Rome (AsiaNews) -- It's hard to celebrate Sunday as the "Lord's Day" in a Muslim country, where Sunday is not only a working day, but also "one of the busiest."  But the Eucharist in Bangladesh, a predominantly Islamic country, is a moment that the tiny Catholic community needs to "express its shared belonging."  It is "the gratuitous gift of oneself", "forgiveness" and "sharing" with the poor and with sinners.  In an interview with AsiaNews, Fr Franco Cagnasso, a missionary of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (P.I.M.E.), tells of the importance of the Eucharist in his mission, the efforts to pass on the bond between Eucharist and life.

Fr Cagnasso is a teacher and spiritual director at the regional seminary in Dhaka.  Out of a population of 140 million, more than 80% of Bangladeshis are Muslim; Catholics number about 300,000.  There are 100 seminarians preparing for the priesthood and some 150 priests on hand in dioceses.

Father Cagnasso, what sense does the Eucharist have in your mission?

There are mainly two aspects of the Eucharist that I feel are lived in Bangladesh: that of a gratuitous gift and that of forgiveness and sharing.  Christ offers bread and wine as the sign of the offering of his very life.  He makes this gift in a context which makes it seemingly useless: his death leads to the end of all his activity.  Only in faith is this gesture able to bear fruit, giving rise to the Church.  The Eucharist is the invitation to offer one's life gratuitously for the people of Bangladesh, expecting no practical thing, no material gratification, in return, even when it seems that this gift is useless and not understood.  It becomes useful for accepting a situation which is often very difficult: in a country where there are serious injustices, corruption and violence, one can come to think at times that there is no point in sacrifice.  Christ, through forgiveness and sharing, reminds us that this is not true: he offers bread and wine, symbols of His body, to people who shortly after will betray and deny Him, but He was not afraid, nor did He step back.  The Eucharist thus becomes the place of the Church's communion even in weakness.

You work in Dhaka's seminary.  What is the importance of the Eucharist when it comes to training the local clergy?

I in fact teach sacraments and have a direct responsibility for making seminarians sense the value of the Eucharist.  The biggest challenge is helping them to go from a ritual devotion to a sense of a Eucharistic life.  The Eucharist is felt differently by the Bengalis and by the aboriginals.  The first come from very devout villages, communities where the Eucharist is celebrated regularly every Sunday, at times daily.  For the Bengalis, the Eucharist becomes a practice that they feel strongly about, that they feel is part of their Christian path, but is lived more than anything else from a ritual point of view.  For the aboriginals, the problem is more radical: they live in remote communities where the Eucharist is rarely celebrated, at time only two or three times a year.  Just the young aboriginals raised in Christian schools are used to receiving the Eucharist every day, but they experience it as an imposition, a mix of values, but also of burden and refusal.  My efforts go toward making the Eucharist understood not only in terms of ritual and adoration, but as a moment which gives meaning to a life that becomes Eucharistic.  The challenge is to be able to pass on a bond between the Eucharist and one's own life, the choices one makes.  In this perspective, adoration does not loose value but becomes a link to celebration, expression of what we live each day.  Here, instead, the prevailing idea is often that Mass is needed only to have Jesus present for adoration.

The Pope and the Italian Church ask that Sunday be discovered as a day of celebration and encounter with the Eucharist.  In Bangladesh, Sunday is a workday.  What value then does the Eucharistic take on in the Church's mission?

In Bangladesh, it is difficult to communicate the sense of Sunday as the Lord's day, an occasion to experience together a celebration.  Friday has been the holiday here since the 1980s.  Besides being a workday, Sunday is also the busiest and most congested day of the week in big cities such as Dhaka.  Catholics are thus forced to celebrate Mass very early in the morning, or in the evening after work.  However, spiritual meetings and catechism are held on Friday to give everyone a chance to take part.

At the seminary, we have chosen Sunday as our day of rest, a day without classes.  We try in this way to give a tangible sign that the day of the Eucharist is the most important day of the week.

Instead, in the countryside and villages, Sunday is still the central day for Catholics, but there's another problem.  In tribal areas especially, communities are not able to celebrate the Eucharist every week.  For this reason, the older missionaries have created the figure of prayer leader.  They are laypeople who each week lead the community in prayer.  So, even without the Eucharist, people have the chance to gather together and pray.  The prayer leaders meet once a month in the central mission: a priest explains to them the readings of the liturgy for the following 4 Sundays so that they can then give a short sermon-homily.  Thanks to these figures, Sunday is a special day in that people can both pray and, in order to pray, interrupt their work and gather together.  They are a bit like the backbone of these small communities.  They also take care of preparing the community for the periodic arrival of nuns and of the priest, who celebrates the Eucharist and hears confessions.

The value of the Eucharist in a heavily populated country like Bangladesh is above all that of gathering a small flock which is otherwise scattered.  Mass is the occasion for really uniting members and expressing a shared belonging.  This aspect is strongly felt also by the foreign community that lives in Dhaka.  Immigrants come from different countries, with different cultures and languages, but in the Eucharist, they feel part of a single reality, the Catholic Church.

Can you give us a concrete example…

In the Mirpur community, an outlying district of Dhaka (with a population of 2 million, of which about 1,500 are Catholics), it is very clear how gathering around the Eucharist is the moment in which the faithful profoundly feel their Christian identity, in the midst of their work activities and their daily live alongside other cultures and religions.  The priest of the local church, which will soon become a parish, has done a lot of work to create among the faithful occasions and the need to get to know each other, to have a sense of community, otherwise the sense of being Christian is lost.  There is a group of laypeople and nuns who continuously go around to find new families who have arrived and to invite them to Mass.  This pastoral method is very much appreciated as it brings together the acts of seeking out and visiting families with gathering and bringing people together, otherwise Christian life becomes just an occasional event.