A gentle looking monk enters the ward. Two novices trail behind.
Emblazoned on the front of their long black robes is a huge white Maltese cross.
A gentle looking monk enters the ward. Two novices trail behind.
Emblazoned on the front of their long black robes is a huge white Maltese cross.
The room is crammed with the sick and injured. Some are crusaders,
wounded in the bloody battles for control of Jerusalem. Many are pilgrims in a
state of near collapse, hungry and exhausted, ill from their arduous journey to
the Holy Land. Others are simply poor and have nowhere else to go.
The monk is Brother Gérard, a member of the Benedictine order. He has
reorganized this monastery guesthouse into a hospital and founded a nursing
brotherhood, which became only fourteen years later the Order of St John, to
care for the “Poor of Christ”, “our Lords, the Sick”.
Brother Gérard walks from bed to bed
giving comfort and care to the ill and injured—washing and feeding the helpless,
dressing their wounds. As he lifts a spoon to the mouth of one of the dying men,
he turns to the two black-robed novices behind him. “It’s a favor and an honor
to care for this suffering man. This man represents Christ. The way we come
close to God is to serve ‘the holy poor.’”
Now, 900 years later, I happen upon him. In South Africa.
In an HIV
care center hidden away in the
mountains of Zululand, in a small rural community ravenged by
poverty and
AIDS.
We fly from Johannesburg to the coastal city of Durban and then drive
through the mountains, past clusters of Zulu homesteads, until we reach Mandeni,
a nondescript South African town. The center we have come to visit is located
next to the Catholic Church {easy to find in this small town}, and minutes later
we arrive.
18.jpg)
But the large two story building would have been hard to miss in any
case. Painted on the outer wall is a large black shield that looks like the one
Zulu warriors take into battle, except that the Zulu shield on the wall has
another shield superimposed in the middle—a bright red western-shaped shield
with a white eight-pointed Maltese cross in the center, the kind of shield the
crusader knights carried into their battles. Above and below the shield are
written the words, Brotherhood
of Blessed Gérard. And under the shield directly over the entrance in huge
bold black letters, the words: BLESSED GÉRARD’S CARE CENTRE.
I enter the
lobby and look up with a start.
There he is, Blessed
Gérard, at the bedside of a
patient whose arms reach out to him in desperation. The tall monk in his long
black habit with the big white Maltese cross on the front picks up a bowl and
spoon and feeds the starving man, while the two black-robed novices behind him
look on.
The last person I expected to encounter in 21st century Africa
is this medieval monk.
As I stand before the life-sized figures on this floor-to-ceiling mural,
I hear the voice of another Gérard—a Benedictine monk who carries on the spirit
and the work of his namesake in this unlikely corner of the earth, Father Gérard
Lagleder.
“Welcome! You are so very
welcome! Come, let me show you around.”
Father is a hefty German man in his fifties with thinning hair, a short
grey beard, and black glasses. I have seen him many times at meetings in
standard priest issue dress, black shirt and clerical collar. But today he dons
a white pilot shirt with bright red epaulettes on the shoulders, distinguishing
devices like the ones worn by pilots, military officers and nurses in some
countries (including South Africa) to indicate qualifications and rank. On each
epaulette is a white Maltese cross. On the breast pocket of the shirt is the
same shield I saw on the entrance to the building, the badge designed as the
insignia of the Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard in South Africa.
“Come up to my office for a cup of tea. Afterwards I’ll show you around
the hospice and children’s home.”
We follow Father down the hall past wooden Zulu carvings representing the
fourteen Stations of the Cross and up the stairs to his office. On the narrow
stairway, framed black and white antique etchings of the monk who started this
“everlasting brotherhood” line the walls—the monk the Vatican has set on the
path to sainthood and now refers to as
Blessed Gérard.
I take a seat at Father Gérard’s massive wood desk. Everywhere I
look—white Maltese crosses on bright red background—on candles, mugs, and
medallions in glass fronted display cabinets. Even a blond Barbie doll in a
black cape with its red shield and cross mounted atop a big white horse. On
Father’s desk a notepad with a Maltese cross printed on the red cover and a
small red flag with the same white symbol.
I just don’t get how this all comes together: the Brotherhood of St John;
the Maltese crosses; the Benedictine monk—Blessed Gérard; and the AIDS care
center here in South Africa. Father
explains.
Blessed Gérard was a Benedictine monk who ministered in a monastery guest
house near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem during the First
Crusade. Many who sought refuge at the monastery were pilgrims and crusader
knights who were either ill or injured. To provide for their care, in 1099
Gérard transformed the guesthouse into a hospital, the Hospital of St John and
founded the Brotherhood of St John, the oldest existing medical religious order
in the Catholic Church, to run the hospital. In addition to nursing the sick,
the dedicated members of this order housed abandoned children, fed the poor and
cared for discharged prisoners.
Throughout the Crusades, as the battles raged over control of
Jerusalem, Brother Gérard built additional hospitals along the routes frequented
by pilgrims. Knights, later known sometimes referred to as the Knights
Hospitaller, defended these charitable institutions from attack, and the Order
of St John developed into a military as well as a medical order.
Over
the years, European wars and shifting political alliances forced the Order of St
John of Jerusalem to relocate its headquarters from one country to another,
including to the island country of Malta, where the Order came to be popularly
known as the Order of Malta.
Eventually the need to defend itself diminished and the Order lost its
military character entirely. Today, while it retains a historic base in Malta,
the headquarters are in Rome and there are many categories of members. There are
priests who serve as chaplains but most members are lay people, some of whom
make “promises,” to serve, rather than take the religious vows of poverty,
chastity and obedience. Some lay members are even designated as knights. And
although its official name remains the “Sovereign Military Order of Malta", the
focus now is exclusively on the charitable works for which it was founded.
Curiously though, the Order’s “sovereign” status continues. To this day, the
Order of Malta maintains diplomatic relations with 104 countries and has
observer status at the United Nations.
We finish our tea and Father tours me through the care center he founded
under the banner of the Order of Malta and introduces me to the staff. Every
single person I meet dons the same uniform. Whether cleaners or nurses, doctors
or cooks, every person in the building dresses exactly like Father—white shirt
with the black shield badge on their breast pocket and white Maltese cross on
red epaulettes on their shoulders.
Near the entrance a young Zulu medical doctor provides life-saving
antiretroviral drug treatment to people living with HIV. For Dr Nzimande, his
clinical work is more than a job; it is a ministry, and he has joined the
Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard as a
dedicated lay member, in the centuries-old
tradition of the Order of Malta. This morning we find him giving a talk to a
room of patients he is preparing to put on treatment, explaining the importance
of taking their medication every day. Since
the doctor is busy we move on to the hospice, the largest
inpatient
hospice facility in South Africa, a place where those beyond treatment spend
their last days. Each ward is identified by the name of a saint of the Order of
Malta on the door. We open the door to the St Flora’s ward. A
s a nurse, I
immediately note how clean the room is, how comfortable the atmosphere is, how
delighted the patients are to see Father. He goes to each bed, leans down close
to give words of comforts, and gently holds their bony hands. This is not the
Father Gérard I see at meetings in the city—intense, driven, making his case for
additional funds; this is Father Gérard the priest.
We leave the hospice and head towards the section of the building that
houses over forty children with no where else to go— children “left over” when
their parent dies in the hospice, those who have been tormented and abused,
orphans with no relative who can give them a home, those who are disabled and in
need of constant care, children unable to be placed in foster homes. Father sees
himself as just that to the little ones, their father. He spends time with them
and closely follows their development. He is now expanding the home so he can
care for more children and renovating to make it “more homey” and to provide
more place for play. Later in the morning when we pass by the kitchen, Father
stops to introduce me to a developmentally challenged young woman helping with
preparations for lunch. She grew up in the children’s home and is now one of the
staff. In her white shirt and red epaulettes, she is protected and secure in the
only home she has ever known, a home she will never have to leave.
The last stop on our walkabout is the Catholic chapel, a large room
dominated by a wall-sized outline of the Maltese cross. Hanging life-sized on
the cross, carved in wood is the Zulu Christ. This is the place Father offers
mass for the staff and ambulatory patients and for the wider community of
Mandeni. It is also the place he presides over the ceremonies where those
associated with the Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard put on their long black capes,
badges, and Brotherhood medals and perform the rituals that characterize the
Order.
We return upstairs, to the section of the center where he Father lives
and works.
“I’m impressed with the center with all you accomplish here. But I’m also
curious. How did a man from Germany connect with the centuries-old Order of
Malta and end up in Africa as the founder of an AIDS Care Center?
Would you be willing to tell me about your personal journey?”
Father
agrees and tells me his story.
My first
vocation was to be a member of the German relief organization of the Order of
Malta.”
In Europe the Order of Malta trains nurses and nursing assistants as well
as emergency medical technicians and offers courses in first aid and home
nursing. The Protestant offshoot of these activities is represented by the
Johanniter Order and the Anglican orientated Order of St John and its Ambulance
Services operate in many Commonwealth Countries.
A friend of his family was a first aid trainer for the Order of Malta.
She talked about it and he convinced her to take him along to some basic
classes. “It was highly interesting to me and caused a thirst to learn more.”
“What sparked your interested in these nursing courses in the first
place?”
“My mother was always a sick person. I never experienced my mother as
happy and healthy—happy but not healthy—so nursing was a part of our day to day
life. We did that for our mother…She died of cancer.”
The young adolescent, who would later take the religious name of Gérard,
could only take the more advanced nursing courses if he became a member of
Malteser Hilfsdienst the relief organization of the Order of Malta in Germany.
Today, as in the distant past, there are many categories of membership, from
professed religious to lay volunteers, even modern day knights. At age fourteen,
however, Gérard was too young to qualify for any class of membership. But he
didn’t give up—shades of the persistence that would later characterize him:
“I begged and begged and they finally gave in.”
Through
high school he continued his classes with the Order of Malta’s relief
organization and eventually qualified as a nursing instructor and placed in
charge of training of 3500 nurse aids.
Gérard wanted to be a doctor. He attended class during the day and worked
night shifts in the hospital to support himself.
During the long nights, when patients feel the most vulnerable and alone,
they would tell him their life stories and many times it would be a “life
confession.”
“I thought that what those people would need was if I could tell them
‘your sins are forgiven’ but I couldn’t. I thought that maybe what people need
is a doctor for their soul. This was one of the many reasons that made me think
of the religious vocation.”
He left the study of medicine to prepare for the priesthood.
Thus began
the second M of Father Gérard’s vocation—Ministry as a priest.
Then around the time of his ordination he began asking himself, ‘What
does God really want of me?’”
He meditated on Scripture where Jesus calls people to become his
disciples and was especially moved by the story of the young rich man who wanted
to follow Jesus until he learned that to follow Jesus totally he would first
have to sell all he had and give the money to the poor.
“For
me, that meant to become part of a religious order. Then I thought, “where do I
go?’ Because I had medical and
nursing experience with the Order of Malta and felt that this [the first M] was
part of my vocation, I decided I should enter into a missionary order…On the day
of my ordination as a priest, I entered the Order of the
Missionary
Benedictines.”
It was when he joined the Benedictine religious order and took his vows
as a monk, {the third M],
that Father took on a new name, the name we know him
by, the name of the Benedictine monk in the mural on the wall, the name of
Gérard.
Initially the Order planned to mission Father Gérard to the Philippines.
But then the Abbot needed someone urgently in South Africa.
These were
the days of apartheid and Father
Gérard was concerned about what he, as a white man, could contribute in that
conflicted country.
“My heart told me to take the challenge,” and he arrived in South Africa
in 1987, a time of great social unrest, when the struggle to dismantle apartheid
had escalated and threatened to tear the country apart.
“I was absolutely surprised when I found that I was not a white man in a
black community, but I was a priest looking after people in need, in spiritual
need and bodily need, and I found that this is really my vocation.”
Father had found his vocation as a
missionary, the 4th M,
For the first three years Father Gérard worked in a parish “in the middle
of nowhere.” He and the parish priest were the only white people in the
district, and there he became fluent in the Zulu language with its complex
grammatical structure. Then he was assigned to be the parish priest in Mandeni.
“Mandeni was known as a white parish surrounded by black townships. I
turned up my nose at this because I was a missionary priest sent to the Zulu
people, and I didn’t think that the white people would need my kind of
missionary input—how wrong I was!”
When Father settled into Mandeni, he found that white people were the
minority, that the great majority were black people living in squatter camps,
now euphemistically called “informal settlements.”
“When I went out into the community I said to myself, ‘Aha, this is why
God sent me here—there is more than enough work.’”
He soon realized the need to expand and better organize the charitable
work of the Church, but he wasn’t sure where to start. Then two things happened,
two events that would bring together the four M’s of his vocation together and
shape the future of his ministry.
The first event happened in 1991 when he visited a dying lady in her
shack. As Father Gérard administered the Sacrament of the anointing of the sick
and gave her communion, he could tell that she in pain. He asked her about it
and she told him that her back hurt so much she could hardly bear it.
“Then I said, ‘Would you mind I have a look what’s wrong with you? I’m
not only a priest, I’m a nurse.’ Then she lifted up her blouse and I saw that
her back was one huge bedsore, so deep that the spinal cord was exposed. I took
her to a doctor who was active in our parish, Dr Paul Thabethe, and he admitted
her to hospital. She died that night.”
“Then Dr Thabethe said to me, ‘Father, so many people in the community
are dying of neglect. Can’t we do something—something like a home?
He opened an open door when he asked
that question.”
The
second event that was to define his mission was a phone call about two destitute
families who were about to be evicted from their hovel. The father had lost his
job and there was no money for the children’s school fees, not even money for
food. Father asked the parish for help. A lady, Clare Kalkwarf, responded and
said she would organize the parishioners to provide relief. In two days the
members of the church had provided food and clothing for the family and had paid
the fees so the children could attend school. They had even found someone to
hire the father.
“Then I knew
that there was someone local who has got the heart, who has the skills, who has
the drive to organize. That for me was an eye opener.”
Father Gérard saw that there was a great need to help the community and that
there was a core of people in the church who were motivated to take on the task.
So he sat down with Dr Thabethe and his wife, a nurse, and Clare Kalkwarf and
her husband, a businessman, and suggested that they found a relief organization
as an arm of the Order of Malta and in the spirit of Blessed Gérard. They agreed
and began the process of drawing up the documents and securing the required
permissions, including the permission of the Benedictine Order for him to embark
on this path.
“It was the Benedictines who sent me here, not the Order of Malta. And
when I came to South Africa, I thought I would never again be involved with the
Order of Malta in all my life.”
On October 28 1992, The Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard was
founded and on
April 20 1993 it was accepted by the Sovereign Council of the Order of Malta as
the
relief organization of the Order of Malta in South Africa and by the Bishop
of the Diocese of Eshowe as a “private association of Christ’s Faithful”.
The four M’s of his vocation—Malta,
Ministry,
Monk,
Missionary—had come
together in ways he could never have imagined. He gives
medical care to the sick
through his association with the Order of Malta; he ministeres
to the spiritual
needs of the community as a priest; he is a monk in the Benedictine religious
order; and he serves
as a Missionary in Africa.
As we
talk together in this care center, surrounded by all the symbols of the oldest
existing medical order in the Catholic Church—the Maltese crosses and red
shields that hark back to the middle ages, Father Gérard reflects on his
personal journey.
Today, in
addition to the AIDS treatment program, the
inpatient hospice, and the
children’s home, the
Blessed Gérard’s Care Center runs other community programs.
The list is long: an HIV/AIDS education program, a
malnutrition clinic, a
poor-sick fund, a
relief fund, a
pre-primary nursery school, a
social club for
the elderly, a first aid service, a
scholarship fund, and a
disaster relief
project.
“Each and every one of our projects is a direct response to an identified
insufficiency of care in our community, an area of need where there is no one
else involved. It is exactly these gaps that we try to bridge.”
Father is gratified that most of the work these days is done by local
members of the Brotherhood, that today he is the only foreign passport holder on
the Board. He likens the role of a missionary to the scaffolding on a
building—when the building goes up, the scaffolding goes down.
When he speaks about the local members, Father never fails to mention
Clare Kalkwarf, the woman who dedicated her life to the work of the Brother from
its earliest days. Murdered in 2006 when robbers broke into her small home, her
life as well as her death testifies to the conflicting forces still at work in
this beautiful land. Clare now lies in a grave on the grounds of the Brotherhood
behind the chapel wall.
Today Father’s main task is to raise funds and to create
public awareness
and interest in the center, and he spends three months every year on fundraising
in Europe. He is a master at communications technology and from his desk in
Mandeni sends his messages out in cyberspace to reach the global community.
In addition to his
blog, information
about the Blessed Gérard Care Center can be found on at least ten different
sites,
Facebook and
Twitter.
“What about the future, Father?
Do you think you’ll spend the future here?
“My idea of retirement is to be the hospice chaplain—that I go from bed
to bed and hold the hand of the patient, go back to basic nursing and basic
pastoral care, feed the patients, talk to them, just be there, a good
grandfather to the children in the home. That would be my dream…”
I look around the room at all those Maltese crosses and when I look back at him, I see the 900 year old Blessed Gérard.
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Gérard
This page was last updated on Friday, 01 March 2013 16:50:01