International immersion trips

During COVID, immersion trips have had to be suspended. Hopefully you can find other ways to Serve in the World. Some reflections on that theme follow.

When Mass Ends…Serving in the World Begins

Quotes

Saint Francis of Assisi bears witness to the need to respect all that God has created and as He created it, without manipulating and destroying creation; rather to help it grow, to become more beautiful and more like what God created it to be. And above all, Saint Francis witnesses to respect for everyone, he testifies that each of us is called to protect our neighbor, that the            human person is at the center of creation, at the place where God – our creator – willed that we should be. Not at the mercy of the idols we have created! [Pope Francis, 10/4/13, Assisi]

If the whole Church takes up this missionary impulse, she has to go forth to everyone without exception. But to whom should she go first? When we read the Gospel we find a clear indication: not so much our friends and wealthy neighbors, but above all the poor and the sick, those who are usually despised and overlooked, “those who cannot repay you” (Lk 14:14). There can be no room for doubt or for explanations which weaken so clear a message. Today and always, “the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel”,[52] and the fact that it is freely preached to them is a sign of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish. We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.  [Pope Francis, 48, The Joy of the Gospel, 2013]

Our faith in Christ, who became poor, and was always close to the poor and the outcast, is the basis of our concern for the integral development of society’s most neglected members. [Pope Francis, 186, The Joy of the Gospel, 2013]

Solidarity is a spontaneous reaction by those who recognize that the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property. The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them. These convictions and habits of solidarity, when they are put into practice, open the way to other structural transformations and make them possible.  Changing structures without generating new convictions and attitudes will only ensure that those same structures will become, sooner or later, corrupt, oppressive and ineffectual. [Pope Francis, 189, The Joy of the Gospel, 2013]

Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs. [Saint John Chrysostom]

Accompanying on its own is not enough. It is not enough to offer someone a sandwich unless it is accompanied by the possibility of learning how to stand on one’s own two feet. Charity that leaves the poor person as he is, is not sufficient. True mercy, the mercy God gives to us and teaches us, demands justice, it demands that the poor find the way to be poor no longer.

It asks — and it asks us, the Church, us, the City of Rome, it asks the institutions — to ensure that no one ever again stand in need of a soup-kitchen, of makeshift-lodgings, of a service of legal assistance in order to have his legitimate right recognized to live and to work, to be fully a person. [Pope Francis, 9/10/13]

Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.  [Francis of Assisi]