Yosefo was horribly mutilated when he showed up at the mission hospital. A diabolical group of rebels in Uganda had cut off his lips, one of his ears and several of his fingers, sending him back to his village with two messages of terror for his people.
One message was written on a piece of paper, the other on the body of this 16-year-old boy from one of our Comboni Missionary parishes.
This kind of terrorism is all too typical of a group that calls itself Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Don’t be fooled by the name. This outfit has nothing to do with the Lord. It steals children as young as nine, using them as child soldiers and sex slaves. It feeds them drugs and threatens them with death, forcing them to commit brutal acts of butchery.
Yosefo was in the hospital for about a week when another boy was brought in. He was one of the LRA’s child soldiers. He had been wounded and had managed to escape from the rebel “army” in which he had been forced to serve.
Yosefo recognized him immediately as one of the boys who had mutilated him. For several days, Yosefo said nothing. Who can tell what kind of turmoil was boiling inside the heart of this young Catholic boy? But our missionaries knew nothing about it until it was all over.
One day, Yosefo simply walked over to the bedside of the other boy and said, “I cannot blame you for what you did to me, because I know very well that you did it because you were compelled. I forgive you. And since you have all your fingers, I hope you will be able to do all the good work which I myself will not be able to do.”
We hear Christ’s message about forgiveness throughout the Gospels. We know this message is necessary to the salvation of our world. In Uganda and 40 other countries around the world, we Comboni Missionaries preach Jesus’ message about forgiving seventy times seven.
In most of those countries, life is extremely hard, and there’s so very much to be forgiven in everyone’s daily life. Our Catholic missionaries have seen so much human wickedness in some of these places — and so much poverty, warfare, disease, hatred, starvation, and cruelty.
It’s amazing how the gospel takes root when the ground is so hard, yet there’s enormous hope in Yosefo’s story. If he can forgive a boy who mutilated his face and hands, we too can follow the example of our Lord who asked His Father to forgive those who tormented and crucified Him.
And if there’s hope for each of us as individuals, there’s also hope for our world — the great hope of the gospel. We missionaries will keep spreading that hope to young people like Yosefo.
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Ordained a Comboni Missionary priest in 1975, Fr. Paul Donohue, mccj, worked for many years in Uganda and Kenya. Holding a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University, he also wrote for the African mission magazine New People. Today he promotes the mission work of the Church as the Comboni Missionaries' communications director for the United States and Canada.
