EUROPE/SPAIN - “Feel mission in your heart”: Sunday 22 January Holy Childhood Day in Spain: concern for millions of children ill, exploited, deprived of rights, many have never heard about Jesus Christ

Thursday, 19 January 2006

Madrid (Fides Service) - “We must feel mission in our heart because if it is something cold and lacks the warmth of love and charity our experience would be absurd and useless” says Archbishop Francisco Pérez González Spain’s Military Ordinary and national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Spain, in a letter to present Holy Childhood Day celebrated in Spain on 22 January with the slogan this year “Feel mission in your heart”. In the letter Archbishop Pérez says if mission is felt in the heart it leads the person to give his life in thanksgiving to God for the service of all people, because mission is not only having good intentions. This is what makes missionaries perform heroic actions because “the heart has reasons which are not of the mind”. This fundamental aspect of mission is the theme of Holy Childhood Day 2006.
For the annual mission occasions PMS Spain produced a Holy Childhood dossier available in electronic and hard copy. The dossier includes material for mission animation of children, catechesis, suggestions for catechists and animators, a copy for religious instruction at school, a CD of missionary songs, advertising and interviews with Archbishop Francisco Pérez and two missionaries: Sr Milagros Cid López, missionary in Republic of Congo and Sr Leonor de la Fuente, missionary in Angola; a DVD on the life of the great 16th century Spanish missionary St Francis Xavier produced by the Shrine of Javier (Navarra) for the 5t centenary of the birth of St Francis Xavier. See electronic copy http://www.omp.es/Infancia/jornada.htm).
To make known the tragic situation of many children in the world PMS Spain has also published a paper entitled Information on Disadvantaged Childhood. The article is not one more paper, full of facts and figures, it is a means of revealing the injustices suffered by so many children and to convince people to work even harder to help disadvantaged boys and girls. The article has seven parts dealing with seven main concerns with regard to children: Medical care and health (and two serious diseases: malaria and AIDS, affecting mainly the south of the world and the cause of a high infant mortality rate. Education (57 million boys and 73 million girls are denied schooling); war and armed conflict (two million children killed, six million injured and one million war orphans in last decade alone; 600.000 child soldiers in the world and every year 10,000 children are killed by anti-personnel mines); labour slavery (in the south of the world alone 250 million children aged 5 to 14 work as slaves); street children (half the world’s poor 600 million are minors and 100million of these are street children”); sexual abuse (every year 1 million minors, mostly girls are victims of sex trafficking); the spread of the faith (at the start of the 21st century, two thirds of humanity has yet to hear the good news of the Gospel. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 19/1/2006 - righe 37, parole 541)


Share: