{"id":35619,"date":"2020-07-15T09:46:24","date_gmt":"2020-07-15T09:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.acnmalta.org\/?p=35619"},"modified":"2020-07-15T09:46:24","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T09:46:24","slug":"farewell-to-the-fearless-good-samaritan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/2020\/07\/15\/farewell-to-the-fearless-good-samaritan\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell to the fearless Good Samaritan"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\"><\/style><p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A Priest, who is retiring from a Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) after 14 years risking his life to bring aid to the Church in need, has been named a modern-day Good Samaritan by Iraq\u2019s most senior Christian leader.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Monsignor Andrzej Halemba served as Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) projects coordinator for Asia-Africa, covering hot spots including Syria, Iraq and Eritrea \u2013 countries across the Middle East and parts of South Asia.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Cardinal Raphael I Sako of Baghdad honoured the 65-year-old Pole with the title Chorbishop, equivalent to monsignor in the Western (Latin) Church. Describing the monsignor as \u201cthe Good Samaritan of today\u201d, Patriarch Sako said Mgr Halemba \u201cwas always present with us, building housing caravans for the displaced, polyclinics and schools and everything.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Dr Thomas Heine-Geldern, Executive President of ACN (International), said that he \u201chas repeatedly put his life on the line, going to places of acute danger in the service of the suffering Church. \u201cHis faith, his courage, his organisational ability, his good humour, his language skills and his professionalism \u2013 these qualities and many more he has harnessed for the good of persecuted faithful. When they needed somebody for them, he came to their aid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Mgr Halemba\u2019s ministry had been largely confined to Europe and Africa until 2010 when ACN appointed him to lead the charity\u2019s project outreach to the Middle East at a time of unprecedented upheaval in the run-up to the Arab Spring. Travelling repeatedly into Syria and Iraq during the height of the Daesh (ISIS) invasion, the monsignor significantly up-scaled the charity\u2019s work, providing emergency relief as well as pastoral aid for hundreds of thousands of people, especially Christians.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">His task was to enable persecuted Christians to find refuge and in due course enable \u2013 where possible \u2013 their return home once occupying Islamist forces had been forced into retreat. The monsignor\u2019s aid programmes are credited with slowing the exodus of faithful, in a region where Christianity has been threatened with extinction. He worked to bring closer cooperation between the many different Catholic and Orthodox Church communities and was frequently commended for his emphasis on ecumenism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Monsignor Halemba, who stressed that he was always inspired by Father Werenfried van Straaten, the founder of ACN, said: \u201cWhat always needs to be stressed is the spiritual character of ACN as we can never become a secular, humanitarian agency. Instead, we are a Catholic charity, helping people to live the life of Christ \u2013 we enable people to respond to the needs and suffering of humanity and above all we are there to dress the wounds of the bleeding Church and dry the tears of the God who weeps.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">For his work helping refugee Christians fleeing from Syria to Lebanon, in 2015 Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Issam John Darwish of Zahle and Furzol in eastern Lebanon, named Mgr Halemba an Archimandrite, an honorific title.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In his first four years with ACN, starting in 2006, Mgr Halemba was projects coordinator for English and Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, drawing on more than 12 years as a missionary in Zambia. In the country, he set up medical and education structures and produced the first New Testament in the local Bantu language as well as a dictionary, which remains the most comprehensive of its kind. Last year, the President of Poland awarded the Polish priest with the golden cross of merit.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.acnmalta.org\/donate\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-35565 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.acnmalta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Support-button-300x44.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"44\" srcset=\"https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Support-button-300x44.jpg 300w, https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Support-button-580x85.jpg 580w, https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Support-button-600x88.jpg 600w, https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Support-button.jpg 627w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Priest, who is retiring from a Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) after 14 years risking his life to bring aid to the Church in need, has been named a modern-day Good Samaritan by Iraq\u2019s most senior Christian leader. Monsignor Andrzej Halemba served as Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) projects coordinator&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35620,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-e-newsletters"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Farewell to the fearless Good Samaritan - Aid to the Church in Need (Malta)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/acnmalta.org\/_oldsite\/2020\/07\/15\/farewell-to-the-fearless-good-samaritan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Farewell to the fearless Good Samaritan - Aid to the Church in Need (Malta)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Priest, who is retiring from a Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) after 14 years risking his life to bring aid to the Church in need, has been named a modern-day Good Samaritan by Iraq\u2019s most senior Christian leader. 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