Dear Friends,
I am on vacation this week with a niece and a nephew. I continue to keep you in my prayers each day! You have our annual Mission Co-op presentation at the Sunday Masses. I am sure you will welcome Fr. Loughran with open arms and a generous pocketbook. This next week, our IXIM team that has been preparing to go Huehuetenango, Guatemala will leave for their mission trip. Please keep them in your prayers as well. We will probably be asking you for some financial help for them in the next few weeks.
Since we are in the Mission Spirit this weekend, I thought I would share Pope Francis’ recent message to the Pontifical Mission Societies during their jubilee to inspire you:
“You chose to gather in Lyon because it was there, 200 years ago, that a young 23-year-old woman, Pauline Marie Jaricot, had the courage to found a society to support the missionary activity of the Church; a few years later she started the ‘Living Rosary’, an organization dedicated to prayer and the sharing of offerings. From a wealthy family, she died in poverty: with her beatification, the Church testifies that she knew how to accumulate treasures in Heaven, treasures that are born from the courage of giving and reveal the secret of life: only by giving it is it possessed, only by losing it is it found.
Pauline Jaricot loved to say that the Church is missionary by nature, and that every baptized person therefore has a mission; rather, is a mission. Helping to live this awareness is the first service of the Pontifical Mission Societies…it is your task, according to the Council to help the bishops open every particular Church to the horizons of the universal Church.
The jubilees you celebrate and the beatification of Pauline Jaricot offer me the opportunity to present to you again three elements that, thanks to the action of the Holy Spirit, have greatly contributed to the spread of the Gospel in the history of the PMS.
First of all, missionary conversion: the goodness of the mission depends on the path of going out of oneself, on the desire to center one’s life not on oneself, but on Jesus, on Jesus who came to serve and not to be served. In this sense, Pauline Jaricot saw her existence as a response to God’s compassionate and tender mercy…Here lies the wellspring of mission: in the ardor of a faith that does not settle and that, through conversion, day by day becomes imitation, to channel God’s mercy on the roads of the world.
But this is possible — second element — only through prayer, which is the first form of mission. It is no coincidence that Pauline placed the Society for the Propagation of the Faith alongside the Living Rosary, as if to reiterate that mission begins with prayer and cannot be accomplished without it. Yes, because it is the Spirit of the Lord that precedes and enables all our good works: the primacy is always of His grace. Otherwise, the mission would be a question of running in vain.
Finally, the concreteness of charity: along with the prayer network, Pauline gave rise to a collection of offerings on a vast scale and in a creative form, accompanying it with information on the life and activities of the missionaries. The offerings of so many humble people were providential for the history of the missions.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian