By Fr. Enzo Corba, PIME
EAC Director

You are a secular priest, you are a lay person, you are a sister but for a long time you’ve been interested in becoming a missionary or becoming more missionary than you are: WELL EUNTES IS HERE TO HELP YOU.

EUNTES is a beautiful gift of the PIME Fathers to Asia: It is a missionary formation center set in Zamboanga but at the service of the Asian Church. It is headed by the kindly and gentle Fr. Enzo Corba who here tells us what being a missionary is all about. It’ll be worth your while to hear him out:

Social Worker?
The missionary is often identified as a dedicated social worker. Orphanages, school, dispensaries, health centers, cooperative, roads, wells and many other initiatives flourish in a placed where a missionary are also the founders and organizers of many of the local churches.

Spiritual & Moral Power
Do the people of Asia appreciate the missionary as a “Man of God”?  Many give a resounding negative answer. Why?... A man of God must be: a man of prayer, silence, meditation, a man detached from the many common amenities of life. A man with only spiritual and moral power.

True Human Liberation
People everywhere have lost their trust in politician and in ministers of organized Religions. Politics and Religion failed, they say. They trust more science and spirituality. Science discovers the truth in the outside world, spirituality, spirituality discovers the truth which is inside in us. Science is the accelerator, spirituality the steering wheel. Only spirituality can give the right direction to science. People remember with devotion the great holy men and women of the past and their teaching. Their messages brought true human liberation. On the contrary most Kings and Generals are remembered with regret for the miseries they brought to the people.

Seeker of Truth
This is the reason why the Euntes Asian Center (EAC) program is a mission formation program. All the activities such as study, research, classes, manual work, and community life...are opportunities offered to the participants to grow in their spiritual life. Our firm belief is that, only person, woman or man, religious or lay, married or unmarried in a search of God, at the feet of the Master, a seeker of the truth which lives in us, can be a missionary.
It is not a duty of a missionary to find the solution to the many political, social, economic problems. Many others can take of that.

Suffering Servants
Jesus become the Suffering servant of Yahweh and thus brought us salvation. The missionary too is called to be one of the suffering millions and thus become a suffering servant. The main thrust of Euntes Asian Center program is spiritual. All the other significant learning offered at are very important but subsidiary. Knowledge will never substitute Spirituality, and it will prove useful only to a person with religious and moral values.

Six Points
The EAC programs of studies focuses on the Evangelization which is considered from six points of view:
Proclamation
Total Human liberation
 Dialogue
 Inculturation
 Ecumenism
Communication

Experience Counts
The teaching staff is composed of twenty four missionaries working in Asia or with Asian experience, it surely would be easier and less expensive to run the course with a few resident professors. But missionaries with an experience of ten to forty five years have been the Euntes choice because they are the people who can communicate an applied knowledge that may inspire the participants to commit themselves to Evangelization. The EAC wants to prepare missionaries from the Asian Churches, and this is the service it offers them.

Uprooted Tree
The Euntes Asian Center Program of studies is demanding, but its usefulness depends in the spirituality if the participants. To offer services to the people for their social economic betterment without being prepared to develop their spiritual moral life it will be like caring for the branches of an uprooted tree.

Even Dangerous
The specific area of action for a missionary is the religious spiritual one. Without it human development or progress will be crippled and, in some instances, even dangerous
To say Euntes Asian Center is to sound a call for spirituality.

To offer services to the people for their social economic betterment without being prepared to develop their spiritual moral life would be like caring for the branches of an uprooted tree.