Timothy John; Msgr. Roger Abotiyuure; Dr. Antoinette Mensah; Gregory John; and Sr. Lucy Marindany, L.S.O.S.F., World Mission board member; visit during the Sakofa Pilgrimage to Ghana in August. (Photo by YMD Media)
The Ghanaian word “sankofa” describes how a person can always return home and bring back something to enhance the future.
Dr. Antoinette Mensah continues to lead the Sankofa Pilgrimage to the West African country as a continuation of the program she and her father, a deacon, began in 2000.
“This is an opportunity for people to delve back, to understand the past, to understand faith and how it influences the way we recall things that have happened,” Dr. Mensah said. “The grace of the trip was being exposed, being able to see things in a different way.”
Dr. Mensah, the director of World Mission Ministries, which includes the archdiocese’s Office for World Mission and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, brought 42 Catholics and other pilgrims to Ghana in August.
The Sankofa Pilgrimage involved diving into both the painful legacy of slavery, the enlightenment of the change that is the joy of a major anniversary for the pastor of Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral in Bolgatanga, Ghana — a church that St. Boniface, Germantown, has partnered with since 1988 — along with the construction of the parish’s new co-cathedral.
“To go back, to really embrace that history and learn more about that history, especially the slave trade, was immensely impactful,” said Gregory John, whose family has been part of the twinning relationship since the mid-1980s through the Erica P. John Fund.
Dr. Mensah says that a pair of groups took different initial steps in the pilgrimage before joining together at Elmina, where a portion of the Atlantic slave trade happened over multiple centuries, even at locations that propagated Christian faiths including Catholicism.
“They went through two castles, Cape Coast and Elmina Castle. The Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Church of England, all said this is where God lives. But how do you reconcile that with the inhumanity occurring just below? If you are a person of faith, you wrestle with that. We didn’t have direct responsibility for any of those things, but that’s the Sankofa,” Dr. Mensah said.
“It’s just that profound feeling that a lot of the African diaspora has, just because of all that pain and suffering and the horrible way we’ve treated Africans and people of the African diaspora over the years. It’s been terrible, so it’s a lot of healing,” said Timothy John, Gregory’s brother. “I feel I have healing to do, too.”
While that experience made people reflect on the struggle of racism, which the Catholic Church in Milwaukee works to change at the local level, the pilgrimage also offered experiences that reflected such a faith-filled commitment.
“We went to the Ancestor Project, an opportunity for people to experience African artists who speak to different moments in Black history, moving from the slave trade to looking at civil rights leaders,” Dr. Mensah said.
A contingent of five within the pilgrims who took the nearly 6,000-mile air trip from Milwaukee traveled to the Diocese of Bolgatanga to witness the vibrant missionary activity of the Church, highlighted by the celebration of Msgr. Roger Abotiyuure’s 60 years of priestly service. The journey reached its most profund missionary moment with a visit to the newly constructed co-cathedral in the far north of Ghana.
“He has been serving his people for 60 years as a priest, and he’s still active,” Gregory John said. “He has done agricultural projects for his people. He is just a leader in social justice and environmental justice and has been an old friend of our family since 1979 when he first came to visit us in Milwaukee, and we’ve been providing a level of funding to him for all of these years,” Gregory John added.
The trip also opened the eyes of pilgrims to the reality of life for many in Ghana, whose per capita gross domestic product is $2,405 according to the World Bank — less than one-fifth of the average world per capita GDP and less than 1/35th of the United States gross domestic product per capita.
“Nobody there I saw was starving, but there were just a lot of people living in difficult situations. I saw a mother and three children just living alongside the road, and cars are zooming past with this red dust everywhere just blanketing them,” Timothy John said.
“I kind of came away with thinking, ‘What is my role? What is my relationship with Ghana moving forward?’ That had a profound spiritual aspect to it, he said.
“What inspiration, what movement can I take with me, as we see how people do live, and we look upon them as our brothers and sisters in Christ?” Gregory John added. “Ghana will always remain with me. There’s no two ways around it.”
“God provides opportunities. People saw people. They experienced whatever emotions they had. There’s the encounter. People identified with somebody, something, some experience. They wanted to accompany,” said Dr. Mensah, who uncovered another universal truth of encountering the face of Christ and brought it back from Sankofa.
“I think you need to meet people, find out who they are.”
