Since its foundation, the Bethlehem Mission Society has been active in 16 countries on four continents. Many of the foreign mission areas have now been abandoned or are being continued by individual members.
Active projects of SMB members
Kenya (since 1978)
In Kenya, Luigi Clerici, a Bethlehem missionary, is currently living in the bishop’s house in Karen, Nairobi. He has been engaged in the training of priests in Kenya since 1982; at first as a founder-member of the Theological Faculty of the “Apostles of Jesus”, the first African Mission Society that was founded in 1968 by the Italian Comboni missionaries.
By 2014 there were six educational establishments in Nairobi for the education of priests. Over a thirty-year period Fr Luigi Clerici worked part time in all six institutions, teaching five hundred priests, half a dozen of whom later became bishops – as well as a dozen women religious. As the Spiritual Master of the Marist Brothers, he cared for 16 years for about 450 Brothers with temporary vows who are now working as secondary teachers in twelve African nations. Today more than half of them are married.
He provides for a dozen girls from the slums, enabling them to study at a boarding school so that they will be able to earn and provide for a family later. In addition he supports two dozen women who are bringing up their often underfed children alone as their husbands have abandoned them.
Eugen Birrer, the second Bethlehem missionary working in Kenya, worked for over 20 years in various refugee aid organisations, including in the Philippines and Vietnam. For the last 25 years he worked in Kenya, where he helped to set up the Jesuit refugee service and an orthopaedic workshop in Kangemi, a suburb of Nairobi. After two attacks, he was confined to a wheelchair, but was determined to stay in Kenya. He died on 10 December 2018.
After Eugen Birrer had worked between 1980 and 1990 for the UN Refugee Agency in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Somalia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Geneva, he came in 1991 to Kenya and joined the Jesuit Refugee Service. In 1992 the UN Refugee Agency was able to open a wished-for refugee centre to cope with the rush of refugees from Somalia und Ethiopia and later from Sudan.
After the genocide in Ruanda (1994) a great number of refugees came out of the region of the Great Lakes. To help cope with this great rush, an orthopaedic centre for the victims of landmines was built in Kangemi, a township in Nairobi.
In 2000 the activities of the Jesuit Refugee Services were taken over by the Archdiocese of Nairobi. In the same year NARAP (the refugee programme of the Archdiocese of Nairobi), opened a hostel for refugees from the Great Lakes area.
NARAP is registered with the Education Ministry as a trainings institute. At any time it can accept 80 students between the ages of 18 and 30. Most of them come from poor families, some of them are orphans and cannot afford to pay anything towards the cost of their training. Originally the centre was intended only for refugees. Since 2010 young Kenyans have also been accepted and today most students are Kenyans.
Missions that are no longer active
In 1992, Bolivia was a new country of assignment for missionaries from Peru, who were endangered by terror and violence there. A total of two members of the SMB were active in Bolivia, primarily in the cities of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and La Paz. Their work focused on a missionary presence in the poor districts of these cities and the establishment of two health centres based on natural medicine. The two Bethlehem missionaries were also able to establish four parishes, which were later handed over to the local church.
After the last missionaries left China, a group of them took up missionary work in the north of Japan in 1948. The first group of four Bethlehem missionaries arrived in September 1948 for the study of the Japanese language. Since then over 30 SMB members have work done pastoral work as well as conducting research and lecturing at universities.
During his time in Japan, he also built over a dozen churches and set up and ran several kindergartens in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Japanese branches of Amnesty International, Justice and Peace, and Life Line were founded in the missionary centre built by the SMB in Morioka.
Missionary engagement in Mozambique goes back to an initiative from Zimbabwe. Once the greater part of the leadership in parishes and institutions had been taken over by local personnel, a younger SMB group decided to work in the rebuilding of the border area of Mozambique, an area that had suffered during the civil war.
Altogether there were four SMB members working in this country.
Paul Peng wrote about his time in Mozambique:
In 1970 I went out to Rhodesia, (today Zimbabwe) where I worked for 28 years.
In both countries I was engaged in pastoral parish work amongst the rural population. That meant the development of Christian communities as places where justice, reconciliation, brotherly love and solidarity could be practised and lived.
Two things motivated me during my engagement.
Firstly: The conviction that the way of Jesus is a way to a better life.
Secondly: Sharing the thoughts and actions of the people concerned.
And thus I was continuously able to experience that I wasn’t only a giver, but that I also richly received.
Paul Peng, parish priest in Oberiberg (Switzerland) from 2009 to 2020, moved to the Mission House in Immensee in March 2020.
n 1981, in connection with continuing education courses at the East Asian Pastoral Institute (EAPI) in Manila, first contacts with Bishop Francisco Claver, SJ were initiated, who headed the newly established Diocese of Malaybalay on the island of Mindanao. Claver invited lay missionaries who started working in Malaybalay in 1986.
Fr. Martin Jäggi joined them with a team in 1992.
When Claver became bishop of his home diocese in the north in 1995, he invited Martin Jäggi and several lay missionaries to work in the north of Luzon.
Martin Jäggi worked there as pastor and retreat-master among the indigenous peoples of the mountain region until 2013. His long-standing presence at various locations of the Philippines earned him the confidence of the local church as he was part of the new understanding of ‚Mission as intercultural fertilization‘ (Bp. Claver).
The General Chapter of the SMB elected Jäggi as Vicar General in 2013, which necessitated his return to Switzerland.
In Zambia the confreres Ernst Wildi, Konrad Brühwiler and Franz Josef Stampfli lived and worked in priestly formation, Michael Traber in the training of journalists, Josef Braun in the publication of liturgical texts, Martin Jäggi and Josef Christen in pastoral care.
From 2009 to 2013 Ernst Wildi and Walter Kaufmann worked in the diocesan AIDS Hospice in Lusaka. In 2013, Ernst Wildi was elected to the general management of the SMB, which resulted in the end of this assignment.
With “Abambo Ernst and the Apocalypse” (in German), the “Reporter” programme on Swiss Radio and Television SRF produced an exciting portrait of Ernst Wildi and his work in Zambia.
One member of the Bethlehem Mission Society, Johannes Bitterli, was active in Tanzania from 1974 to 2017.
His missionary work is concentrated on integral parish pastoral activities, mostly in rural areas. For some time he also worked in the capital city, Dodoma.