Two evenings about Syria.

Syria in its ninth year of war: a country that longs for peace, normality, everyday life, a country whose women bear the main burden for their families. Many men are lost, dead, in prison, in war as soldiers, looking for work abroad. The hopes in the war-weary country are high, the reports by Sr. Fabienne Bucher and Nawras Sammour SJ revealing: At the end of May, the two invite to a discussion evening in Zurich and Wil/ St. Gallen.

Nawras Sammour SJ is director of the Jesuit Refugee Service Syria and was already there with his team before the Syrian war. The Jesuit priest, born in 1968 in Aleppo and closely rooted in the country, initiated social projects across all religious and cultural boundaries. So when the war broke out in 2011, he was able to help the weakest from a standing start. His team provided survival assistance, built soup kitchens, and provided medical and psychosocial support. In 2018 the Jesuit Refugee Service set up three neighbourhood centres in Damascus, Aleppo and Al Kafroun - three centres that point to the future and maintain hope for peace in a war-weary country. At present, 900 children and 600 women are being cared for with school and social programmes. Nawras Sammour SJ is now also director of the Mena region and as such responsible for educational, social and spiritual projects of the Jesuits in countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

Sister Fabienne Bucher is a diocesan hermit in the tenant house of the Appenzell monastery of Wonnenstein. She is Swiss and has followed the call of her heart throughout her entire life, always feeling God's guidance: Schoenstatter Sister of Mary, pastoral assistant, pastor at the Cantonal Hospital of St. Gallen and now hermit. With energetic help, she is in contact with the people in and around the Jesuit-influenced Syrian monastery of Mar Musa, whose director Paolo dall'Oglio SJ became a victim of the war (see below). His life project fascinates them, and his fate occupies them very much. In the course of her research she came into contact in 2014 with Sister Friederike from the monastery Mar Musa in the Jesuit Lassalle House in Central Switzerland. Back in Syria, she soon had to flee and, together with a brother in a monastery in the Syrian Nineveh plain, set up a centre for 200 people displaced by the IS. The two women are united in prayer, occasionally they were able to visit each other and exchange advice and relief supplies. 

Mar Musa, a monastic centre in the mountainous desert inside Syria, is known as the "Taizé of the East" and has roots as far back as the 6th century. The formative figure of our days is the Italian Jesuit Paolo dall'Oglio SJ. He revived the monastery and presided over the centre, which was largely self-sufficient and attracted spiritually interested people - men, women, Christians, people of other faiths, agnostics. Father dall'Oglio was kidnapped by the IS in 2013 and has been missing ever since.

Conversation evening with Sister Fabienne Bucher and Father Nawras Sammour SJ

Tuesday, 21.5.2019: Centrum 66, Hirschengraben 66 Zürich, 18.30

Wednesday, 22.5.2019: catholic parish centre Wil, 19:00

Registration required: Tel. 044 266 21 30 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.