INTER-TRIBAL football matches am now a possibility in the Mbao mission of the Beni diocese in the Belgian Congo.
Fr. Kieran Dunlop, A.A., of Bethnal Green, London, writing in the Christmas number of The Assurriptionist, says that the latest venture in his year-old Pygmy and Bantu mission is a football pitch "cut out of the forest with much perspiration."
"At present," says Fr. Dunlop. "such niceties as a correct throw-in or a flagrant offside are superfluous. The main object is to get the ball past those posts (there are, of course. no nets) and the fellow in the way had better look out for himself."
Last month THE CATHOLIC HERM reported that 50 of the Pygmy children in this mission now to go school for 90 minutes a day—both chaplain and children find that an hour and a half a day is about the limit of endurance.
Poverty and pity
Some of the children arc preparing for their first Holy Communion.
The mission is now getting "organised," writes Fr. Dunlop. but at Benediction "the poverty of no cope or monstrance reduces the visual aids to piety. . . .
"A round cardboard pill-box serves as incense boat . . . but a Christian is no less fervent because he comes to a confraternity meeting in a loin cloth and leaves his spear or bow and arrow at the door."