Today is mission Sunday throughout the Catholic world. It was the wish of Jesus that the gospel should have a universal outreach: "Go ye therefore, teach ye all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." But, even if Jesus never gave that mandate, the whole logic of the gospel would propel the Christian towards a universal mission.. The unselfishness at the heart of the gospel forces our attention and active concern beyond our own immediate surrounds, beyond those who live in our immediate vicinity.
This concern expressed itself very eloquently through the Missionary Movement. Thousands upon thousands, generation after generation, left Ireland to spread the gospel abroad. Right through the 1940s and 1950s, Irish missionaries were spectacularly successful in their undertakings. And their activities were not confined to specific missionary activities like preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. In many African countries, for example, Missionary sisters put in place entire educational and health care systems which were efficient, effective and caring.
Professor Joe Lee, in his book Ireland 1912-1982, marvels at the achievements of the Irish missionaries in the 20th century. By the 1950s, Lee remarks, Ireland at home was a stagnant and failed entity. Yet these Irish people abroad were inventive and productive to an incredible degree.
They were of course a highly motivated group of people, may of whom achieved and experienced a freedom in Africa that they could never have expected to achieve at home. This was true in particular of women. The suffocating social restraints of the Ireland of the 1950s lifted under the bright African skies and great energy was released and creatively harnessed at the service of humanity. In fact missionaries themselves will be the first to admit that they received more from Africa and the missions than they ever gave.
Left to ourselves, and to our own small patch on the planet, I suppose we can grow too introspective, too parochial. Mission Sunday challenges that introspection, forcing us to look beyond our own borders. Today of course the eyes of the universal Catholic Church are turned towards Rome where the pope has beatified that other great Christian icon of the 20th century, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder to the Missionaries of Charity. "That she embodied and expressed in her own person the love of Christ in an intense way."
There are very few who would question that judgement. Her very life and personality was a convincing argument for Christianity. The pope himself made no secret of his great admiration for this tiny figure and we must presume it is no coincidence that he opted to beatify her on Mission Sunday, the week of his own Jubilee. At the end of the 20th century she was probably the only face that would be more widely recognised than the pope himself.
She left Albania, her parental home, at the age of 18 to work as a missionary in India. She joined the Irish Loreto Sisters in India, and began her missionary life as a teacher. (She spent a short time with the Loreta sisters in Rathfarnham).
After 20 years teaching she concluded that her missionary vocation would best be fulfilled in a life of service to the poor in the slums of that city. In 1950 she established the Missionaries of Charity. They took as their primary task that care of those who had no one to care for them. Today the order consists of over one thousand sisters and brothers in India, of whom a small number are non-Indian. Many have been trained as doctors, nurses and social workers and are in a better position to provide effective help for the slum population.
Her order has over 50 relief projects in India, among them homes for abandoned children, homes for the dying, clinics and a leper colony. The order has undertaken missionary work in Africa, Asia and some Latin American countries. It also has houses in Italy, the UK, the States and Ireland. Her work has received wide recognition, including the Nobel Prize for peace in 1979. Today I suppose she has received the ultimate accolade, beatification at the hand of her old friend John Paul II in the week of his own Jubilee.
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