Nuncio With New York Ties Visiting South Sudan This Week

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Archbishop Charles Balvo has no plans to make dramatic statements or offer detailed suggestions when he attends a bishops’ conference meeting this week in Juba, the capital city of the violence-torn African nation of South Sudan.

The meeting, scheduled for Jan. 21-23, will be the archbishop’s first opportunity to meet the heads of the dioceses of South Sudan and Sudan since his appointment in December. He expects any remarks he makes, other than a brief introduction of himself, to be general in nature.

“I’m at their service, and what I can do, I will,” Archbishop Balvo said in a half-hour interview with CNY via Skype last week. Archbishop Balvo is native New Yorker who was ordained a priest of the archdiocese.

The Vatican’s new apostolic nuncio to South Sudan, the world’s newest country, is no stranger to the East Africa region. He has served next door as the pope’s representative to Kenya since last April, a post he will continue to hold.

Archbishop Balvo said he would bring words of encouragement from Pope Francis, whom he met at the Vatican last year—the archbishop believes he was the first nuncio to personally meet with the newly elected pope—after he completed his tenure as nuncio to New Zealand and some 20 islands in the Pacific.

“A lot of things he’s said in the meantime are helpful for our work and for bishops in general,” the archbishop said.

In eastern Africa, as everywhere else across the globe, the new pontiff is “generating a great deal of enthusiasm,” Archbishop Balvo said.

Archbishop Balvo, 62, a native of Brooklyn who grew up in Suffern and studied for the priesthood at the North American College in Rome, was ordained for the archdiocese in 1976. He served at two parishes, Sacred Heart in Newburgh and St. John the Evangelist in Mahopac, before he was sent to study canon law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in anticipation of service with the archdiocesan marriage tribunal.

As he was finishing his studies in the spring of 1984, he was contacted by Auxiliary Bishop Joseph O’Keefe, then serving as vicar general and archdiocesan administrator, who had been contacted by the Vatican with the request that then-Father Balvo come to Rome to train for service with the Vatican diplomatic corps. (Archbishop Balvo was ordained a bishop by Cardinal Egan in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2005.)

Through the years, he has served in such far-flung places as Ghana, Togo and Benin in Africa, Ecuador and Chile in South America, Jordan, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

“I’ve seen the Church at different stages of its history in different places—different liturgical styles, different languages, different cultural elements to how the faith is lived,” he said. “It’s certainly given me a perspective that a lot of people don’t have the opportunity to have.”

The archbishop, the oldest of four children, returns to the United States each summer to visit with his father and his three younger sisters, one of whom, Cathy, is married to Joe Zwilling, director of communications for the archdiocese.

In Kenya, Catholics make up one-third of the population and close to half the nation’s Christians. During his first months as nuncio, he has visited a number of dioceses, conducting ordinations of priests and deacons and confirming hundreds as well as celebrating the anniversaries of dioceses and parishes.

He joyfully recounted the greeting he received earlier this month when he celebrated Mass at a retreat center on the outskirts of Nairobi run by Indian Vincentians.

“I couldn’t believe it, there were thousands of people there,” the archbishop said of the celebration, which occurs weekly at the center.

Religious practice in Africa is “very high,” the archbishop said, especially when compared to the rate of devotion in New Zealand, where he served as nuncio for more than seven years. About half the people there are not affiliated with any religion, he said.

“This is a part of the world where religious belief and sentiment is very strong… Spirituality is very strong,” Archbishop Balvo explained. “There is a great sense of religion. Religious practice is very high. Masses, devotions tend to be long.”

Kenya, while still a developing country with significant poverty, is able to function. Nairobi, the city where the nuncio is based, is a major metropolitan center for East Africa.

By contrast, there is no mission or nunciature in Juba. South Sudan, independent since only 2011, established diplomatic relations with the Vatican last February. Close to half the population is Catholic, Archbishop Balvo said. Of the six dioceses and one archdiocese, three are currently without a bishop.

Though his appointment is so recent that he has not yet received any background files or detailed instructions about the Church in South Sudan, Archbishop Balvo said he decided to attend the bishops’ conference in Juba “to meet people, to see who was there and see what the place looks like.”

He has received some information from Catholic Relief Services personnel, who have a regional office in Nairobi, as well as from the Maryknoll Fathers, whose regional house is right across the street from Archbishop Balvo. “A couple of the priests who are in South Sudan, or who have been, came over to talk to me about things last week,” he said.

South Sudan is generally underdeveloped, with poor roads and a lack of infrastructure, but it does have natural resources like oil as well as a climate that sustains agriculture.

The conflict now marring South Sudan draws daily headlines for violence that has killed thousands and pushed tens of thousands of others to seek refuge at United Nations bases in the country. The source of much of the fledgling nation’s troubles is political, not ethnic, the archbishop said.

“That (ethnic differences) comes into it…but it’s not that the groups are not getting along, it’s political differences that have been there for a long time, before the creation of the country,” he said.