Vatican II: Bringing the Gospel to ‘Kilometer 64’

    One of the most fruitful documents of Vatican Council II was the Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church. Catholic dioceses in countries where the church was well established were asked to send priests, brothers, sisters and lay persons as missionaries to countries where Christ was not known, where the Church was just getting a foothold or where, though Catholicism was well established, there was an acute shortage of priests, religious and catechists.
    The response was strong.
    The Archdiocese of Boston even started a missionary society for diocesan priests called the St. James Society so they could serve in Latin America. Religious orders like the Jesuits and Maryknolls, who had religious missionaries already in foreign missions, created volunteer groups of laity who served at the mission stations.
    U.S. church parishes began adopting church parishes in mission countries and sending groups of laity on short-term mission trips to help in those churches. Today colleges and even high schools are sending students on mission trips.
    Not long after Vatican Council II, an Abbeville, La., family – Frank, Genie and 10-year-old Beau Summers – decided God was calling them to a more permanent life as missionaries in the South Pacific. They sold everything – house, furniture and car – and went. Eventually a few friends joined them, and others asked to be trained so that they, too, might answer the call to the missions.
    Family Missions Company was established. Today its more than 80 members, all laity, have served in India, the Philippines, the Marshall Islands, Peru, Ecuador, Spain, the Caribbean and Mexico. Some are families with quite a few young children; others are singles of all ages.
The what and why of mission
    While chaplain at LSU and since my retirement 3 1/2 years ago, I have had the privilege of working with Family Missions Company, both at their base in Abbeville and in Mexico, Ecuador and St. Lucia. People often ask me, what does one do in the missions and does it do any good? I respond: lay sewerage lines; clear land for churches; paint schools and churches; visit the sick, the elderly who are in nursing homes, the handicapped in homes for them; and celebrate Mass in little villages so far in the boondocks that they seldom see a priest. We do all of these things on mission trips and more.
    I am sure that it does some good. Jesus even mentions some of these in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. But short-term missionaries returning home after 10 days – or even a month – can’t always see the good they have done. There is a deeper good than these material and charitable acts. It is a good that goes by the name of evangelization. That is a broad, ambiguous term, but on a recent mission trip to General Cepeda, Mexico, with Family Missions Company, I saw a very tangible spiritual result of Christ’s great commission, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16: 16).
    In the deserts of Northern Mexico near the town of General Cepeda, population 11,784, a two-lane highway heads west with its traffic of dusty, banged-up trucks transporting the commodities of a poor people. Right off the highway, in a spot so dry that it is covered with only rocks and a whitish powdery sand, are a few bars and tiny huts that house women who once served the truck drivers after they tired of drinking. This tiny village is named simply Kilometer 64.
    About 10 years ago, Family Missions Company began ministering to these prostitutes and their children. The women expressed great enthusiasm for learning more about the Catholic faith, for finding a way out of their desperate poverty and a better means to provide for their families. If only they could find a positive enterprise that provided income.
    In addition to the permanent missionaries from the U.S., two Mexican families had joined Family Missions Company. One of these couples, Gallo and Rita, knew that these women sewed much of their clothing. The solution became apparent – the women could sell things they sewed if they could find a market and if they could produce enough goods to supply the market.
A new life near the bars
    The Missions Company provided the KM 64 women with  electric sewing machines and taught them how to use them. The Missions Company also built a chapel next to the bars and huts that flanked KM 64.
    Because the women’s living quarters had no electricity, the capilla (chapel) doubled as a tienda (shop). The seamstresses sew in the chapel. As for the market, the churches of the Diocese of Lafayette are providing that. These women, having changed occupations, now work in their chapel, which is lit, and sew altar linens (purificators, corporals and custom altar-table cloths) that are sold in Lafayette. Is this a role reversal?
    What I love about ministry in the missions is how the Gospel comes alive. Here is Marciela’s witness about her new life in Christ: “Since the missionaries have started visiting, they have helped us a lot. We didn’t have a church, but thanks be to God now we have a place to come together. I have felt closer to God; I have much more fortitude and faith.”
    In Catholic Louisiana, in first world abundance, we practice our faith, we hear the Gospel, but the Word becomes often just words. “Salvation,” “sin,” “redemption” lose their meaning, they get drowned out by the latest news, the latest entertainment, all the noise in our lives.
    But as we celebrated Mass and I looked into the faces of these women in their roadside chapel/sewing shop on the baked desert of Northern Mexico, I knew what Jesus was saying, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.”
    Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnnycarville@gmail.com.