Timor in last week's Catholic Herald, Joao Boavida shows the ways in which the Church has been challenged, in the face of the sufferings of an occupied country, to identify with the dispossessed.
As Boavida rightly points out, if the Church can recognise the insistent challenge of political participation, then it can find its true place as the supporter of the marginal and the suffering, not the lackey of a colonial establishment.
Boavida rightly says that political participation "moulds Christianity upon the realities of the human condition".
The Church should no longer be afraid to stand
against the political background of national suffering but should regard it as vital to its mission. James Rodd
London