Sharing the Crucified Lord in mission religious communities

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Dear Victor,

Peace and God’s blessing!

So much has happened since I last wrote that I don’t know where to begin. John Paul II has passed away and already writers of newspaper and magazine articles are calling him the Missionary Pope – and so he was. He went out to the world to proclaim the love of God to and for our non-Christian brothers and sisters. With courage and personal sacrifice and by word, attitude and behavior he proclaimed to Christians and non-Christians alike the Crucified and Risen Lord’s message of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of the one God.

We Xaverians do the same thing but on a more modest scale. We don’t have the eyes of the world on us as we plug along day after day and year after year living in a religious community of at least three Xaverians and sowing and reaping the seeds of faith that God’s loving grace constitutes. 

John Paul II was the Missionary Pope. He went out to the world to proclaim the love of God to and for our non-Christian brothers and sisters. With courage and personal sacrifice and by word, attitude and behavior he proclaimed to Christians and non-Christians alike the Crucified and Risen Lord’s message.

As you know, Victor, the Xaverians are a strictly foreign mission religious family. We have a tough life but it’s a life filled with many rewards and satisfactions. It is a life that implies encountering hardships wherever we work: climate, culture, food, language, poverty/misery, sickness, violence, injustice, etc. The missionary’s heart can break so many times but when it happens God’s loving grace rushes in through the crack to fill us with an indescribable peace and inner joy as we resign ourselves to sharing the cross of Christ and of the non-Christians.

As I end this letter to you, I want to share with you my hope for the new pontiff, Benedict XVI. I ask God that His vicar on earth speak with clarity about the faith and evangelizing mission of the Church and that his discourse may inspire to dedicate their life to bringing Christ Our Lord to those peoples and cultures that don’t know Him.

God love you, Victor. I am

In Christ, Missionary of God the Father,

Fr. Adolph Menendez
Xaverian Missionary