Explaining our presence

Three white guys moving into, and not out of, a multicultural neighbourhood requires some plausible explanation to take away the inevitable suspicion. It remains to be seen whether we shall succeed.
We would love to simply tell the truth, that we are Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a religious community of mostly priests, like ourselves, in this part of the world, but we fear that these words won’t do us any good.
‘Missionary’ is the first difficulty. The missionaries that are most active are the evangelicals and the pentecostal churches. They have the image of an aggressive type of evangelisation. We don’t want to be put into the same bracket as them. For us ‘mission’ is dialogue, it involves as much listening as talking, trying as much to understand as to be understood.
‘Roman Catholic priest’ sounds a bit better but runs into another difficulty. We are priests without a parish and do not represent in any way the local parish church. We need to explain that for us the neighbourhood and all its people are important, not just or primarily the Catholic part of it. We are precisely interested in how the different cultural and religious groups live alongside one another and cope with their differences. If possible we would like to be involved in building bridges.
The words ‘Sacred Heart’, for Catholics and those in the know, point to universal love but for others, Muslims and evangelicals alike, it smacks of idolatry: God may not be represented in an image of any kind. Even for many Catholics the Sacred Heart may appear too sweet or something of a bygone age.
All these associations prompted us to look for different words. Finally we came up with ‘Cordate Community’, knowing well that ‘cordate’ (which means ‘heart-shaped’) is not self-explanatory either. There is no way in which we can explain ourselves honestly and succinctly without running into difficulties. One advantage of the word “cordate”, however, is that it does not carry other connotations, other baggage. Hopefully it will encourage people to ask about its meaning. That itself provides an opening for dialogue and conversation.
And so we have chosen to be known as the ‘Cordate Community’, a community that has heart for the neighbourhood and for all the people living there. But we realise that it is not within our control to have this name accepted. We can only hope that in the end our deeds speak louder than our words.