission of evangelisation. Our typical projects are for the formation of seminarians, upkeep aid for religious sisters, construction of churches, presbyteries or convents, formation of catechists, means of transport, religious books and social communications. Our donors also provide us generous offerings of mass intentions, to be celebrated by priests in the poorest countries.  All those instruments that enable the faith to deepen and grow. In countries where Christian are being persecuted, we recognize the need to assist the faithful to enable their communities survive. In these cases, we exceptionally grant emergency relief aid. These mostly include the countries of the Middle East, but also other regions of Africa and Asia.

Our project partners are the local bishops, priests or religious and all projects must be approved by the responsible bishop or religious superior. It is very important for us to listen to the needs, to the priorities and to see how we can help. We are not there to tell our partners what to do but, in some situations, we might know of a similar need in another diocese or country and can suggest that experience as a possible solution. In other words, we share best practices!

I mentioned at the beginning that the ongoing formation of priests is an important issue for our Foundation. It is for this reason that, in a spirit of attentive listening to the needs of the universal Church, our regional coordinators are participating in this meeting with great interest. I believe this experience will be certainly fruitful in the future accompaniment of formation projects worldwide. When we go on visits to the local Churches on all the continents, we meet a lot of priests and we see the challenges that they face: communities of faithful spread out over large areas, huge distances to cover on impossible roads, working in a busy city environment where the faithful expect the priest to be always available, supporting the faithful in war situations or under autocratic governments, facing aggression in growing secularised societies. There are many more challenges than those that I have mentioned. All of them have the potential to wear down the priest, to diminish his spiritual life and to weaken his ability to help others. But many priests have told us how regular ongoing formation has saved them from a burn-out. I met one priest in Chile last year, who took part in one of the initial courses of the Dicastery for the Clergy on ongoing formation. He told me how much it helped him personally and how it equipped him for the work that he does today in this field.

We faithful need our priests – and they need to be in good shape! - for themselves, for us. And also for all those young men, who are potential candidates to the priesthood. Often when we ask a seminarian about how he got his vocation, he will tell us how he was inspired by this parish priest or by a priest teaching in his school.

So that is why Aid to the Church in Need contributed towards this conference and will continue to accompany vocations to the priesthood in all the phases of their life. Thank you for your attention and thank you for being our pastors.

Regina Lynch

Executive President

Aid to the Church in Need

Königstein, 5 February 2024