Bishop Joel M. Konzen, S.M.

At the grocery store or elsewhere, I am sometimes asked if I would like to donate to a charity. These may or may not be familiar to me, but they are always domestic, that is, confined to aiding causes in the United States. One of the great traditions of our church, though, has been the urge to mission, to see our horizons for evangelization and service extending beyond oceans and national boundaries. While I am glad for the many opportunities I have to contribute to building up the Kingdom of God in our country, I am grateful, too, when I am stretched to see the ways that I might reach out to those in other regions of the world and in less familiar circumstances. 

In my elementary grades, we were asked to save our small change during Lent in a “mite box.” At the end of Lent the proceeds would be collected and sent to support a Catholic mission overseas. That would sometimes send me to the world globe to get a sense of where these far-off places were that we were supporting. I felt a certain thrill at being a very small part of the effort to bring the faith to remote areas.  Similarly, having been part of the push to bring Catholic education to a poor section of Ghana has reminded me of the value of participating in the mission of evangelizing and human development on foreign soil.  

We do this because of a belief that we are united as God’s children wherever we may be, and we rely on each other for different types of assistance as the times demand. Before we had men born in the United States entering seminaries, we depended on priests coming from Germany, France, Ireland, and elsewhere. A century later we sent American priests to be missioned in Central America, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, among them members of my own Marist congregation. Now, in another century, we more and more rely on priests in the United States who have come from South America, Africa, and Asia. This is part of the changing circumstances of the church, its expansion in different directions as is necessary to respond to needs. 

I am praying that we in the United States will continue the good works that our American missionaries did in an earlier time, to build the communities where they ministered and to build those communities’ trust in the church that is aiding them in their desire to live in dignity and sufficiency. The United States Catholic Bishops rely on the work of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to extend the care and fraternal concern that is proper to our Catholic tradition. CRS delivers critical, in some cases life-saving, assistance in addition to training and education designed to make those in poor regions less reliant on outside aid. 

When he visited the United States for the first time, now St. John Paul II told his audience in Yankee Stadium, “You must never be content to leave the poor just the crumbs of the feast. You must take of your substance, and not just of your abundance, in order to help them. And you must treat them like guests at your family table.” This is so much of what the Catholic Church has sought to realize as it brings faith and hope to those in Haiti, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other countries beset with conflict and poverty. St. John Paul’s reference to treating the poor like guests at our family table is a wonderful image that applies to many others who find themselves, through no fault of their own, in grave difficulty: refugees, those injured and orphaned by war, young people who have not enjoyed the availability of education.  

In addition to so many in the United States deserving our charity, the mission we have to those suffering elsewhere should not be forgotten. Pope St. Pius X reminded us: “No means is more efficacious than charity. ‘For the Lord is not in the earthquake.’ It is vain to hope to attract souls to God by a bitter zeal. On the contrary, we must work with all patience.”   

May that patience and kindness lead to an earthly dividend and a heavenly approval.