Excellent Guidelines on Budgeting
Magnet is really magnetic.
I went through all the articles of March issue of MAGNET. “Budget: Financial Planning” by Fr. Alex Gnanapragasam S.J is very informative and a road map to achieve specific goals. Budget helps us to plan, prioritize the essentials among the basic needs. Money is a necessary evil and if we have to be transparent and make our limited resources a positive good, planning and budgeting are very essential. Fr Alex has very clearly brought out the kinds of budget, its activities and goals, how it has to be prepared. Once a proper Budget is prepared, we can move in the right direction. That is our spirituality. I think we all agree that Budgeting is the beginning of wisdom in financial management. We need to discern before we begin to spend our hard earned money. Fr Alex’s articles give us the role of our economers: how to make a standard j+udgement on what is basic and what is discretionary.
Sr Emy Adapur FS
Paduvary, Byndoor, Karnataka 576214
Top Priorities: Correct! Financial Mismanagement: True!
I’m sorry for this very late feedback on your excellent article “Religious in India Today: Top Priorities.”
I’m writing this a few minutes before I leave for the airport to Dumaguete City to accompany the Carmelite Sisters on their Holy Week retreat.
I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t express my deep appreciation of your great and very useful insights regarding the actual living of our consecrated life.
The ten aspects you treat in the article really ask for discernment and urgent response.
The examples you give are very real. They are our day-to-day experiences as religious.
Your observation about how we usually pay more attention to trivial practices of poverty, like requiring the juniors and the scholastics to submit a detailed account of their expenses at the end of the month, along with tickets and receipts, is so true. At the same time, we waste a lot of money on unwise and mismanaged construction projects.
I know of a congregation in the Philippines that spent USD 10,000,000 to build a gym which is now practically useless.
Another congregation imported a crane for its school-building construction project. It could have just rent one from the vicinity.
I also like your comment on collaboration with the laity. The ideal is to collaborate with them and not to ask them to collaborate for us.
I have to stop here; it is time for me to leave for the airport
Fr Samuel Canilang CMF, Manila, Philipppines
Touching and Thought-Provoking
As usual, MAGNET is very thought provoking. I loved both your editorial and your article on poverty. It mirrors all of us who have committed ourselves as Christians and as consecrated people and speaks about our fear of giving too generously of ourselves. It is as though we give only in measured quantities as we are fearful. This I feel is one of the obstacles to living poverty more honestly. But we are in serious danger of becoming counter witnesses if we do not do this courageously. And we, the organised church, have to take a brave and courageous look at ourselves and what we stand for. Else we are in danger of becoming irrelevant and extinct.
I loved some of the beautiful and poignant human interest stories: the one by Sr. Theresa Viegas about the heroic woman who lost her own child and was then parenting two other children, all the while looking like an ordinary person externally, though she was doing such a remarkable, extraordinary thing! The testimony of the doctor from Sion Hospital was very real for me as a medical professional as this is something that I could easily identify with and see everyday. Thank you also for writing a tribute to healthcare workers.
The example of the very real battle for saving the life of a baby in NICU caught in the midst of s social maelstrom was very touching and heartwarming. Fr Jose’s article on synodality is particularly apt for our times and will hopefully help us navigate away from a top heavy system, into a more inclusive one.
I loved your positive and enlivening examples of poverty heroically lived, giving joy to both the person living it, as well the one witnessing it. The write-ups by some of your authors on actual persons was very thought-provoking, such as the one about the environmentalist Jane Goodall. Your article on suicides was painful to read but is very necessary and something that we cannot hide from; thank you for sharing it. Hopefully knowing and being aware is the first step in preventing at least some of the suicides.
Dr Ann Agnes Mathew, Bangalore
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