Treatment of refugees shocks new Jesuit leader

Sydney
19 January

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Social justice and Catholic thinking

Treatment of refugees shocks new Jesuit leader

Year of Pope John Paul II

Treatment of refugees shocks new Jesuit leader

Fr Mark Raper SJ today

By Chris Lindsay

Australia's treatment of asylum seekers presents "an example which only hardens the hearts of countries around the world", says Fr Mark Raper, former international director of the Jesuit Refugee Service.

"They say: 'Well, if Australia can do it, so will we.'

"So I am ashamed coming home to Australia. After all I have seen overseas I am shocked and ashamed to see this."

After 20 years of working with refugees overseas, Fr Mark has returned home as the new provincial of the Jesuits in Australia.

He was the first head of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Asia, then - as head of the worldwide Jesuit Refugee Service - worked with refugees in Africa and the Balkans, "where they are a real problem".

That's why, he says, he finds it hard to believe the way Australia is treating asylum seekers.

"I can't for the life of me understand why such fuss is being made when Australia isn't confronted with a problem," he says.

"The numbers are so pitiful compared with what is being faced by any other country.

"And what is being proposed as a solution is so punitive and harsh and totally out of proportion with the situation.

"Australia has a capacity to offer something to the world, a way of meeting the refugee crisis that could be helpful."

A proper multicultural approach "has been clearly established as the way we have to go, where it is obvious to all our neighbours that all people are respected well", he says.

Mark Raper was born in Sydney, one of five children - four boys and a girl - of a real estate agent and his wife.

He attended St Aloysius College at Milsons Point and then St Ignatius' College, Riverview, where he was active in sport, rowing in the First Eight in the Head of the River and playing in the First XV in GPS rugby union.

So why did he decide to become a priest?

"I guess my contact all through my youth was with the Jesuits," he says. "The Jesuits are an international order and for me that opened up a tremendous range of possibilities.

"I remember looking at that as being attractive; there was a range of ways of really serving people."

Was it a tough decision to become a priest?

"The decision made by an 18-year-old young man is different from the decision made by a 25 or 36-year-old young man who decides to stay with it once you realise the cost," he says.

"Those decisions along the track are the ones that are more important because they are a confirmation of the first decision, but they are possibly even harder.

"At age 18, you are young and have idealism which carries you along. But when you see your friends getting married and having children you realise much more clearly what you require in your life, to be crafting an outcome, to be fulfilled as a person.

"So it is absolutely important for us as priests or as celibate men to have the possibility of living fruitfully and creatively.

"But it was no more of a struggle than anybody else has to make their lives creative and fruitful - I wouldn't like to claim it as anything special."

The direction his career would take in the Jesuits was set early.

He studied history and politics of south-east Asian society at Monash University, Melbourne, as part of his Jesuit studies.

"It was a time of much greater openness to Asia for our province and for Australia in general," he recalls.

"In the 70s I was asked to be a part of that, since it had been a field of my study, and I helped develop a small Jesuit centre - Asian Bureau Australia - with some other Jesuits and later a range of people.

"It was involved in developing Australia's relations with Asia.

"The Vietnamese war was still on and there was the distraction of ideological debate between the left and the right going on.

"Then the Indochinese boat people started to arrive and we were very much involved in developing programs of welcome and of public education of Australians about the cultures from which they'd come."

Following this, Fr Mark was appointed to head the Jesuit Refugee Service in Asia; he set up its headquarters in Bangkok.

"We had teams in all the refugee camps in South East Asia," he says. "Then this expanded to include Sri Lankans in India, Afghans in Pakistan and Burmese coming into Thailand.

"We had to provide a variety of services, such as education and health care programs.

"It grew quickly into quite a large service, funded largely by Catholic agencies and support from donors - a lot of Australian people contributed."

In 1990 he was asked to go to Rome to become international director of the Jesuit Refugee Service.

"The organisation grew immediately because of the sheer size of the refugee problem," he says.

"In that decade, after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic and territorial disputes became more the language in which conflicts were worked out.

"I worked a lot in Africa in that period, building up the service.

"We also had the problems in the Balkans, and set up a program in Sarajevo in Bosnia, which then extended over the years into Croatia and Serbia."

Fr Mark thinks it is sad that the Balkans conflict involved re-fighting wars 1400 years old, but says it is wrong to think that all the people of that area are full of hatred for each other.

"I met many, many people there who had no hate in their hearts," he says. "They had been overtaken by the conflict and had a deep desire to be with their Orthodox or Muslim friends.

"Their lives had just been torn apart.

"I think it is just a small number of people who exploit ethnicity, but there is enough of them to cause trouble in the heat of the moment."

Fr Mark finished his work with the Jesuit Refugee Service at the end of 2000, then spent six months as a visiting fellow at Georgetown University in Washington.

"Then, out of the blue, I was asked to do the job of Jesuit Provincial in Australia," he says.

"The process is not exactly democratic: there is wide consultation and then, on the basis of recommendations, the superior general in Rome makes a decision."

So has he any plans to take the Jesuits in a new direction in Australia?

"Not so much my own plans, the priorities are already put in place,' he says.

"But, because the number of religious has declined in the 20th Century, lay people are now running many areas of the Church and it is up to the Jesuits to support that.

"A lot of Church projects have lay leadership. In Australia there must be two or three thousand organisations with lay people in charge, social welfare organisations - even The Catholic Weekly.

"These people are there because of their competence, but they have not necessarily had a solid religious formation. We can help them develop their charism.

"We can integrate their professional competence with what is the Church, what is the meaning of faith today."