Seventy-five-year-old Sister Giuseppina Berti, who has worked for 26 years in the leprosarium of Tabriz and now lives in Isfahan in the house of the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, will have to leave Iran in the coming days because her visa has not been renewed and she has received a travel order. Her departure will make it difficult for her fellow nun, Sister Fabiola Weiss, who has dedicated 38 years to the poor and the sick in the leprosy hospital, and whose residence permit has been renewed for another year.
She and her fellow sister Fabiola, a 77-year years old Austrian, they have dedicated their lives to the country’s sick without distinction of religious or ethnic affiliation, to the education and training of young people, children, refugees and war orphans but in recent years, the two sisters did not carry out any outside activities, to avoid being accused of proselytizing. Their house is currently the only reality of the Latin Catholic Church in Isfahan and their chapel, built in 1939, serves as the parish of the «Powerful Virgin», which is occasionally made available to visitors for the celebration of Mass.
In Iran the Catholic Church is integrated by two Assyrian-Chaldean archdioceses (Tehran-Ahwaz and Urmia-Salmas) which have one bishop and four priests (in 2019, the patriarchal administrator of Tehran of the Chaldeans, was also denied a visa renewal and could no longer return to the country), an Armenian diocese in which there is only a bishop and the Latin archdiocese which currently has no priest and is awaiting the arrival of its newly appointed pastor, Archbishop Dominique Mathieu. As for the religious presence, the Daughters of Charity operate in the country, with three sisters in Tehran and two sisters in Isfahan. There are also two consecrated laywomen. The faithful number about 3,000. With the departure of the nuns, the presence of the Latin Catholic Church in Isfahan would be permanently lost.
This news puts us in contacts with a quite unknown reality of several countries where Christianism is a very little presence and religious intolerance continues limiting and sometimes suffocating the life and mission of the Church. On the other side we know that the humble and often unseen presence of the Christians, is always a seed of God’s kingdom that sprouts up its fruit of compassion and mercy for the poorest and weakest ones and their silenced voice continues announcing to the people, messages of peace and hope.
By VATICAN NEWS