Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo was elected president of Caritas Internationalis during the Vatican-based confederation of national charities’ General Assembly on May 11-16, 2023. / Courtesy of Caritas Internationalis
Rome Newsroom, May 15, 2023 / 10:45 am (CNA).
Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi has been elected as the new president of Caritas Internationalis, the second-largest humanitarian aid organization in the world after the Red Cross.
The Catholic archbishop of Tokyo was Japan’s first missionary priest in Africa, where he first volunteered at a Caritas refugee camp, the start of 30 years of service with the Catholic charitable organization.
More than 400 delegates taking part in Caritas Internationalis’ 22nd General Assembly in Rome May 11-16 elected Kikuchi to serve a four-year term. The body must still elect a secretary general.
“Caritas must be on the front lines to welcome, accompany, serve and defend the poor and vulnerable,” Kikuchi, 64, said in his speech to the assembly.
“This mission must be sustained and be the focus of the members of the Confederation, and I would like to be the one, together with the secretary general, to lead the entire organization to fulfill this important mission of the Church. We are all invited to walk together.”
As president of Caritas Internationalis, Kikuchi will lead a confederation of more than 160 Catholic charities operating in 200 countries and territories. He succeeds Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who has served as Caritas’ president since 2019.
Japan’s first missionary priest in Africa
After he was ordained a priest in 1986 with the Society of the Divine Word, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries, Kikuchi was sent to serve as a missionary priest in rural Ghana for eight years.
“I was sent to a ‘bush’ parish, deep in the bush, without electricity, without water. … And that was really an important experience for me and that helped create my identity, I suppose,” Kikuchi said in an interview with Vatican Radio on May 14.
He witnessed extreme poverty with “many people … dying without proper medication” and the spread of HIV-AIDS, but he was struck by how people supported each other and how that created hope.
After his work in Ghana, Kikuchi returned to Africa in 1995 as a Caritas volunteer at a refugee camp in Bukavu, Zaire, which took in hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Rwandan genocide.
Kikuchi recalls that the Rwandan refugees “had no food, no clothing, no shelter, and people were in need of everything.”
He said: “The second time I went to the camp, I met some of the leaders and asked them what they needed. And I was expecting the leader to tell me that ‘we need food, we need education, we need medication, we need shelter’ — or something like that. … But rather than that, he said, ‘Father, you come from Japan. So, when you go back to Japan, tell them that we are still here: We are all forgotten.’ And that really shocked me.”
“After that experience, I met so many people in different areas, in different countries struck by disaster, or people in war-torn or conflict areas. I heard the same story and the same cry again and again, that ‘we are forgotten; we are forgotten’. So, this is the real mission of Caritas: to help people know they are not forgotten. We want to be with them.”
Kikuchi became the executive director of Caritas Japan in 1999 and was appointed as a bishop by John Paul II in 2004.
He went on to serve as the president of Caritas Japan from 2007 to 2022, also participating as a member of the Caritas Internationalis Executive Committee from 1999 to 2004 and leading Caritas Asia as its president from 2011 to 2019.
Pope Francis appointed Kikuchi as archbishop of Tokyo in 2017 and he currently serves as the president of the Japanese bishops’ conference and the secretary general of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.
Pope’s reform of Caritas
The Japanese archbishop takes the helm of the Church’s charitable arm as it is going through a critical period of reform, six months after Pope Francis dismissed its top leaders.
Pope Francis issued a decree in November that removed the organization’s administration and stated that Caritas would undergo a review “to improve its management rules and procedures — even if financial matters were managed well and fundraising objectives regularly achieved — and thereby better serve its member charities around the world.”
A press release issued at the time said there was no finding of any misappropriation of funds or sexual abuse but cited deficiencies in Caritas’ “management and procedures, seriously prejudicing team spirit and staff morale.”
A provisional administration, led by a former Bain Capital management expert, has run the global organization ever since.
“It is not only that we are an NGO, but we are much more than that. We are a Catholic Church organization, and the institute of the service of the Church,” Kikuchi said.
“So, that means that Caritas is supposed to be a witness of the love of God. What we do is not only provide food or materials or any kind of assistance, but rather we want to be witnesses of the love of God to show people that this is how God loves all people.”
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It is ever more apparent that two people of the same sex can fall in love in a deeply spiritual way that honors humanity. I truly thank God that more nations now respect this truth. I thank God even more for the wisdom that is the Separation of Church and State. I am no longer Catholic, so my view does not contradict my religion.
If you are no longer Catholic then what are you doing commenting on a Catholic forum? If you feel happy about your faith decision then obviously you would see no need to turn back and pontificate about it.
I am just a person. I may no longer be Catholic, but I will always be Catholic, I think. Just sharing my views, because I was silent and hiding for so long. I don’t mean to insult anyone. When I discovered the comment section, here, I felt strongly about sharing my opinion. A recent opinion on here (by Reilly about LGBT politics) really angered me.
You appear to be one of those people who tailor their religious views to coincide with the sins they want to commit, rather than struggling against temptations to do evil.
“It is ever more apparent that two people of the same sex can fall in love in a deeply spiritual way that honors humanity.”
Balderdash. Vile perversion doesn’t honor humanity.
Thank you, Leslie.
What, exactly, is “spiritual” about the added homosexual version of tunnel vision, or that contradicts not only Catholic morality, but also nature?
Then there’s the question your raise about the nature of your new religion…Not exclusively Catholic (which you are “no longer”) are such biblical references as these: Noah and Ham (Genesis 9:20–27), Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:1–11), Levitical laws condemning same-sex relationships (Lev 18:22, 20:13), two Second Testament vice lists (1 Corinthians 6:9–10; 1 Timothy 1:10), and Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom 1:26–27).
About the separation of Church and state, is the coercive power of the state your new religion? Just askin’…
Yes, Peter, I practice a devout adherence to the coercive power of the State.
Peter, my beliefs are different than yours.
This vote was decided 2016 at the opening of the Gotthard Tunnel ceremony. “A topless woman decked as a bird hovered above actors representing the nine construction workers who died during the building of the tunnel” is cursory theatre of a radical distancing from moral good. Celebrated was the sensual, the perverse, and the theatrical though spiritually real abandonment of Christ. Some showy displays purposely satanic. As suggested in my comment on tiny San Marino gone abortion ‘crazy’, the only word that comes to mind there are consequences in rejecting Christ. We lose his divinely ordained suzerainty for the macabre devilish. Where there’s a moral vacuum, a house all tidied up the filthy denizens from Hades take residence. And how! The moral rotation is epochal, since the only gift for our salvation Christ has been rejected worldwide. Nothing historical comes close to comparison. A price to be paid is impending absent of a miraculous conversion of hearts.
The Swiss Catholic Women’s Federation welcomes the result? And they’ve been fighting for it for twenty years, no less?
Huh?
Maybe they know something that we don’t. Maybe there was a mistake in the recording of God’s plan, when it come to gay relationships. Maybe we are all wrong.
But, even if God means us to avoid homosexuality completely, his followers can continue to strive to see gay people as human beings who struggle like everyone else.