Interviews with a Few Special Priests ( #4 )

To Help People Bond, He Came from Africa

To America with Love and a Wide Smile

Says Fr. Gilbert Mashurano, "I  like to be with people . That's my thing."

By Robert R. Schwarz

Fr. Gilbert and the St. James operations manager

            Fr. Gilbert hails from the Haya tribe in Tanzania, Africa,  near Lake  Victoria. He was born and raised in a small village (population 1,000) , where the adult daily income is less than a dollar .  Before the missionaries came, the people  "would sacrifice goats under a tree, believing this would connect the un-sacred earth to what was sacred above the tree,"  Fr. Gilbert told me during our interview.  It's also where   less than 20 years ago ,  neighbors lived in grass-roofed homes without  plumbing or electricity.  The  Haya tribe then  was  organized in its  traditional  series of 130   clans, each having its own totem , a symbol of  high regard for the tribe's  ancestors.

          Stepping off his plane at Chicago in  2008 , Fr. Gilbert saw America for the first time. Four years later he was ordained as a priest by Cardinal George and soon was standing on an  altar and being greeted by hundreds of parishioners at St. James Catholic Church in the  suburb  of Arlington Heights, Illinois.  For the next five years, Fr. Gilbert , when not laboring to improve his English, was devoting his 16-hour day to instructing the St. James school children  in their Christian faith and preparing  for some of the churches 12  weekly masses.  Said a parent whose daughter graduated from  the school,  One parent later told  Fr. Gilbert. " We were so excited to be at your first mass at St. James. So many of your family and friends from Africa held you up in prayer. The more you know us, the more you will love your new St. James family."             On his first birthday here, the school grounds resounded all day with  "Happy birthday, Father Gilbert" , though no student or any staff member took up the challenge of correctly pronouncing his last name. ( That would  come in time . ) 

" I genuinely like people"

          What this  33-year-old priest wanted most, he said ,  was to be known as a priest who likes people "in a genuine way" and finds  joy in helping them form good relationships with other people. ( As predicted by that one  member, Fr. Gilbert  did learn to love his St. James family. On June 25, 2017 , prior to his new assignment as associate pastor of the nearby St. Raymond church in Mt. Prospect, he stated this in the St. James bulletin: " These five years of my  first assignment of the priesthood  have been the most joyful and happiest  years  of my life. " )

           Fr. Gilbert and I spent a rare hour of his spare time talking in the parish library. He was dressed in blue jeans, a green tee-shirt, and a beige windbreaker. He stands an inch or two under six feet and weighs perhaps 150 pound ; his smile is characteristic and his speech , as I can  recall from three trips to Africa,  has that pleasant sing-song quality of Swahili  one hears in several countries there. ( Dozens of native dialects are  spoken in Tanzania, the most linguistically diverse country in East Africa .) Slightly raising his hands again to emphasize a point, the priest expressed sadness over people in developing countries who, because of  lack of education, are easily misled about important social issues. He said that  people who boast about their talents also saddens him, especially when they don't give God the credit for their talents. " This is God's gift to them and they should be grateful that they can use their talents to help others."

We got on the subject of how villages in sub-Sahara Africa are known for strong bonding among  friends and neighbors.   "We can see God through our relationships with others," Fr. Gilbert explained. "I see people in terms of relationships. "  He mentioned  his respect for the acclaimed book, I and Thou , by Jewish author Martin Buber.

With the St. James director of student spiritual formation

When asked to  comment on Fr. Gilbert, St. James member Sharon Winters said, " I knew from the first day  I met him  that he was a caring person . That big smile on  his face  told me  there was something different about this priest. He really wanted to visit me in the hospital after my surgery. " 

People skills was also part of Fr. Gilbert's formal and  classical education. He studied philosophy—he still likes to read Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas—at the Salvatorian Institute in Tanzania. There, he said, he was also trained intensively in "neuro linguistic programming (NLP) as   applied to modeling Jesus the leader." The institute required this course to help future priests with counseling and the sacrament of reconciliation.

One might say Fr. Gilbert's priestly formation began with  his grandmother, whom he recalls taught him how to pray the Rosary and  the virtues of honest labor in the home and on the  farm ."My spiritual growth …is due to the good training I received from my grandmother," he wrote in a brief biography. He went to live with her at age two, after his physician father was killed in an auto accident and his mother began studying to be a teacher. At age 13, Fr. Gilbert moved in with his uncle whom, he says became his role model.          

Growing up, Fr. Gilbert played soccer, volleyball and basket ball.  His  village suffered saw malaria, typhoid, and some AIDS, but no tribal conflicts . What sparked    him towards the priesthood occurred when he was elected dean of his high school students and   bemoaned the fact that Catholic students had not seen a priest on the grounds in six months. What especially irked the young Gilbert was that, while Muslim and Protestant students had their own spiritual director, his fellow Catholics had no one to say mass for them. He wrote the diocese bishop, requesting that a priest be sent to the school. While waiting for the full year it took before a priest was finally assigned to the school, he helped lead a Catholic student prayer group.

          Looking back on those days as student dean, Fr. Gilbert—his dark brown eyes   now focused intently as he raised  his hands a few inches—said, "I couldn't stand to see my fellow Catholic students suffering because they didn't have someone to take care of them." Later he would write in his short biography that appeared in the St. James bulletin, "In my discernment toward priesthood, I realized that a priest's vocation is a special manifestation of God's love and a personal invitation to life similar to the one our Lord lived, a call to carry our cross to witness and follow him."

"I knew then  that I have to go to people who are most in need."

At that time he was aware of the increasing   number of Christian missionaries bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ into surrounding village in a country with an estimated population of more than  55 million people .  After graduation n 2001, Fr. Gilbert joined the "I knew then  that I have to go to people who are most in need." Congregation of the Precious Blood and soon was enrolled in a three- year program at the Salvatorian Institute in Tanzania.              

     The St. Joseph College Seminary in Chicago was now  on his horizon, followed by   seminary training at Mundelein in Libertyville, Illinois..

               

     When asked about his goals as a  newly ordained priest , Fr. Gilbert grew  serious. "I have spiritual goals," he said. " I told people I needed to grow with them, spiritually, intellectually, and humanly…People will be my teacher—in language and in cultural things." He admitted having two challenges: being accepted by the congregation and learning English. Understanding his homilies was at times  difficult  for several in  the pews; so, he worked hard  at being more fluent.
          Our priest from Africa, of course, had  moments at St James when he needed a light-hearted hour or two break from all the church rubrics and its events . For a  change of pace, he would turn on the TV  in his room a few hundred yards away and watch the action-packed Jack Bauer "24"series. But even then, as he watched the heroic Bauer fight  wickedness and prevent terrorist attacks on America, Fr. Gilbert was ,  we can say, providentially reminded that he  , like Bauer , has been called to his job even if  at  great personal expense.

The End

Starting Sept. 29 : It's all 

about an 86-year-old priest

who once was a successful

dentist with a family  and 

now  says mass and 

plays golf .

All comments are welcome.

rrschwarz7@wowway.com

© 2019 Robert R. Schwarz