Florida Catholic | Editorial

Missionary zeal should dwell in all Christians

Published: 10.19.07

“We are all called to be missioners — every day, in some small way.”

It wasn't so many years ago that dioceses in the United States routinely sent missionary priests to developing nations. We had — if not a surplus of priests — at least enough to serve our needs and to share with those areas that had few, if any, native vocations.

And that was fitting, since it wasn't all that many decades before that when the Americas received missionary priests of our own, especially from several countries in Europe. We received the faith passed down from generation to generation. When it came time to pass it along, men from families in the United States stepped forward and took the faith to Africa and Asia.

And now it appears the tide is turning again, with a new wave of missionary priests coming to the United States from Africa, South America, Mexico and Asia. For a number of reasons, native vocations have taken hold in those areas, and some of those dioceses are now able to share their priests with our churches.

Florida itself used to be mission territory, and not just in the days of Columbus or colonial times. The Catholic Extension Society, America's home mission organization, still served many parts of Florida, even in recent times.

Jesus sent his disciples out in twos and said, "Go, and teach all nations." This call to evangelize is the root of the Gospel mission. Deeply embedded in that mission is also the call to act as Jesus did: to serve with compassion, to lift up the lowly, to live among the people with whom the missioner serves and to whom he or she preaches the Gospel. It is a way of life that St. Francis of Assisi summed up in this message: "Preach the Gospel always, and when necessary, use words."

Missionary men and women religious as well as lay men and women answer the call to travel to faraway places to serve God in the faces of his people, wherever they are. Within this issue of the Florida Catholic, you can read some of these stories of faith-filled people who are daily preaching the Gospel without words. The essence of this is immersion in the culture of the people with whom they serve. They go not as saviors, but as servants; not as leaders, but coworkers.

Mission work need not be long term. You can read stories about parishioners and teenagers who headed to a foreign country for a week, and who came home transformed by the experience. Mission work need not even be foreign. In recent years, many youth groups find that a weeklong trip to an impoverished area of the country — or the Gulf Coast recovering from the storm — is prime opportunity for a mission. The young people come back with a sense of a world outside of themselves, a world larger than an iPod and a school locker.

And mission work can last a lifetime. Some folks find they are called to various kinds of service, and as one ministry leads to another, they find themselves in a mission land. I know of a Maryknoll Missioner, originally from Brooklyn, who has spent several decades living and working in Southeast Asia. It's peculiar to hear him speaking with a Brooklyn accent one moment and then switch to Mandarin or Cantonese, with a perfect dialect, the next. He knows the people, he knows the culture, and he knows why he serves where he is.

We are all called to be missioners — every day, in some small way. Each of us can "go out and teach." Maybe we won't go out to all the nations; maybe we'll just go next door. But we all are called to teach, and serve, and lift up others.

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