Courtney McGrail
Spiritan Bishop Maurice Piat from Mauritius, who studied for the priesthood in Ireland and Rome in the 1960s, said that he first heard the news of his recent nomination as cardinal when a friend phoned to congratulate him. He didn’t believe it.
Asked by a journalist what he thought his elevation meant, Bishop Maurice said that it was not about himself but was a sign of Pope Francis’ attention and love for the little ones. This is an honour for the Church in Mauritius, “a small Church in a small island”.
The nominations announced at the weekend are not about the big metropolis but about the peripheries including the war-torn countries of Syria and the Central African Republic. As always, Pope Francis is sending out a message.
Like many of the things Francis says, the message is nuanced and can be read at different levels. The headline nominations are probably American cardinals like Cupich, Tobin and Farrell who are resisting the huge pressures in American society to divide along ‘culture lines’. The absence of big-ticket names and big cities speaks as eloquently as the names whose identities we have to Google and whose locations we need to look up on the map. Much ink is likely to be spilled in the weeks ahead as analysts seek to parse and scrutinise the nominations.
For me one significant thread runs through the list of names. Apart from the fact that a number of the bishops – 10 of whom come from outside Europe and the USA –are pastors of relatively small dioceses in terms of numbers of Catholics, five come from specifically missionary religious congregations: Sebastian Koto Khoarai is an Oblate of Mary Immaculate; Joseph Tobin is a Redemptorist; John Ribat is a Missionary of the Sacred Heart and both Dieudonné Nzapalainga and Maurice Piat are Spiritans.
In this year of Mercy, when Pope Francis commissioned Missionaries of Mercy to spread the Joy of the Gospel and the Good News of the Father’s mercy to all the world, the appointments of these new cardinals is a clear statement that the consistory in November will be a missionary one.
The Pope is putting God’s Mission at the heart of the Church. We are seeing a new form of mission corresponding to the needs of the times in which we live. Mission has been understood as evangelising and converting – bringing people into the fold. It has developed since Vatican II into a cry for liberation and working for the integral development of peoples around the world.
Today we see that missionaries are working to bring peace and reconciliation in places torn apart by conflict and division. In a world becoming more and more polarised, where Islam is pitted against Christianity, missionaries like Archbishop Mario Zenari Nuncio in Syria or Archbishop Nzapalainga in the Central African Republic are called to promote dialogue and respect between those of different faiths and none.
Missionaries today give witness in a very simple and often unassuming way to the need to proclaim that, whatever differences there are that enrich humanity, these can never be used to divide us or exclude others. But to do this, a deep faith and life of prayer is necessary to ground the missionary in the Spirit-filled life of God’s Mission. In other times, perhaps, a missionary was seen as a pioneer or a trailblazer.
Today, as Pope Francis demonstrates, a missionary is called to be a contemplative and mystic in the midst of an often complex world.
Fr Marc Whelan CSSp is Provincial of the Spiritans in Ireland.
