I’d like to invite you to think about your experience of Church growing up. From what I’ve heard many of y’all share with me, maybe you went to the local parish with almost everyone else in your neighborhood. Maybe your parish was just across the street from the Polish or Italian parish. Faithful attendance at Sunday mass was likely the norm, and I doubt you heard many homilies about evangelization...

Now I’d like to recall your experience of church now at St Ann. Maybe you participated in the home holy hours, where we brought the Blessed Sacrament itself to your homes. Maybe you’re thinking of the migrant mass, where we packed up the trailer and celebrated mass in the fields with local migrant workers. I’d venture to guess that these such initiatives are newer experiences- dissimilar to the Catholicism of your youth.

These new initiatives at St Ann are concrete manifestations of the new paradigm of the Catholic Church at this moment in time. This is something that the late pope Francis continually called for, a church that goes out. Gone are the days when we can sit back and expect the people to come to us. Gone are the days that even many Catholics in our area even come to mass. As Msgr Shea has indicated, Christendom is over. Our culture at large no longer conforms itself to the Gospel ethic. We, like the apostles of old, are faced with an unbelieving world that does not know Christ nor the good news of the Gospel. We are once again in an apostolic age.

Yes, this is troubling. But like the apostles in the first century, we have a decision. We can see this as an overwhelming task and shrink away in fear or discouragement, or we can seize the moment empowered by the graces of the Holy Spirit and boldly proclaim the gospel to a world that is desperate to hear it. This attitude has inspired our pastoral strategy at St Ann, and make no mistake- these are exciting times.

One such exciting initiative that I’d like to reflect on is our migrant mass. This ministry is made possible thanks to our St. Vincent de Paul (SVdP) Council. We are blessed in this parish with dedicated Vincentians who do truly amazing things for our neighbors in this community. The charism of the SVdP ministry aligns perfectly with this "new paradigm" for the Catholic parish and Catholic Church. Impelled by a love for our neighbors and a desire to bless and serve them, we boldly go out to them- celebrating the mass literally outside. If our migrant brothers work the fields in Colerain, we will go to those fields in Colerain and bring the love of God to them. I think of the example of St Vincent himself- how he saw the needs of his neighbors and spent countless hours with them. St Vincent and our SVdP ministry remind us that we need not look far to "find our mission"; our mission ought to be loving those right in front of us.

Sitting outside at our makeshift altar, I can’t help but feel united to so many great missionary priests throughout the Church’s history. As a future priest, these migrant masses have instilled a definite zeal for souls in me. Although we don’t always speak of it, zeal for souls is such an important ingredient to be a good priest. The patron and model of all diocesan priests, St John Vianney, lived a life completely consumed with such zeal. As priests, our desire to go out, find, and bring people to Christ ought to be directly proportional withChrist’s desire to bring all people to Himself. It is in our pastoral zeal that reveals and makes present Christ’s love incarnated in our hearts. It would be very easy to not go to the trouble of doing the migrant mass. Surely the ratio of time and resources invested to souls encountered is inefficient, but as Jesus reminds us, we are not to be measuring nor calculating with love.

As I write this about my vocation, I also issue a challenge for you: How have you mirrored Christ’s infinitely desirous heart? As our Reach more participants know well, Fr Jairo is one man. It is the responsibility of the laity (yes, you) to carry out the missional work of the Church. The paradigm of delegating all the pastoral ministry and evangelization to the priest must also become a thing of the past. One word of advice: Come to a migrant mass. Even if you don’t feel called to volunteer in our St Vincent de Paul ministry long term, just going will activate your missionary muscles, something that we as Catholics are so often unwilling to do. Doing so will be a rewarding experience, and will be great a great lesson in becoming an evangelizer and friend to our neighbors.

It is a joy to go out to Colerain. It’s fun- it’s an adventure. I think this joy that I experience in going on the fun adventure of the migrant mass is something similar to God’s joy in coming to meet us in our broken humanity.

So often we look at ourselves in our poverty and we begin to feel bad. We don’t have a great fancy soul adorned with great virtues or holiness for Jesus to dwell in. Sensing this, we sometimes balk at the thought of Jesus coming to us. “No”, we say. I have no fitting home to offer you, Please pass me by and enter some other better suited soul. This is where we go wrong. Yes, it is true that we are guilty of maligning our hearts with sin and distortion, but we do wrong if we then make a judgment upon ourselves and refuse Jesus’ entry. Jesus, by his passion, has made it very clear that he is our savior and he wants to go even the depths of hell to find, embrace, and restore us. As some have eloquently commented: The savior delights in saving. Who are we to prevent Jesus from doing this work that he so dearly loves to do?

We’ve likely heard this all before, but still sometimes we have trouble really truly believing that this is the case. “Surely Jesus must be frustrated at me by this point”, we say. “Surely He has better things to do.” To combat this, I think of my genuine joy and delight in going to the migrant mass. It’s fun to go out to the fields.The abnormal aspects of this ministry (being outside, needing to pack and transport a mini sacristy every time) are precisely what I like about it. So too it is I think with God. We all have our own stories and unique wounds and miseries and thus need personalized experiences of healing and mercy. As Leo Tolstoy put it: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Rather than view our unique brokenness as “outside the norm” and thus outside the normal boundaries of God’s love and mercy, what if we believed that God knows the unique fractures in our hearts and stories, and precisely that unique brokenness creates the challenge of custom tailoring his love to you, a project he delights in.  

This spiritual reflection is just one example of how God has used my experience of the migrant mass to surprise me. If you’re open, and you give him the opportunity to speak to you, I promise He’ll have something to say to you too. As I said before, these are truly exciting times. There are difficult challenges in today’s world that demand an effusion of creativity. If you want to be a part of this creative redemptive mission of Christ in todays world in this community, come out to Colerain. Come serve with our Vincentians. God will have much to show you there.  

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