BÉNÉZET BUJO, RELIGIOUS LIFE: A SIGN OF CONTRADICTION. NAIROBI: PAULINES PUBLICATIONS AFRICA. (2017). ISBN: 9966-60-23-3

Abstract

Religious Life: A Sign of Contradiction is written by Rev. Professor Bénézet Bujo, a priest of the Diocese of Bunia in the Northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prof. Bujo, since 1989, has been a professor of Moral Theology and Social Ethics at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has authored many books on intercultural morality and African Theology. This book by Prof. B. Bujo is a well-researched, articulated, reflective, rich and beautiful meditation given as a retreat to the Congregation of the Sisters Servants of Jesus (Wamama Watumishiwa Yezu) of the Diocese of Bunia in Ituri (Congo Kinshasa). Prof. Bujo with his decades of experience has in a unique manner offered such a rich and calculated meditation as a great African Theology who has encountered countless religious on numerous capacities in different parts of the globe. Drawing upon this experience, he offers us something of what is essential to religious life with particular reference to the three evangelical counsels in African context. He enriches the meditation by taking into account the African woman religious background as an African and modern situation. This he did without losing sight of the classical teaching on the subject matter. He used a very simple, down-toearth, lucid, succinct language and African stories and examples to drive home his message and to aid both the young and elderly religious to comprehend the text. The book has two unequal parts. Part one examines the vows and explores their impact on the life of the religious and her environment. He interestingly points out briefly the rudiments of the African tradition that could be useful to preserve the religious life alive in Africa. Prof. Bujo refers to the root of the vow of poverty (and the rest of other vows) as having nothing of one’s self, except the life of God, losing everything for the sake of Jesus. He quotes St Paul’s letter to the Philippians to buttress his statement: “More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ.†(Phil 3:8). For him, poverty is not a state of destitution or loss but a freedom, a detachment from accumulation of material, unnecessary and unessential things. Poverty is a call to die to self and put on the love of Christ who had given away everything for our sake.