Love's labor's long road, Sept. 9, 2007

This column was written about Father Michael Barton by a columnist for The Indianapolis Star: Dan Carpenter You know a fellow is accustomed to hardship when he laments that peace is a tougher time than war was. In some ways, at least. After 23 years walking and biking southern Sudan as a priest, teacher, builder, fund-raiser, social services director, protector and occasional prisoner, Father Michael Barton has learned to watch what he wishes for. "I adapted to war," the 59-year-old member of the Roman Catholic Comboni missionary order said on a recent visit to his native Indianapolis. "Peace also has its problems. The local government has money now. We lose our teachers because they go to government jobs. Money's a problem with peace. There's more around and I have less." A smile plays across his sun-cured face as he reflects on the astonishing accomplishments in construction and education he and his colleagues have squeezed out of meager funds over the two decades, most recently in and around Nyamllel, a town that was bush and huts and ruins when he arrived five years ago. "I'm very happy there's peace, of course. But the longer I'm there, the more I should be able to understand, and yet sometimes it's just more confused." Hunger amid fertility, destitution despite oil, patriarchal resistance to schooling females even as the saving power of education manifests itself more each day -- the confusing and confounding are the routine in Barton's world. As a modern missionary, oriented toward egalitarian service rather than cultural supremacy, he finds himself trying to uproot some traditions while nurturing others. "There is the hospitality, for example. The people will share anything they have. And they're somehow very forgiving. That's why I've been able to stay there 23 years not being killed." He was jailed twice during the 21-year war that was halted in 2005 by an agreement between the rebels of the Christian and animist south and the Islamic government in Khartoum. War continues, of course, in the tragic region of Darfur to the north. Meanwhile, the battle to build and baptize continues for Barton, who visits 80 chapels in his sprawling parish, sometimes having to portage his bike two miles at a stretch during the rainy season. A Toyota Land Cruiser was donated three years ago, but the battery came much later and came without acid; for now, the vehicle gets used when a battery can be borrowed. And you thought requisitions were nuts at your workplace. A graduate of Little Flower School on the Eastside and a cousin of the late former Mayor John Barton, Father Mike wanted this work as far back as he can remember. While he speaks passionately of the schools and medical facilities his team has built and the thousands he has baptized, he is terse and matter-of-fact about his own motivation, as if the attractiveness of the opportunity should be obvious. When he looks at 21st-century Africa, he sees the 19th-century Indiana that confronted two French missionaries, Bishop Simon Brute and St. Theodora Guerin. "When I started work, I could not imagine anything coming of that," he says. "Then I met this priest this summer whom I had known as a child. He said there were 12 priests from there, and some students who had gone to medical school and law school. Could Bishop Brute or Mother Guerin have imagined the Archdiocese of Indianapolis?" Contact him through the Comboni Missionaries, 1318 Nagel Road, Cincinnati OH 45255, www.combonimissionaries.org