VATICAN - The Cloister is mission

Friday, 20 October 2017 consecrated life   pontifical mission societies   mission   evangelization  


Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - "Teresa of Lisieux wanted 'to be love in the heart of the Church'. Today cloistered nuns are like a heart pumping blood, that is, the charity of Christ, to the entire body of the universal Church. Thus their love reaches all missions and all missionaries, who are the hands that baptize or the arms that welcome the poor and the suffering. If the heart does not pump blood, the body dies. Pope John XXIII said that the Pontifical Mission Societies are like the vascular system in the human body, that network that allows God's love to reach every tissue. The nuns, with their prayer and their daily sacrifice, are the pulsating heart from which everything originates": this is how Fr. Ryszard Szmydki, OMI, Undersecretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, presents the video produced by Agenzia Fides and released, on the occasion of World Missionary Day, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the proclamation of Teresa of Lisieux "Patroness of the missions". On December 14, 1927, it was Pope Pius XI who declared St. Teresina of Lisieux "special patroness of missionaries, men and women in the world", a title equal to St. Francis Saverio.
In the new effort of multimedia production (the video is available on Fides's Youtube channel in Italian and English), Fides entered a Carmelite monastery where the nuns, according to the path traced by Santa Teresina, embrace the whole world.
In the interview with Fides, Fr. Ryszard Szmydki recalls that mission and contemplation belong to every baptized: "The missionary, as the Redemptoris Missio affirms, must be a 'contemplative in action'. The answer to the problems he gives in the light of God's word and in personal and community prayer. If the missionary is not a contemplative, he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible manner". (PA) (Agenzia Fides, 20/10/2017)


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