Bakole Wa Ilunga

Paths of LIberation Bakole Wa Ilunga

I was born in 1920 in a little country village in the former Belgian Congo. I was eight years old at the time the day the first white man visited our isolated village. He was a Catholic missionary. It was through him and many other priests, catechists, and teachers that I came to know deeply Jesus Christ, who has shown me the path of true liberation. My people live in a situation of extreme underdevelopment, wretchedness, and exploitation. My experience as a Christian and a pastor has taught me that our pastoral and evangelizing work should offer persons a total development, rooted in the Good News of Jesus Christ. One is not possible without the other. This is what I have tried to explain in Paths of Liberation. Of course, too, the path Jesus assigns us for the liberation of society from the evils that afflict it is not the shortest of paths. It is not enough to make surface changes, and the path leads through the heart of the human person, which Jesus wishes to change. And the human heart is not to be changed in a day. But this longer path is also the most effective and the most realistic, for only thus do we attack the evil in its roots. Have we not found that at the core of all problems is always sin? It is precisely from this sin in the human heart that Jesus liberates us by guiding us on the path of continual conversion and uncalculating love.