Comboni Lay Missionaries

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A missionary sending, blessed by the star of Evangelization.

by
LMC Guatemala

Our dear laywomen, Mercedes and Carolina, spent from September 13 to October 11 in a small experience of community life in a community of the Little Vincentian Sisters of Charity, who welcomed them with much love and generosity.

On their return they attended the feast of St. Daniel Comboni, which we celebrated as a Comboni family at Casa Comboni. It was a very joyful afternoon, full of enthusiasm and many surprises, we all had lunch together and shared with the people who study in the school of evangelization run by the MCCJ. We also played BINGO, an activity with many prizes that turned out to be a great success.

During the mass Mercedes and Carolina introduced themselves, they told a little of who they are and where they are going, many were admired for their decision and collaborated with joy for the cause.

On Sunday 20 we were ready to celebrate as a community the DOMUND, with a special event.

At 7:00 p.m., the sending out mass for Mercedes and Carolina was held at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary, patroness of Guatemala. The mass was presided by Monsignor Tulio Lopez, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, who, with much admiration, dedicated part of his homily to the missions and the courageous decision to say Yes to Christ through the mission of the agents, he told them that his heart is young, full of ardor for service and that Guatemala sends them together with the prayers of this people. Fr. Juan Diego Calderón, provincial of Central America, presided together with Monsignor Tulio the celebration and together they did the blessing and sending.

As a community we feel very happy, joyful and encouraged, because Christ has chosen these lay women to continue with His mission, that of building the Kingdom, and we are participating in sending them, working together with them, opening our hearts to this fire that burns for Christ and does not go out.

We trust in Providence, that the road is being smoothed by God and that all the obstacles are being overcome little by little, we believe that St. Daniel Comboni intercedes for this small community and accompanies us with hope, so that we can continue with this work of giving “a thousand lives for the mission”.

We continue to work and pray that our dear Mercedes and Carolina will soon be in Peru, so that they can tell with their testimony, the wonders that God works in their lives.

A fraternal embrace from Guatemala.

CLM Guatemala Community

An adventure with Jesus in Arequipa

by
LMC Guatemala

Dear CLM and friends of the mission who read us.

Wishing you abundant blessings in your missionary life, we greet you Mercedes and Carolina, Comboni Lay Missionaries of Guatemala.

We would like to share with you a little of our personal history.

My name is Mercedes, I am a widow and I am 80 years old, mother of 3 children, 6 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren.

Before becoming a missionary, I worked in pastoral communities in the preparation of readers, acolytes, missionary children, and I was instituted as a minister of the Eucharist, also forming open cenacles at home; despite all this work done for the Lord, I had the desire to know the mission and I began to mission with the Comboni Lay Missionaries of Guatemala traveling to San Luis Peten, once a year, for four years. One of the activities we did was to visit marginalized villages deep in the mountains, without access to electricity and water. I would go on mission listening to the needs of the people, sharing and living with them.

I have been on the road of mission and the Comboni charism for fourteen years now, in various situations and projects, such as in Santa Cruz Chinautla, a municipality with a high indigenous population, evangelizing children and women of scarce resources, working in the program of evangelization, formation and nutrition of children in Santa Catarina Pinula in some peripheral villages and doing some community life experiences, both in El Salvador in a peripheral neighborhood and in Santo Domingo Xenacoj, in marginalized indigenous villages. My desire to go on mission outside of Guatemala has been growing.

My name is Carolina, I am single and 68 years old, mother of 2 children and 3 grandchildren. Before being in the mission, I worked for many years in a Catholic Christ-centered group, in open and closed retreats of first evangelization, also giving talks of personal growth to adults who joined the group from the retreats, at the same time to the children who met on Fridays in the group assembly meeting.

For four years Mercedes shared with me about the mission and her experience in it, until one day I agreed to go to the Comboni Lay Missionaries and I stayed, I have eight years of being in the mission and in the way of the Comboni charism. I was in formation for two years, then I went to visit a village called La Salvadora in Santa Catarina Pinula and I have worked with the local people, I have seen their needs and I have felt that strong call to go on mission outside Guatemala.

Like Mercedes, I was with her in Santa Cruz Chinautla and in the experience of community life in El Salvador.

AT THIS MOMENT we are living our experience of community life and specific preparation, to be able to leave in a few days to Villa Ecológica in Arequipa, Peru.

We are living this experience in a Home for the Elderly located in Quetzaltenango, five hours from Guatemala City, which is where we live. We have left our home, families, loved ones and all our usual work to prepare ourselves for the mission Ad Gentes.

This experience has allowed us to live together and get to know each other better. Alberto de la Portilla has given us formation, which has been very enriching to discern our vocation, we have prayed together and we have asked ourselves if we really want to leave Guatemala because of all the problems that come with arriving in a place with a different culture and customs, but the answer has always been YES, trusting in divine providence that goes ahead of us. It has not been easy to adapt to the climate, because here it is very cold and it has rained a lot, otherwise, we have been welcomed with much affection by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, from whom we have learned a lot about the organization of the Asylum, the way in which they harvest their own food and take care of the 32 elderly women in their care. The missionary should always learn everything he can to be able to serve in the missionary journey.

Receive a cordial greeting, Mercedes and Carolina.

CLM Guatemala

A Plan, so ancient, yet so new

by
Comboni

«The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, For the Lord has anointed me He has sent me to bring the Good News to the poor; To bind up hearts that are broken, To proclaim liberty to captives, Freedom to those in prison, To proclaim a year of favour from the Lord » (Isaiah 61,1-2a)

«The Catholic, who is used to judging things in a supernatural light, looked upon Africa, not through the pitiable lens of human interest, but in the pure light of faith; there he saw an infinite number of brothers who belonged to the same family as himself with one common Father in heaven […] then, carried away by the impetus of that love set aflame by the divine light on Calvary Hill, when it came forth from the side of the Crucified One to embrace the whole human family, he felt his heart beat faster» (Writings, 2742).

Dear Confreres, Pax et Bonum in the Lord Jesus, the missionary of the Father!

It is with a profound feeling of joy and gratitude that we greet you on the occasion of the So-lemnity of Saint Daniel Comboni. This celebration reminds us that we must keep both the “memoria” (anamnesis) both of the Founder, lived with immense passion, and his death, accepted as a gift of love for the poorest and most abandoned, in such a way that the life and mission of every spiritual son and daughter of his may truly become “love incarnate” in our missionary service.

This memorial of the heavenly birth (dies natalis) of our Holy Founder challenges us to deepen his charism, as the living heritage that must animate us in matters of mission in the world of today as “missionary disciples” of Jesus, in a Combonian manner.

Recently, we recalled the 160th anniversary of the founding charismatic experience lived by Comboni on 15 September 1984 during the triduum in preparation for the beatification of Margaret Mary Alacoque, as he prayed at the tomb of Saint Peter in Rome. It was an experience that led him to conceive the Plan for the Regeneration of Africa. That Plan is not just a text, a mere operative strate-gy or a dream to cling to but the fruit of inspiration “from above”, from the Holy Spirit, that is, that “called” Comboni and sent him to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to the poorest and abandoned.

Thanks to his great passion for the salvation of the Africans and his missionary enthusiasm, by his life he “gave flesh” to that Plan. After him, his missionary men and women – his authentic “sons and daughters” who make his dream their own – have continued to “incarnate” that Plan with their life, their generosity, their spirit of sacrifice and their apostolic courage. We continue to do this today, while broadening and updating the original inspiration of the Founder no longer in Africa alone but in every continent, with the same spirit (charism), in the world of our time, still inhabited by persons and peoples who suffer, who are marginalised, exploited, vilified, the victims of atrocious injustice and even killed. In recent months, the situation in Sudan has become particularly dramatic, due to a con-flict that seems to have no end.

take to heart the main insights of that Plan. We would like to list some of them.

First of all, the conviction that the evangelisation of Africa must be realised by the Africans themselves, that they must not be mere spectators but become the protagonists of a new history of their own of liberation and dignity.

Second, the heartfelt appeal addressed to the whole Church to commit itself in its entirety to promoting the evangelization of Africa, calling it to gather together and commit all the missionary forces existing in the world of that time and inviting them to cooperate in a true synodal spirit.

Thirdly, the vision of mission as essentially the binomial of “The proclamation of the Gospel” and “human promotion”. A century would pass before the Church convoked the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and Pope Paul VI announced the regular convocation of the Synod of Bishops (1965). The third Synod, in 1971, produced a powerful document capable of sustaining the living ac-tion of the Church regarding the problems of justice and peace on a global level. The following state-ment of the bishops is splendidly courageous and prophetic: «Action on behalf of justice and partici-pation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preach-ing of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation» (Justice in the World, 6).

We must not fail to grasp the prophecy, the actuality or the urgency of the missionary proposal formulated in the Plan, characterised by a true missionary spirit and strategies that are valid for our time and our humanity of today. It is not unjustified to see in the vision of Comboni a veritable harmony with the thematic of the Synod on Synodality taking place in Rome at this time and which we, the children of Comboni today, are called to make our own.

However, to discover the richness of the vision of the Plan and make it operational in our lives, we must adopt the attitude of deep prayer and docility to the Spirit that the Founder had. We ask the Holy Spirit to descend upon us as He descended upon him, enabling him to “See Africa’s hour” and to feel within himself an irrepressible desire to dedicate himself entirely as a “free gift” to a new Afri-can mission that would respond to the urgencies and challenges of his time.

Ultimately, it is a question of always having the courage to start from the Lord, to be driven by his Spirit, without ever falling into the temptation of self-referentiality, which not only impoverishes the mission, but also destroys it, just as the Rules of 1871 remind us: «Completely emptied of self and deprived of every human comfort, the Missionary to Africa works only for his God, for the most abandoned peoples in the world and for eternity » (Rules of the Institute for the Missions of Africa, 1871; Writings 2702).

It is obvious that the Plan conceived by Comboni, before becoming a written document, was al-so a dream and a passion, an uncontainable force in his heart that overflowed in charity. We can say that the Plan is the expression of a love so genuine and heartfelt that it became a source of mission.

We too need to have such love! Let us ask ourselves: what passions drive me to live the mission today? How does my heart leap when I encounter injustice, oppression, cold indifference, and the many other evils of our society today? In the quotidian of my life, is there still space, time and open-ness to God for His Spirit to enter my heart and sustain it? To what extent does my love for the poor oblige me to give myself completely to them, arousing in me such a strength as to transform my life into a gift of love?

In this “missionary month” of October, we have the opportunity to follow and live the Synod of Bishops. Let us take advantage of these experiences of ecclesial communion, in sincere listening, in fraternal welcome and in walking together, aware that the Spirit who inspired Comboni can also in-spire us and help us to overcome our weaknesses and produce fruits that are an expression of the per-ennial concern that God has for all his sons and daughters, especially the weakest and suffering.

We ask for our Comboni Family the gift of being filled with a love that becomes real, as a con-crete response to the challenges of today’s mission, always ready to make common cause with the poor.

Best wishes to everyone on this joyful solemnity!

Rome, 10 October 2024

The MCCJ General Council

For a shared mission

by
Papa Francisco

“We are community.” This is one thing the Pope says to us for the month of October.

Pope Francis reminds us of the importance of walking together, making ourselves “co-responsible for the Church’s mission.” He also emphasizes that priests are not “the bosses of the laity, but their pastors,” and that “Jesus called us, one and others – not one above others, or one on one side and others on another side, but complementing each other. We are community.”

This is why consecrated persons, the laity, priests, all Christians must “witness with our lives,” always giving the best of what they know how to do.

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