Below is part of my homily at the launching of the Extraordinary Mission Year
The full text can be downloaded HERE.
The full text can be downloaded HERE.
In today's gospel Jesus tells those being sent: “Whatever house you go into, let your first words be, 'Peace to this house!'”. It is the very first word, the very first wish the Risen Jesus shares with the apostles at his Resurrection: “Peace”.
This Extraordinary Missionary Year should also be a time
- for our Church,
- for the bishop and priests,
- for our religious sisters,
- for each sodality or group,
- for each Catholic,
to deeply look at the lives of the people in the Kingdom of Eswatini and identify the realities where the peace Jesus has come to bring us is not present.
Today, I ask each one of us here and every Catholic in our diocese
- to fix our eyes on Jesus
- to fix our eyes in the lives of every person in this country
- to ask ourselves: is this the way Jesus wants us to be living?
I personally believe we have one country with very different worlds inside her. We have:
- those who seem to have access to all the financial resources of the country and dispose of them as they please and those who live from hand to mouth;
- those who feel safe knowing they have access “to the right people” in the country and those who do not count;
- not long ago we read the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. While in the Gospel the rich man has no name and the poor one at his doorstep does have a name, for us instead it is the rich one who is known by name and the rest are just statistics;
- Pope Francis frequently speaks about a "throwaway culture" in which unwanted items and unwanted people, such as the unborn, the elderly, and the poor, are discarded as waste. We could add others who, like them, just do not count;
- those to whom every opportunistic is available and those who more and more are taking to “suicide” as the only way forward because they have lost every possible hope;
- those who are being abused emotionally, sexually, physically and those who abuse others in the security that nothing would ever happen to them. A Swazi young woman wrote earlier this year eight “tweets” explaining in every detail why a woman would choose not to report having been raped;
- those who can talk freely knowing that no one would dare challenge what they say and those who are afraid of sharing what they think, in many ways they live in fear and choose to self-censor themselves.
These are situations we will come across as we are sent by Jesus to every person, to every family in this country. People who met Jesus experienced their lives being transformed. No one who met Jesus remained the same.
As Catholics we have a rich tradition in this country.
- We saw education could have the power to transform the lives of our people and today our diocese continues to do it through 60 schools;
- We saw the need to provide health and we started clinics and a hospital;
- When HIV/Aids touched our families and we started many projects and even a place where people would die with dignity. Today Hope House offers hope in a new way;
- When we became aware that people are being taken and sold as goods, we started a counter trafficking desk...
This missionary year should open our eyes to today's needs so that we address them in new ways but also to understand what causes these situations. When every day you have a headache it is not enough to take an aspirin. You want to know “why” you are always sick.
A missionary year is not just to increase our prayer meetings or preaching. We risk looking for a God that will magically change our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters without our own commitment and our own conversion.
We want to be bearers of the peace Jesus came to bring us and we want to be instruments of that peace.
As we will pray today and daily during this Mission Year,
may we find new and efficacious expressions that bring life and light to the world. Help us make it possible for all peoples to experience the saving love and mercy of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
+ José Luis Ponce de León IMC
Bishop of Manzini
