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)

This phrase certainly mirrors the spirit of Eugene and the first Missionaries! In their parish missions they used every possible form of ceremony, symbolic gestures and ministry to communicate their message and respond to the needs of the people. As Bishop of Marseilles, Eugene had the same approach in responding to the most urgent needs of the members of the local church and beyond. Apart from pastoral letters, sermons and personal contacts, he responded by enlisting as many people as possible in the charitable responses of the diocese. He wrote:

Admire how these charities are multiplying. How many new institutions have an objective that was previously unknown!

Childhood, old age, the sick, the poor, the worker bent from morning to night under the weight of the workday and the heat, the innocent in peril, the disgusting and remorse-ridden vice, the young prisoner already initiated into the habits that make criminals, the serious offender hardened in crime, the rich man himself often so helpless before God on his deathbed:
charity embraces everything; and when there are new needs, it invents new responses when necessary:

spiritual help, bodily help, bread for the soul, bread for the body; instructions for ignorance; advice, guidance, support for weakness; a sanctuary for virtue or for penance; pious sentiments, sweet consolations, supernatural strength for the dying;

all types of good works are lavished in the name of Jesus Christ.

Pastoral letter of Bishop de Mazenod to the Diocese of Marseilles for Lent 1847

Our mission puts us on constant call to respond to the most urgent needs of the Church

Constitution 7)

At this moment, delegates representing every area of the Oblate world are gathered in India in a meeting that takes place in between our General Chapters. Constitution 7 focuses exactly on what this meeting is about: to examine our “constant call to respond to the most urgent needs of the Church” as Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

We invite every member of the Oblate Charismatic Family to join in prayer to accompany our delegates as they open themselves to the directions of the Holy Spirit in discerning responses to the most urgent needs of the Church today.

You can follow the progress of the inter-chapter on the OMIWORLD website: https://www.omiworld.org

203 YEARS AGO ON AUGUST 15, 1822

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.