Eugene de Mazenod speaks to us

Our mission puts us on constant call to respond to the most urgent needs of the Church through various forms of witness and ministry.

(Constitution 7)

Preaching missions at home and sending missionaries abroad have been traditionally central to our apostolate. There is no ministry, however, which is foreign to us, provided we never lose sight of the Congregation’s primary purpose: to evangelize the most abandoned.

Rule 7b

Oblate missionaries have been amazingly generous and creative in responding to the ever-changing needs of the Church, as Pope Francis recognized:

“Your missionary history is the story of many consecrated people, who have offered and sacrificed their lives for the mission, for the poor, in order to reach distant lands where there were still “sheep without a shepherd”. Today, every land is ‘mission territory’, every human dimension is mission territory, awaiting the proclamation of the Gospel. Pope Pius XI called you ‘specialists of difficult missions’. The current field of mission seems to expand every day, embracing the poor again and again, the men and women bearing the face of Christ who ask for help, consolation, hope, in the most desperate situations in life.”

(Pope Francis to the 2016 Oblate General Chapter)

The homepage of the OMIWORLD website daily reflects Oblate responses to the most urgent needs of the Church throughout the world: https://www.omiworld.org. Make it the homepage of your browser. You can also download the OMIWORLD app and find even more Oblate Family news on Facebook “OMI World.”

Hopefully my daily reflection in “St Eugene Speaks” imparts something of the Eugene’s spirit to impel us to respond to the most urgent needs of the Church.

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

CC&RR, Constitution 7

Here we find our Oblate ministry spelt out in a nutshell. Too often Eugene is presented solely as a do-gooder with a special love for helping the poor. He certainly was this, but his focus of “doing good” and “serving the poor” was very specific and clear: it was to reawaken their faith and to accompany them in their journey of discovery as to “who Christ is” for them.

Eugene was not primarily a philanthropist, or social worker, or NGO or popular influencer – to use contemporary expressions. His love for the poor was focused on their faith and on their relationship with Jesus the Savior. This is why he founded the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and gave us this focus as the fundamental reason for our vocation.

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”.

Constitution 7

Eugene’s instruction to every member of his missionary family:

Insist on making Jesus Christ known and loved. Speak often of this divine Saviour and of all he has done to save mankind. Make them resolve never to spend a day without praying.

Letter to Fr. Jean Viala, 17 January 1849, EO IV n4

From the very beginning of our missionary history, our goal has been: “teach who Jesus Christ is” (Preface). Today the same sentiment continues to be expressed in this way.

May this be our guiding light today in all our actions.

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

Constitution 7

Our helping others has to begin with ourselves. If we have not discovered what it means to have Jesus Christ as the center and point of unity of our lives, and do not live with and for him, we have only empty theories to offer to people. Our Constitutions and Rules point the way to achieve the personal holiness which comes from knowing Jesus Christ. Constitution 2 invites us to be:

ready to leave everything to be disciples of Jesus. The desire to co-operate with him draws us to know him more deeply, to identify with him, to let him live in us.

Constitution 31 sums it up well:

We achieve unity in our life only in and through Jesus Christ. Our ministry involves us in a variety of tasks, yet each act in life is an occasion for personal encounter with the Lord, who through us gives himself to others and through others gives himself to us.

May all those we meet be touched by “the Lord, who through us gives himself to others.”

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

CC&RR, Constitution 7

We were initially founded to “re-awaken the faith in the people” whose faith and religious expression had been stifled as a result of the French Revolution – primarily by conducting extensive parish missions in the rural villages.

In the course of this ministry, the Oblates came across people who had never been evangelized, thus necessitating a ministry to “awaken” their sense of God and religious knowledge. It was in the foreign missions, however, that the ministry to awaken the faith of people in Jesus Christ took root. Writing to a missionary sent to North America, Eugene said:

Foreign missions compared to our missions in Europe have a special character of a higher kind, because this is the true apostolate of announcing the Good News to nations which have not yet been called to knowledge of the true God and of his son Jesus Christ…. This is the mission of the apostles: “Go, teach all people” this teaching of the truth must penetrate to the most distant nations so that they may be regenerated in the waters of baptism.

You are among those to whom Jesus Christ has addressed these words, giving you your mission as he gave their mission to the apostles who were sent to convert our fathers. From this point of view, which is a true one, there is nothing higher than your ministry and that of our other Fathers who are wearing themselves out in the glacial regions to discover the indigenous people whom it is their task to save.

Eugene’s letter to Fr. Pascal Ricard, 6 December 1851, EO II n 157

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

Constitution 7

Eugene founded us to “reawaken the faith” of the people of France after the French Revolution. Christopher Dawson described that situation as “an atmosphere of defeat and disaster” and continued:

“Everything had to be rebuilt from the foundations. The religious orders and the monasteries, the Catholic universities and colleges and, not least, the foreign missions had all been destroyed or reduced to poverty and impotence. Worst of all, the Church was still associated with the unpopular cause of the political reaction and the tradition of the ancien régime.

Yet, in spite of all these disasters, the Church did recover and a revival of Catholicism took place, so that the church was in a far stronger position by 1850 than it had been 100 years before when it still possessed its ancient wealth and privileges.” (The Historic Reality of Christian Culture, p. 57 – https://archive.org/)

Eugene’s Missionaries played an important role in the recovery of the Church through the impact of the prolonged and intense parish missions in France and Corsica, and later in the missions outside of France where they encountered Catholics who had fallen away.

(The topic of the popular missions has been reflected on in depth in this series in the past. I invite you to consult some of these entries, from https://www.eugenedemazenod.net/?p=358 to https://www.eugenedemazenod.net/?p=2524 )

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

CC&RR, Constitution 7

Before his conversion journey, Eugene intellectually knew “who Christ is” – after 25 years of religious observance he knew his catechism. What happened at his conversion was that this knowledge became experiential. He entered into a relationship with Jesus Christ that would be the characteristic quality of the rest of his life.

Conversion did not mean getting to know about Jesus but getting to know Jesus in a relationship that he became passionate about. From now on he would “act in everything and for everything” only for him and he would love him “above all else.”

What he received was so powerful that he was impelled to share it with others – particularly those whose situation made it difficult to come to the same knowledge. These were the poor for Eugene, as he described in this letter to his mother:

As the Lord is my witness, what he wants of me is that I renounce a world where it is almost impossible to find salvation, such is the power of apostasy there; that I devote myself especially to his service and try to reawaken the faith that is becoming extinct among the poor; in a word, that I make myself available to carry out any orders he may wish to give me for his glory and the salvation of souls he has redeemed by his precious blood.

Eugene’s letter to his mother, 29 June 1808, EO XV n. 27.

All who share in Eugene’s charism participate in the same dynamic of working to lead others to the same experiential knowledge of the Savior. Each in our own way, and in our particular circumstances, has this mission of helping others in this process.

It is noteworthy that the text says “we will help them to discover ‘who Christ is’.” Mission does not mean going to people to fill them with knowledge – it means journeying with them as they discover and deepen their understanding of the meaning of a relationship with Jesus.  Eugene’s use of this phrase in the Preface speaks of helping people to understand that which Jesus Christ is for them (“ce que c’est que Jésus Christ”) – who he is in their lives and the meaning he gives.

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

Constitution 7

Fr. Michel Courvoisier writes:

“Nil linquendum est inausum ut proferatur imperium Christi…”, states the text of the Preface of our Constitutions and Rules of 1826. As a literal translation, I suggest: “We must overlook nothing, leaving nothing undared to advance, to extend the reign of Christ”. This apothegm has sustained and presently sustains the missionary thrust of the Congregation.”

Eugene’s life was made up of a series of daring actions, of sparing no effort, for his Savior. Breaking away from his mother’s dominating wishes and the high society of Aix, his going to the seminary in Paris unleashed a chain reaction of daring events. He spared no effort in his defense of the rights of the Church in the persecution of Napoleon (nor of any other King of France in later years).

He spared no effort in giving himself to the service of prisoners and youth in Aix, and then to the villages of Provence. He dared to invite others to join him and spared no effort to get us to evangelize the rural towns of southern France.

He dared to introduce the moral theology of St Alphonsus which stressed mercy and compassion in the face of the prevailing Jansenism in France.

He dared to send missionaries to Canada and to the British Isles and Ireland at a time when we were so few and not coping with the demands in France. He spared no effort in the missionary outreach of the Oblates until his death.

As Bishop of Marseille, he spared no effort to evangelize his people and to lead them to respond to the never-ending needs of the poor with their many faces.

“Daring” in the Dictionary of Oblate Values (http://www.omiworld.org/en/dictionary/dictionary-of-oblate-values_vol-1_d/1037/daring/)

We will spare no effort to awaken or to reawaken the faith in the people to whom we are sent, and we will help them to discover “who Christ is”

Constitution 7

“Spare no effort!” In 1818 Eugene wrote these words in the first version of what has come to be known as our “Preface.” For over 200 years these words have been engraved in the hearts and imaginations of our Oblate missionaries: “spare no effort!” These words sum up Eugene’s entire life and the history of his Missionary Family present today in 65 countries.

The Church has shown its recognition through the words of the Popes at our General Chapters. Pope John Paul II, for example:

With you all, I give thanks to the Lord for the work accomplished by the Oblates. Your presence on every continent, and particularly in distant lands, brings you into contact with men and women of different cultures and traditions; this is the sign of the Church’s universality and of her concern for all peoples.

[…] You are also concerned with the new areas of mission, especially the communications media and confident dialogue with the people of today, in order to establish an ever more fraternal society and an era of justice and peace. You are making courageous efforts to meet new, urgent pastoral, apostolic and missionary needs, and to undertake the necessary inculturation, a patient process which, while requiring you to listen to people, “must in no way compromise the distinctiveness and integrity of the Christian faith” (Redemptoris missio, n. 52). The Church appreciates your willingness and concern to answer the Lord’s call wherever you are sent and to put yourselves at the service of the local Churches […]To the XXXIII General Chapter, September 24, 1998

Eugene charges us today: spare no effort to make him known in whatever you do, in your speech and in your actions of love for others

Oblate Brothers share in the common priesthood of Christ. They are called to cooperate in their own way in reconciling all things in him (cf. Col 1: 20). Through their religious consecration, they offer a particular witness to a life inspired by the Gospel.

Brothers participate in the missionary work of building up the Church everywhere, especially in those areas where the Word is first being proclaimed. Missioned by the Church, their technical, professional or pastoral service, as well as the witness of their life, constitute their ministry of evangelization.

Rule 7 c

“The Brothers brought their many skills to the Oblate mission, especially in teaching: “in 1850-1853, brothers were teaching in Canada and in England. In the period between 1841 and 1861, at least twenty-five brothers taught catechism in France, at Vico and in Sri Lanka.

The brothers were so much a part of the Congregation after 1841 that Bishop de Mazenod distributed as many as possible in the houses in France and made them a part of every missionary contingent. Moreover, more and more brothers joined the Congregation after the acceptance of foreign missions. At the time of the death of the Founder, of the four hundred and fourteen Oblates, there were eighty-seven brothers, giving a total of twenty percent.

In the appendix of the 1853 Rule on foreign missions, Bishop de Mazenod … opened up a new field of apostolate for them by asking that in all our missions the priest should never be alone, that he be accompanied by at least one brother. He added that the Oblates should turn their attention to teaching the youth” (S. Rebordinos, https://www.omiworld.org/lemma/brothers/ )