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Lent in Focus
“Lessons from the Missions” for Lent from National Director Father Andrew Small, OMI (in English and Spanish). Archbishop Sheen’s reflections on our Blessed Mother – from Lent 1951. Examples of how your prayers and support make you a “personal missionary” to so many in need…from Africa to Asia, from Oceania to Latin America…making a world of difference for our mission family.
These are just some of the resources for your Lenten journey that form this website, “Lent In Focus,” from the Pontifical Mission Societies, helping you see the Season through a missionary lens.
Also included are reflections on Scripture for the Sundays of Lent, resources for education for elementary school students, as well as for those involved in youth ministry (activities for each week in Lent), information about the World Mission Rosary, especially in this Year of Faith, and thoughts for Lent from the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Pauline Jaricot.
Page by page (links above), make your Lenten journey with us – coming closer to the Lord and His continuing mission in our world of need.
God’s Word for the Journey
Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
March 24, 2013
Link to Readings
Palm Sunday celebrates the triumph of Christ’s final entry to the city of Jerusalem for the holy days of Passover. But within days of crowds gathering to see Him and calling Him King, Jesus would be arrested, tried and crucified. But before those final agonizing hours, Christ still had lessons for His followers. At the Last Supper, He reminded the Apostles of their own coming mission – and their reward. “Let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.… I am among you as the one who serves. It is you who have stood by Me in My trials; and I confer a kingdom on you” (Luke 22:26-29).
Even as Jesus faced His last hours on earth, He urged His disciples to remember their obligation to serve their brothers and sisters. Pope Francis, in the homily at the Mass of his inauguration as Pope, also spoke of service, and the power inherent in it – the power to do good for others. “Let us never forget that authentic power is service,” our Holy Father said. To serve, he said, means to “embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important…”
Through our prayer and help, we serve as well – supporting missionaries as together we share our faith with compassion and generosity.
Suggested missionary action: Let us praise our Lord on this Palm Sunday and ready ourselves to join in His passion in the days ahead. Let us pray for the courage and strength to “embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important…”
Making a World Of Difference: A Home of Hope and Love
For years, the Adoration Sisters of the Holy Face in Cebu City, Philippines have been handcrafting Rosaries and selling them to support the work they do with poor families, the elderly and street children. The Sisters also rely on local donations. A recent $20,000 grant from the Missionary Childhood Association will help the Sisters reach out to even more people in this very poor area of the Philippines.
The Sisters main focus is on education – both academic and religious. They run a school and a formation center serving hundreds of poor children. Some graduates have gone on to college while others have perused vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
In addition to their work at the school, the Sisters coordinate a program through flip-flop style sandals are distributed to children in need. And, once monthly, the Sisters visit student’s families to deliver food and medicine if needed. More importantly, they take time to pray with them. On Saturdays, a “soup kitchen” serves healthy meals including vegetables grown by the Sisters and their students.
With your continued prayers and support, you can help the Sisters make a real difference in the lives of these children.
“I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation of behalf of the Adoration Sisters of the Holy Face of Jesus for your generous support and assistance,” said Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, Archbishop Emeritus of Cebu. “There is still much to be done but the Adoration Sisters are certain that they are not alone in their undertaking because of your help.”
Feeding street children
Sisters preparing the soil for planting
Making a World of Difference: Beginning with the New
“We’ve got two things in common,” National Director Father Andrew Small, OMI told his new friend 'Ananda' in Bangladesh. Since a look at the duo might make one think otherwise, he quickly clarified the statement for the child whose name means “joy.” “We’re both small,” Father Andrew said with a smile, indicating his own last name and the boy’s age and height, “but we’re big in God’s eyes.” Then came a mission connection: “And we both went to Oblate parish schools.”
The start of Father Andrew’s mission journey in Bangladesh January 19, 2012 was in the newest diocese in the country, Sylhet, announced as a new mission diocese by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI just in July 2011. (Originally Sylhet was part of the Dhaka Archdiocese.) He was greeted with a music-filled rally on his arrival at Kalagool ESA Primary School at Kalagool Tea Estate in Khadim Nagar, Sylhet. (Bangladesh is one of the major tea-producing countries in the world.) The school is run by Oblate missionary Fathers, the Religious Community to which Father Andrew now belongs and the priests who educated him as a child. That village includes 50 families, all depending on the tea gardens for a living.
Father Andrew was welcomed also by another Oblate priest, Sylhet’s Bishop, Bejoy D’Cruze, OMI. Of the diocese’s seven parishes, in fact, six are run by Oblate missionary priests, with one parish staffed by Holy Cross missionaries. Sylhet is a tribal diocese. In total, 22 priests, including two local priests, and 33 religious Sisters serve in those parishes. Out of a population of about 8.2 million, some 17,000 are Catholic. “With such a small tribal community, employed mostly in tea plantations, there is a lot to do,” Bishop Bejoy observed. Sylhet is known for some 132 tea estates in the hilly and forested terrain. The Catholic Church in Bangladesh is known for its services, which are open to all communities. "The Church has a lot to offer the poor and those most in need," says Bishop Bejoy. He noted that most don't earn enough - about 50 cents a day - and cannot afford daily necessities, including food, clothing and housing. They can't even send their children to school, or receive adequate health care when they are sick, Bishop Bejoy added, noting that education and health services are among his top priorities. And, of course, there is the need always to reveal Christ’s saving love to the poor and vulnerable. Catholics worldwide, through the Pontifical Mission Societies, can offer what they can to support Bishop Bejoy, and the priests, religious and lay catechists serving with him.
Making a World of Difference: A Healing Mission in Zambia
According to the website of the Catholic Church in Zambia, the Church’s provision of health care services to the poor happened from the very start of its mission in the country in the 1890s. Initially, basic health care came from clinics in small Christian communities. This developed over the years into larger, more structured health care institutions, as well as community Home Based Care Programs. Currently 60 percent of health care services in rural areas of Zambia are church related.
On a recent visit to Zambia, National Director Father Andrew Small, OMI spent time at Cardinal Adam Memorial Hospital in Lusaka. Named for the former missionary archbishop of Lusaka, the facility was part of the overall plan of the Bishops of Zambia to offer a fully integrated approach in caring for the sick in their homeland. Being developed in stages, the first phase, which is almost completed, includes administrative offices, as well as a pharmacy, laboratories, dental room, eye clinic, radiology and ultrasound departments, a small operating theater, and consultation / treatment rooms. The second and third phases – which will begin with the availability of funds – will include pediatric and maternity wards, a convent for the Sisters on staff, and small homes for lay volunteers.
In Zambia and throughout the Missions, the Pontifical Mission Societies offers support not only for the all-important and central evangelizing mission of the Church, but also for her healing mission. That includes the efforts of this hospital in Lusaka, as well as some 9,000 clinics caring for the sick and dying in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Europe and Latin America.
This Lent, pray for our mission family – in Zambia and throughout the world – and for the missionaries who serve them. And give generously to the Pontifical Mission Societies to continue to support the life-giving, hope-filled work and witness among the poor and most vulnerable half a world away.
Father Andrew Small, OMI with children from the Home of Joy in Lusaka, Zambia.
Making a World of Difference: Finding Refuge in Egypt
The Holy Family found refuge in Egypt, fleeing from King Herod. Today, our mission family from Sudan – between 750,000 and 4 million in the past 20 years – have also found safety there.
Mission within a mission… Egypt’s Christian population – estimated at about 10 percent, some 300,000 in the total population follow the Coptic Orthodox rite. They are in the minority of their predominantly Muslim nation and facing dangerous times of persecution – risking their lives just to attend Mass… and they are still extending welcome to God’s neediest who have fled war ravaged countries for refuge in their parishes.
Parishes such as Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Alexandria are helped by the Missionary Childhood Association, a Pontifical Mission Society. Families are assisted with food and education for the children. They are finding hope, peace, and an abundance of God’s love, through the service of missionaries today - priests, religious and laity – work and witness supported by your prayers and sacrifices.
Father Andrew Small, OMI, national director for the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States visited Egypt as 2012 ended. “We are bound together in prayer for the poor, the oppressed, the refugee and the outsider,” Father Andrew reflected. “Their story is our story as we celebrate once again the difference God makes.”
As we continue our Lenten journey, let us pray for both the persecuted and the refugees of this turbulent area, and so many places throughout the Missions. Let us offer our support for the priests, religious and lay catechists who offer them concrete help and the saving message of the Risen Lord.
(Photo by Scott Nelson; 2012 Pontifical Mission Societies, USA)
Archbishop Sheen’s “Way of the Cross”
The late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen first composed the “Way of the Cross” for Palm Sunday 1932, published in that year by the National Council of Catholic Men and then 50 years later by Our Sunday Visitor.Archbishop Sheen began those writings with this “Prayer Before the Way of the Cross”:
O Lord Jesus,
the curtain is now about to go up
on the awful and abiding drama
of your redemptive love.
And as I hear your words,
“Take up your cross daily and follow me,”
I stand affrighted, lest its burden
be too great and its shame too bitter.
If I could but see that your command
to follow you to Calvary
was not just an iron law of cruel fate,
but a condition of everlasting happiness,
perhaps I could better make the journey.
But I fear, dear Jesus, that in having you
I must have nothing else besides.
Let my fear be dispelled
in seeing death as the condition of life.
For through your apostle Paul,
you have told us that it is the joy at the end
of the journey that makes us endure my cross.
I shall, then, take up my cross.
O Jesus, why must we love you so!
Archbishop Sheen and Lent: Cana and the Cross
As he offered his radio program for Palm Sunday 1951, then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen continued his journey through Lent with our Blessed Mother, speaking specifically on that Sunday broadcast of The Catholic Hour about the Wedding Feast of Cana. In telling His Mother, “my hour has not yet come,” Jesus was letting Mary know that what she was asking Him to do was to begin the road to the Cross, then-Monsignor Sheen explained. He further made the case that it was in that moment that Jesus actually gave our Blessed Mother to us as our Mother at that moment, calling her “Woman” – and connecting that with what would happen as the Lord hung on the Cross.
Here’s how then-Monsignor Sheen explained it “in our language,” as he put it“The moment I do this, I begin the royal road to the Cross…. What affects Me affects you. Once I undertake the salvation of mankind, you will then not only be My Mother, you will also be the Mother of everyone I will redeem…. will become the Mother of my body which is the Church. “That great title of Woman I now dignify you with, and I shall dignify you again with it when my hour comes, and when I am unfurled upon the Cross like a wounded eagle.”
At the conclusion of the radio program, then-Monsignor Sheen takes us right up the way to the Cross – the end of the Holy Week that begins with Palm Sunday, the day that radio program aired in 1951. From the Cross the Lord calls her “Woman” again – and tells the anonymous Apostle – “in his anonymity John stood for everyone” – “Behold thy Mother.”
Archbishop Sheen and Lent: The Blueprint in the Mind of God
“Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves.” With these words, then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen began his Catholic Hour radio broadcast on the Fifth Sunday of Lent in 1951. God too, he said, has “blueprints of everything in the universe which He loves” – including each one of us.
As with all his Lenten radio messages that year, he brought the focus to our Blessed Mother. Although God has two pictures of us in His mind – what we are, and what we ought to be – there is only one picture of Mary, for in her there is “perfect conformity between what He wanted her to be and what she is.”
“Because she is what God wanted us all to be,” he said, “the Eternal Blueprint in the Mind of God, the one whom He loved before she was a creature.”
“Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfill the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us,” he continued. “But Mary is the equal sign…. The melody of her life is played just as it was written.”
Once again, his radio message included the World Mission Rosary and his request that listeners “pray for the peace of the world on our World Mission Rosary.” He also urged that the Rosary be obtained through the Holy Father’s World Mission Society – the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. (That is still possible; click here for the order form.)
“God love you,” then-Monsignor Sheen concluded that Sunday evening broadcast. “Pray for our missionaries.”
Archbishop Sheen and Lent-Embrace the World in Prayer
“How wonderfully popular the World Mission Rosary has proven!” So said then Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen on Sunday, February 18, 1951, the Second Sunday of Lent that year, on his Catholic Hour, a nationwide religious radio program regularly broadcast on Sundays over the NBC Network. The week before he had put forward his plan for that Rosary, one where each of the five decades was of a different color to represent each of the five continents. “When the Rosary is completed, one has…embraced all continents, all people in prayer,” he said.
The subject of that particular radio broadcast was “The Marriage of Mary and Joseph,” and then Monsignor Sheen focused on families, asking them to “model the love of the Holy Family” and to “say the Rosary together every night.” The Rosary he asked them to say? “And may the Rosary that you finger be our World Mission Rosary in which you will pray for the missions in each of the five continents of the world, that families on each may come to know the blessedness of your holy Faith!” he said.
“God love you,” he concluded. “Pray for Our Missionaries.”
You can order a World Mission Rosary; you can also – right now, in this moment, on any Rosary you have with you – “embrace the world in prayer,” and pray the World Mission Rosary online.
Archbishop Sheen and Lent: Mary, Mother of Mercy
On the Fourth Sunday of Lent in 1951, then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen spoke on his Catholic Hour radio broadcast about the comfort, hope and strength that all “wounded, frustrated, anxious, fearful souls” may draw from our Blessed Mother: “Your Heavenly Mother understands. She will lead you to her Son.”
He said near the conclusion of that broadcast: “Never give up hope. Say your Rosary and remember that Our Divine Lord’s last act on earth, to which He visibly demanded our adhesion, was to give His Mother as our mother. ‘Behold thy Mother.’ Will you refuse her whom Jesus offered?… Remember that the child who falls and is hurt is the one who gets the mother’s kisses. Maybe she has one for you.”
And again, there was his message about the Missions. “May I urge for the sake of the peace of the world to pray for all the five continents on our World Mission Rosary,” he said halfway through the broadcast, and then, at its conclusion, offered: “God love you. Pray for our missionaries.”
Archbishop Sheen on mission visit to Africa.
Archbishop Sheen and Lent: The Silence of Mary
“The Silence of Mary.” That was the subject of The Catholic Hour radio broadcast with host then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen on the Third Sunday of Lent in 1951. In this Lenten radio broadcast for that year – which ends as did all broadcasts with his, “God Love You. Pray for Our Missionaries” – he brings the listener back to the World Mission Rosary. Here are some excerpts.
“Here is the key to the mystery of Mary the mother of Jesus – her silence. Throughout 33 years of intimate life with her Divine Son, she is recorded as speaking only seven times.... The seven times Our Lady speaks may be called Her Seven Words, which parallel so beautifully the seven Last Words of Jesus on the Cross. Her first and second recorded words were to an angel; the third to her cousin Elizabeth, it was a salutation; the fourth her song, the Magnificat; the fifth to her Divine Son in the Temple; the sixth to her Divine Son at the Marriage Feast of Cana; and the last to the wine stewards...
“After Our Lord worked His first Miracle by changing the water into wine, Our Blessed Mother is never recorded again in Sacred Scripture as speaking, though she appears in the public ministry, at the Cross and at the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit on the Church...
“Why is Mary silent? The answer is: The more one speaks with the Creator the less talkative one is among creatures. Such is the nature of love.
“The other question is: But why do we praise her?... Silence stirs admirers to speech...
“If I can influence you to combine speech and silence I will be happy. May your speech be prayer, may your silence be meditation. You speak when you say the Rosary; you listen when you meditate on the beautiful mysteries of the life of Our Lord. In the Rosary, as in all prayer, the ear is more important than the tongue! May you combine both on your World Mission Rosary for the Peace of the World.”
Archbishop Sheen visits the Missions of Africa
Lent in Focus: Youth and Mission
As you embark on your Lenten journey with youth and young adults, we offer several resources to foster both deeper reflection and Thanksgiving. Some of these are featured below. Be sure to also visit the Youth in Mission portion of our website for additional resources and information.
Resources For Lent
Lent in Focus: Mission Lessons
"Missionary Saints." "Me, a Martyr?" "Prayers and Pennies." "A Safe Refuge." "What We've Given Up."
These inspirational reflections by Father Andrew Small, OMI, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, can help you on your own Lenten journey - keeping you "going in the right direction" in the Year of Faith, ever closer to the Lord and the mission He gives us every day.
Missionary Saints / Santos Misionales
Me, A Martyr? / ¿Yo, un mártir?
Prayers and Pennies / Oraciones y Centavos
A Safe Refuge / Un Refugio Seguro
What We've Given Up / Lo Que Hemos Abandonado
Father Andrew Small, OMI with Egyptian children at an after school program at St. Mary Virgin Catholic Church in Cairo. Read more about his trip by clicking here.
Lent in Focus: Teaching Mission
Children can learn more about young people in the Missions and the season of Lent by reading our It's Our World newsletters. Click here to downlaod!
Activity
Love, Healing and Forgiveness
6-8
Participation in the Sacraments helps to unite the people of God. Ask students to write a short essay which tells how the Sacrament of Reconciliation in particular helps bring God’s people together. Ask students to focus on how this Sacrament helps nourish the soul and leads to healing. As a group, prepare a classroom prayer service asking for forgiveness. Include a litany of forgiveness that includes:
- For all the times I have been mean to my friends, forgive me Lord.
- For talking back to my parents…
- For being unkind in words and actions…
- For being selfish…
Conclude the service by reciting the Act of Contrition together and then lead a class discussion about areas of the world that are most in need of hope, peace and healing. As a group, commit to praying daily for those areas of the world during this Lenten Season.
Lent in Focus: Thoughts from Pauline Jaricot
“Lord, show me in a hurry what is Your will for me!”– Pauline Marie Jaricot
January 9, 2012 marked the 150th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Pauline Marie Jaricot. Read more about her life, her work and her passion for the Missions of the Church – her quest to “love without measure…without end” – on our special website for this year in which we “celebrate the legacy” of “the match that lit the fire.”
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