Behind this project of spreading the World of God there are 3100 missionaries. We are the Claretian Missionaries founded in Spain but now working with a great variety of ministries in 63 countries.
This was exactly Pope Francis’s message to China. In his first, historic interview on 28 January 2016 with Francesco Sisci for Asia Times, the Pope said: “[China] is a land blessed with many things. And the Catholic Church, one of whose duties is to respect all civilizations, before this civilization, I would say, has the duty to respect it with a capital “R”. The Church has great potential to receive culture”
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Fr Michael Kelly in conversation with Fr You Guo Jiang, SJ a teacher at Boston College who researches and writes on education, global engagement, student development, spirituality and Christianity in China. This includes biographical articles on prominent Chinese Christians such as Ma Xiangbo, founder of Fudan University, Shanghai and the famous jurist, Wu Ching Hsiung who helped draft China’s first constitution.
In a homily delivered in Manila on November 29, 1970, Saint Paul VI stated: “I would never have come from Rome to this far-distant land unless I had been most firmly convinced of two fundamental things: first, of Christ; and second, of your salvation.” He added: “The more distant the goal, the more difficult my mission, the more pressing is the love that urges me to it.” Saint Francis Xavier could have said the same words. For him, too, the motives were Christ and the salvation of the people.
On 16th July, 1849 Jaimes Clotet became as part of the group of founders, was the youngest of all. Clotet was just 26 years old at the time of founding the congregation. He was a faithful and kind person. His companions were: Esteban Sala, 37, a learned, José Xifré, 32, energetic and enterprising, Dominic Fabregas, 32, good man, invited at the eleventh hour, Manuel Vilaró, 33, a virtuous missionary in Tarragona, and Antonio Claret, 41, a tireless missionary. Fr. Clotet finally discovered his vocation and mission in the new Congregation.
Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, advised him to go to Latin America too for the same kind of study. And so he got to know Brazil and Argentina. In Rome he taught at the Gregorian University for 35 years and worked at Vatican Radio for 25 years in the Chinese section. “There was Fr. Michael Chu,” he continues, “who would come and celebrate the Sunday Mass that we would transmit for China.
In his speech to the General Congregation of Cardinals prior to the 2013 conclave, the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio said, “When the Church does not go out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then sick. […] When the Church is self-referential, without realizing it, she believes she has her own light. She ceases to be the mysterium lunae and this gives rise to the most serious evil of spiritual worldliness.
Today vast numbers of people still do not know Jesus Christ. For this reason, the mission ad gentes continues to be most urgent. All the members of the Church are called to participate in this mission, for the Church is missionary by her very nature: she was born “to go forth”.
A pilgrim journey at the service of God’s Dream is meaningful and joyful when it is done with others facing difficulties together, with minimum luggage to carry, and with a willingness to march forward. Let us make their missionary mystique our own and render the foundational spirit alive today. We shall commend our journey to our blessed Mother who accompanies her sons and cherishes them in her immaculate heart as she did for her son Jesus and our Founder St. Anthony Mary Claret.
Antony Clark is a professor of Chinese history at Whitworth University in Washington. In 2020, he published China's Catholics in an Era of Transformation, which features a collection of short essays on China's modern Catholic Church, combined with reports on his encounters with contemporary Chinese Catholics. The essays were mostly written in China while he was traveling by train or staying in villages and large cities near the Catholic communities.
Local priests like Father Lien manage the Catholic parishes and mission station in all 27 dioceses of Vietnam, where Spanish and Portuguese missionaries brought the faith in the 16th century. The Catholic mission suffered because of a dearth of priests and infrastructure in some 10 dioceses in northern Vietnam, where communism forced Christians to flee during the Vietnam War (1954-75). However, native priests are now enthusiastically engaged in missions, particularly in the north.
