THE POOR FOR THE OBLATE FAMILY ARE THOSE WHOSE CONDITION CRIES OUT FOR SALVATION (Constitution 5)
Wherever we work, our mission is especially to those people whose condition cries out for salvation and for the hope which only Jesus Christ can fully bring. These are the poor with their many faces; we give them our preference. (Constitution 5)
Eugene used the expressions, “poor” and “most abandoned” interchangeably, always referring to the same people. The “most abandoned” were usually the materially poor who did not have the means to receive spiritual help. As Eugene and the early Oblates became increasingly involved in this mission, so did their horizons open to include all groups who were in need of “the hope which only Jesus Christ can fully bring.”
Initially, when the young Eugene went to the seminary, he expressed his reason for doing so as:
As the Lord is my witness, what he wants of me, … is that I devote myself especially to his service and try to reawaken the faith that is becoming extinct amongst the poor…
Letter to his mother, June 29, 1808, EO XIV, n. 27
After his ordination, in his first Lenten sermon to the poor of Aix en Provence:
The poor, that precious portion of the Christian family, cannot be left in their ignorance. So important did our divine Savior consider them that he took it upon himself to instruct them; and he gave as proof that his mission was divine the fact that the poor were being instructed: Pauperes evangelizantur.
Notes for Lenten Instructions, March 1813, EO XV
Over 40 years later, when he saw the misery of the poor in London: “Poor people, they need food for the body. How much more do they need food for the soul.”
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I think of the many God has used to reawaken the gifts that were given to me in Baptism. How I have been cared for and loved, formed in much the same way that the Master Potter forms and reforms me as I am led to go ever more deeply with those in whom I recognize myself.
I think of the many who I have come to love only because God has allowed me to see through the eyes of Jesus on the cross. I think for a moment of Fr. Albert Lacombe OMI and his brothers who shared their experience of God with all those they met.
Small steps within large footsteps… I remember a retreat I made some years ago when I felt that God was asking me to love all of His children who did not know love in the same sense as myself. I am thinking of the “really bad people in history and in the now of that moment” and how I shared that with the person giving the retreat. To this day I am not sure how he kept himself from laughing out loud. I find myself wanting to laugh now. Seriously though – there is a lot of poverty that cannot be alleviated by any amount of money. It is to these that I freely give of myself to accompany and walk together with, just as I do with the many members of the Oblate Charismatic Family…
I am called to walk those whose poverty is not immediately recognized or thought to be worthy in any way. These are the ones on the map of life which I have been invited to follow. They are among the many who have become so very precious.