After eight and a half years, the head of Aid to the Church in Need Australia and New Zealand, Bernard Toutounji, is stepping down. Toutounji looks back on his years with ACN with pride.
“More than $50 million was raised to support the suffering and persecuted church around the world, benefactor numbers more than doubled, and the Australian office became one of the strongest contributors in the international federation,” he says.
Unlike most international charities, ACN is a charity which focuses on keeping the flame of the faith alive when it is in danger of being extinguished. So instead of distributing sacks of rice and powdered milk, ACN helps Catholic organisations to persevere with their pastoral work.
“Everything we do is through this lens of keeping the faith alive,” Toutounji told The Catholic Weekly.
“Building or repairing a church building provides a real sense of hope. Hope isn’t just some astral thing that’s a nice thing to have.
“If you lose all sense of hope, if you lose all sense that that at the end God triumphs, then you can offer all the bandages and the bread you need, but the next day they will be hungry again.”
The greatest gift that the church has to offer, says Toutounji, is not hospitals, schools and aged care, but Jesus Christ.
“So the greatest thing we can do is to build a church and make sure the sacramental needs of the people are maintained.”
One of his most memorable experiences as the Australian head of ACN was visiting Lebanon and Syria in 2023.
“My own family is from Syria, so it was, in a sense, returning home. I was thinking, why do people leave this country, it’s a beautiful place?
“But I realised that there was just such terror, problem after problem, attack after attack, that families just want safe places to raise their family, to live their faith.
“While they had deep faith, it also became just not an option to stay around.”
Christianity in the Middle East, he warns, is nearing a tipping point when the current exodus of Christians could leave the Holy Land emptied of the faith. Earlier this year, Toutounji recalled that an abbot from the Holy Land gave an ACN conference a sombre report.
“There will always be priests and religious in the Holy Land, looking after these churches, being a presence there,” said the monk.
“But the risk is the Holy Land ends up becoming a Catholic Disneyland, where you just got these habited monks and nuns wandering around.
“There are no more children anymore, no more families, there are no more elderly. So, it’s not a real place anymore, because you know it’s not real when there’s just clergy floating around the place. You need the laity engaging and having jobs.”
During Toutounji’s time at ACN, Nigeria became a hotspot of Christian persecution.
“Nigeria today is an epicentre of Christian martyrdom,” he told the media last year after this became an issue in the United States.
“Since 2000, more than 60,000 Christians have been murdered by Islamist groups like Boko Haram and heavily armed militias.”
Some of the support that ACN has provided to Nigeria included building fences around seminaries. It has bought enclosed vehicles for priests because travelling by bicycle or motorbike to carry out their pastoral work is too dangerous.
“Look, we’ve all got our problems here in Australia,” Toutounji told The Catholic Weekly.
“We can say sometimes we’re, quote unquote, persecuted as Christians. But when you compare it to Nigerian Christians, there’s not a comparison to be made. We want to continue to draw attention to that.”
ACN International documents the reality of global Christian persecution in a biannual “Religious Freedom in the World” report.
Toutounji is leaving ACN to set up a faith-based consultancy called New Shore. After many years of working for the church in different agencies, he observed that many older and established institutions were groping for clarity of purpose in a changing world. And younger groups were often full of enthusiasm but lacked managerial and leadership skills.
“It is offering to faith-based organisations of all sorts and sizes the opportunity to be all they’re called to be,” he says.
