‘This is going to be our mission: singing and laughing with them, but at the same time, feeling their losses as if they were our own’, explained the first superior of the San Jose community, Jacinto Anaya, the founder of Radio Santa Monica in Chota, and a missionary with experience in working with the simple, unaffected people of the Peruvian mountains. ‘We will always be united to Chota, always a mission, and united with the Order that sent us. We move on from a place, we leave friends, and we start all over again. As friars, with humility and simplicity, we are ready for anything’, Anaya explained.
For his part, the Bishop of Cajamarca, Jose Carmelo Martinez – also an Augustinian Recollect- made a statement to the official website of the order: ‘I am really grateful to the Augustinian Recollect fathers for coming up to Cajamarca to evangelize in this diocese which is so extensive and where there is such a shortage of priests..and also so much hope and so much of a future. They are good people, too’. The prelate assured that ‘they will always have my support, and they will know how to measure up as fine missionaries in the vineyard of the lord, protected by Our Lady of Sorrows, who is a mother for them and for us’, referring to the patroness of Cajamarca.
Fr Anaya set out with enthusiasm the future opening out before them: ‘We are going to encounter poverty in the midst of mountains rich in gold, we will find faces weather-beaten by the sun, broad-brimmed hats and ponchos, brothers and sisters of many other religions of all varieties, a city where there is everything, and a countryside in which the people of Cajamarca live, sowing wheat to make cachangas, and ollucos and ocas (root vegetables) in their plots of land’.
The diocese of Cajamarca covers 15,333 square kilometres, with a population of 844,000. The territory is divided into 38 parishes, and has 61 diocesan priests, 18 male and 168 female religious.