Eugene de Mazenod speaks to us

We are members of the prophetic Church. While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice. We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ and the new world born in his resurrection.

(Constitution 9)

Father Jetté invites us to reflect:

Announcing the liberating presence of Christ means to recall the ever present and actual role of Christ in man’s liberation and the establishment of a better world, one that is more just, more welcoming to the poor, the sick, the unfortunate.

… there is also a world more according to the Gospel, one that is already possible here on earth, thanks to Christ’s action which continues in people’s hearts and through the ministry of the Church and which strives to establish more justice, trust and love among men and between the peoples of the earth.

The Kingdom comes and grows when the Word of God is proclaimed to people; it is like a seed that is cast into the ground and is meant to grow (Matthew 13:3-23). Article 9 summons us to play our part in the coming of this new world that is more according to the Gospel. 

(F. Jetté OMI, The Apostolic Man, Pages 101-102)

“To expect heaven on earth is an illusion, but to tolerate the existence of hell on earth is not Christian. We are called to work with the poor and to help them make their world less like hell and a little more like heaven.” James Cooke OMI

We are members of the prophetic Church. While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice. We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ and the new world born in his resurrection.

(Constitution 9)

The heart of our spirituality, the focus of our charism and the source of our mission is expressed in our Rule as: “Through the eyes of our crucified Saviour we see the world which he redeemed with his blood, desiring that those in whom he continues to suffer will know also the power of his resurrection”(C 4).

Constitution 9 reflects our founding vision and impels us to do exactly this as Fr. Fernand Jetté, our Superior General from 1974 to 1986, wrote:

… everyone recognizes that it is necessary for a missionary Congregation dedicated to evangelizing the poor to open itself to this new dimension and to commit itself, clearly and according to its proper vocation, to the struggle for justice and the defense of human rights. That is the sense of the present article, an important article that is not without its elán (ed. animating force).

In fact, the prophetism that it asks for, even though it may bear in a special way on social justice, is much more vast than the sole defense of human rights.

It expresses a reality that lies at the very heart of the religious life, the latter’s basic prophetism, namely, contesting the world, that is to say, the world filled with ambiguity and marked by sin in which we live, a world to be contested with God’s justice and holiness.

If lived the way it ought to be, that is to say, radically, the religious life is, by its very existence and the practice of the vows, both an absolute contestation, often silent, of everything that is worldly in the world and in the Church, as well as the proclamation of a new world born of Christ’s resurrection.

(The Apostolic Man, p. 99)

We are members of the prophetic Church… We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ and the new world born in his resurrection. (Constitution 9)

A prophetic Church hears, lives and communicates the heart and mind of God. Its prophetic lifestyle and message communicates God’s guidance and insight into current circumstances. During this jubilee year, the Church invites us to focus on being pilgrims of hope and our Oblate Charismatic Family is concentrating on being pilgrims of hope:

Hope is our way of being in the Church. It is foundational in all that we believe. It carries us forward in mission. As we await the second coming of Jesus, we evangelize as persons of hope to bring the Good News to the poor and to care for the earth, our common home. This hope that we bear, in turn, brings hope into our own religious life and commitment.  (Acts of 2022 General Chapter n.3)

We are members of the prophetic Church. While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice. We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ and the new world born in his resurrection. (Constitution 9)

Being prophetic means hearing, living and communicating the heart and mind of God. A prophetic lifestyle and message communicate God’s guidance and insight into current circumstances. This sums up Eugene’s life and the foundation of his evangelization:

We must lead people to act like human beings, first of all, and then like Christians, and, finally, we must help them to become saints

Preface

Pope Francis gives us a key of reading of this foundational Oblate text:

Consequently, no one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life, without concern for the soundness of civil institutions, without a right to offer an opinion on events affecting society. Who would claim to lock up in a church and silence the message of Saint Francis of Assisi or Blessed Teresa of Calcutta? They themselves would have found this unacceptable. An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better that we found it (Evangelii Gaudium n. 183)

Awareness of our own shortcomings humbles us, yet God’s power makes us confident as we strive to bring all people – especially the poor – to full consciousness of their dignity as human beings and as sons and daughters of God.

(Constitution 8)

The sound of Eugene’s first sermon in the Madeleine church to the most abandoned of Aix continues to echo across the centuries:

Come now and learn from us what you are in the eyes of faith.

Poor of Jesus Christ, afflicted, wretched, suffering, sick, covered with sores, etc., all you whom misery oppresses, my brothers, dear brothers, respected brothers, listen to me.

You are God’s children, the brothers of Jesus Christ, heirs to his eternal kingdom, chosen portion of his inheritance; you are, in the words of St. Peter, a holy nation, you are kings, you are priests, you are in some way gods, You are gods, children of the Most High.

So lift up your spirits, that your defeated souls may breathe, grovel no longer on the ground: You are gods, children of the Most High. (Ps. 81:6).

Notes for the first instruction in the Church of the Madeleine, 1813, EO XV n. 114

To seek out new ways for the Word of God to reach their hearts often calls for daring; to present Gospel demands in all clarity should never intimidate us. (Constitution 8)

The representatives of the Oblate Charismatic Family who gathered at the General Chapter in 2022, addressed these words to us:

As a Chapter we invite Oblates to respond to the call of Pope Francis to recognize that we are first and foremost a people advancing on its pilgrim way towards God (Evangelii Gaudium 111). As pilgrims, we are people who begin a journey without knowing what the end of the road looks like, trusting that God is guiding us.

Consider that two senses balance our pilgrimage.

The first is that we begin with an idea of who we are and understanding where we came from;

the second is the realization that as we walk the path, we are transformed as we encounter the other.

What we thought we understood takes on new meanings, and how we understand ourselves changes as we encounter Jesus. Recall the two disciples who walked along the way to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-35). They thought they knew the end of the events that occurred in Jerusalem, but their understanding of the things which they thought they knew changed when they arrived at Emmaus. Their hearts were burning as they walked. Their identities also have changed, and now they identify themselves as evangelizers who go to announce the Good News 

We will let our lives be enriched by the poor and the marginalized as we work with them, for they can make us hear in new ways the Gospel we proclaim. We must always be sensitive to the mentality of the people, drawing on the riches of their culture and religious traditions

 (Rule 8a)

“Being missionaries of hope means knowing how to read the signs of its hidden presence in the daily life of the people. Learning to recognize hope among the poor to whom you have been sent, who often succeed in finding it amid the most difficult situations.

Letting yourselves be evangelized by the poor you evangelize: they teach you the way of hope, for the Church and for the world.”

Pope Francis to the OMI General Chapter 2022

To seek out new ways for the Word of God to reach their hearts often calls for daring; to present Gospel demands in all clarity should never intimidate us. (Constitution 8)

The Church recognizes this quality in our Oblate Charismatic Family:

You have chosen to be pilgrims, to rediscover and live your condition as wayfarers in this world, beside the men and women, the poor and the least of the earth, to whom the Lord sends you to announce his Kingdom.

Your founder too was a wayfarer, at the origins of your religious family, when he would go walking with his first companions in the villages of his native Provence, preaching the popular missions and restoring to the faith the poor who had turned away from it, and that even the ministers of the Church had abandoned…

Pilgrims and wayfarers, always ready to set out, like Jesus with his disciples in the Gospel.… towards the peripheries of the world beloved by God, and living a charism that leads you towards the furthest, the poorest, those whom no one reaches. Walking this road with love and fidelity, you, dear brothers, render a great service to the Church.

Pope Francis to the OMI General Chapter 2022

To seek out new ways for the Word of God to reach their hearts often calls for daring; to present Gospel demands in all clarity should never intimidate us.

Constitution 8

The description of his preaching by the great evangelist, John Wesley, can easily be applied St Eugene as well: “’I set myself on fire, and people come out and watch me burn.”

The history of the Oblate Charismatic Family’ history of “lighting fires” is filled with amazing stories of constantly seeking new ways to reach people “through the eyes of the Crucified Savior.” I refer you to Oblate websites whose pages are regularly filled with stories about the amazing different ways of Oblate evangelization today.

From our official website Oblate Communications which regularly features the latest Family news: http://www.omiworld.org/

and the list of accessible OMI sites around the world: https://www.omiworld.org/resources/other-oblate-links/

We will always be close to the people with whom we work, taking into account their values and aspirations. To seek out new ways for the Word of God to reach their hearts often calls for daring; to present Gospel demands in all clarity should never intimidate us. (Constitution 8)

Essentially founded with the focus of rebuilding the ravaged French Church through the preaching of parochial missions 200 years ago, we find ourselves responding to very different missionary challenges today. The common thread has always been a daring to seek out new ways for the Word to reach people. The scope of mission was to dare to respond to the needs of the youth, the prisoners, domestic workers, farm laborers of Provence, then they dared to move to shrines as permanent mission centers, and then to dare to cross oceans to reach out to abandoned people in the forests of Canada, the slums of England, the plantations  of Ceylon, the desert of Algeria, the valleys of Natal and mountains of Lesotho – always reaching out to people of different languages and cultures and areas of abandonment. Always responding with daring to every missionary challenge.

In the OMI Lacombe newsletter we read about Pope Pius XI’s recognition of Oblate daring in presenting the Gospel:

In 1938 Fr. Prime Girard, OMI was visiting Europe for his vacation. During his stay in Rome he attended the private audience with Holy Father Pius XI. “Curé of the North Pole” reported to the Pope about the Arctic missions, about Inuit and about the harsh reality of the North. Pius XI, who was attentive from the very beginning to the Arctic missions, listened to the stories of Fr. Girard with a great interest. It is then that he called the Oblates the specialists of the most difficult missions. This calling is attributed to the Oblates all over the world till today, but very few remember that it was Fr. Prime Girard, OMI and the pioneers of the Arctic missions who, in heroic way, have deserved this call. (http://www.omilacombe.ca/2016/03/14/specialists-of-the-most-difficult-missions)