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)

Taking up the invitation of the theme of the 37^th General Chapter, we recognize our missionary vocation of being called to offer hope to a broken world that experiences war, poverty, and the degradation of creation. Hope in Jesus Christ calls us to “offer explicit witness to the saving love of the Lord, who despite our imperfections offers us his closeness, his word and his strength, and gives meaning to our lives” (EG 121).

(Acts of 2022 General Chapter n. 10)

The brokenness of the world touches every aspect of our lives and we feel so helpless in doing anything about it. St Eugene inspires us to have confidence in God as his cooperators:

We need to have some courage and confidence in God who shows us the road and will not abandon us when we act in his name and for his glory. Everywhere we have established ourselves we have made a feeble start.

Letter of Eugene to Fr  Guigues in Canada, 5 December 1844, EO I n 50

Here he was writing to the first missionaries in Canada who were few and feeble – yet their persevering confidence in God was to bear astounding missionary fruit. His words continue to speak to us today. Healing a broken world begins with our own personal and community world.

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)

As members of the Oblate Charismatic Family, we share in the prophetic function of the Church: to search for, point out and promote the presence of God in the midst of evil, and to journey with people on that journey of transformation.

BUT there is one condition! We need to be constantly on a journey of personal conversion that gives witness to the presence of God that we seek to embrace daily. Unless we do this, and are energized by the Savior, we risk becoming like so many politicians and of using their same methods. It is this danger that Eugene warned against in his vision statement that we now know as the Preface. Initially aimed at Oblate priests, its scope and vocabulary can be adjusted to accommodate the whole Charismatic Family today.

They are convinced that if priests could be formed, afire with zeal for men’s salvation, priests not given to their own interests, solidly grounded in virtue – in a word, apostolic men deeply conscious of the need to reform themselves, who would labour with all the resources at their command to convert others – then there would be ample reason to believe that in a short while people who had gone astray might be brought back to their long-unrecognized responsibilities. “Take great care about what you do and what you teach,” was Paul’s charge to Timothy, “Always do this, and thus you will save both yourself and those who listen to you” (1 Tim 4: 16).

Eugene de Mazenod, Preface

Unless we constantly seek conversion, we will not be able to withstand the criticism that any prophetic ministry invites.

We are members of the prophetic Church. While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice.

( Constitution 9)

This statement reminds me of the words of Fr. Rossetti on the ministerial priesthood. These words apply equally to all members of the Oblate Charismatic Family:

“If you have been a priest for many years and you look back at decades of service and, after reviewing your ministry, cannot find one time when your preaching, ministry, or personal witness met with disapproval, you have to ask yourself if you really preached the Gospel. If our words and homilies have never been rejected by some people and if we have never been criticized for our public stance, then we have never fully preached the message of Jesus.” (The Joy of Priesthood, p.20)

The two centuries of our Oblate history are filled with the names of a multitude of Oblate missionaries whose ministry has been prophetic. In practically every country where we serve, prophetic voices have been raised against injustice, persecution, discrimination, and any other form of betrayal of the Gospel values of God’s holiness and justice. The disapproval shown against some even led to their being put to death (Jozef Cebula, Mauricio Lefebvre, Michael Rodrigo, Cándido Castán (layman, Pozuelo), Ludwig Wrodarczyk, Paul Thoj Xyooj lLay catechist Laos), Ben de Jesus – just to name a few).

While recognizing our own need for conversion, we bear witness to God’s holiness and justice.  (Constitution 9)

The Oblates, representing the entire Oblate Charismatic Family, gathered at the 2022 General Chapter spelt this out for us:

Our pilgrim journey and Oblate identity as missionaries to the many faces of the poor call us to live as consecrated men through our vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and perseverance, “making visible the marvels wrought by God in the frail humanity of those who are called” (Vita Consecrata 20). Animation around the vows is always essential in first and ongoing formation.

Reflecting on the vows helps us to understand the freedom we gain from them—freedom to love, to go where we are called, and to live simply. Our faith and trust in God as religious men are directly reflected in how we live our vows. Authentic and fraternal growth can spring forth by living the vows daily, recognizing our human frailties, and persevering in our efforts at conversion. We look to Mary as our model and rely on her help for the strength to overcome obstacles we encounter along the way (cf. C 13). (Acts of 2022 General Chapter n. 7.3)

All members of the Oblate Charismatic Family are consecrated through baptism. The call to recognize our own need for conversion and to bear witness to God’s holiness and justice is an integral part of our being first and foremost Christians, and then in our particular lifestyles and ways of commitment.

We all need animation, ongoing formation and reflection. Our OMIWORLD website (www.omiworld.org) contains a remarkable amount of resource material (and useful links) to help 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