There are just so many times our Church tries to tell people about something that really matters for their faith lives, talking at them about it, but never involving them in a matter deemed critical to their spiritual life.
One of these critical matters is mission and evangelization. You know mission – those stories of people in faraway places whose lives do not intersect with ours, but whom we are told are important to us. From the time we were very young in school we heard about mission, through the Mission groups like the Holy Childhood Society, for whom we saved our pennies every Lent using the little cardboard “bank boxes” they furnished us to save our Lenten sacrifices to provide an Easter of relative abundance for them from our meager but sincere efforts.
Fr. Rich LoBianco, CARITAS For Children's Director of Catholic Mission and Evangelization, explains how CARITAS child sponsorship programs can be a great way for people to get involved in global missions in a personal way.
You've also heard the word evangelization and no doubt have some vague understanding that it relates to sharing things about our faith with others. It’s really about so much more and at the same time so much less than we might imagine.
It’s a whole different ballgame when we put a human face on mission and evangelization. Recently at my parish we celebrated Mission Sunday, the annual weekend when our diocese, along with all the others across our United States, takes up a collection in support of the Church’s missionary activity.
This year I decided that this celebration could not remain anonymous and generic if it were to have the full impact it should make on every believer here. I showed a PowerPoint on our big screen in church of one of the real CARITAS children our faith community has a relationship with, Godfrey Kisekka. The presentation showed him at his school, Saint Alphonsus Demonstration School in Nkokonjeru, Uganda, in his village, and in his life. The images traced the evolution of his growth and development physically, but more importantly his development spiritually and his empowerment as a person, as he found with more confidence, as the pictures demonstrated, his identity and potential as a person and child of God.
By supporting Godfrey through CARITAS child sponsorship programs, the people of our faith community are helping him to realize his dignity as a child of God.
For the first time I really think the people of our faith community felt a connection with this young boy, and by extension, all our sisters and brothers, who though a world away, share a relationship with us as sons and daughters and children of God. I hope they were awakened to their responsibility and felt like they were a part of CARITAS’ mission. It is a great and humbling privilege to have the opportunity to love Godfrey and see the face of Christ in him.
Evangelization isn’t about reciting church doctrine to each other, but about sharing the good news that God loves us. It’s the realization which can only begin in our hearts that this love becomes real and visible when we love another person like Godfrey and all the other children and persons of our world waiting to find Christ in us. Really so much less than we thought, but so much more that only God can reveal.
