Fr. Guilherme Andrino, SVD
The Parish as a Mission Field
By Fr. Guilherme Andrino, SVD, Vice Provincial of the Society of the Divine Word Chicago Province
I was born in a little village in Brazil. When I was a boy, few things excited me more than the day a missionary came home from a foreign land. Some brought boxes of slides, and when the lights went down, a white wall became a window to the world. I learned about a bustling parish in Poland, a village chapel in India, a baptism by a river in Indonesia and children singing under a tree in Kenya. Those faces are the reason that, at 13, I decided to join the Divine Word Missionaries.
Back then I thought of mission as something far away: a country in Africa or Latin America. God had other plans. I did my Cross-Cultural Training Program at St. Anselm Parish in Chicago. My first assignment as a priest was to Our Lady of Good Shepherd Parish in Trenton, New Jersey.
African and African American Catholics in New Jersey taught me that mission is less about crossing an ocean to another country and more about entering the lives of people from many different countries. Today, as pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Lakewood, New Jersey, I know the mission field did not stay on those slides. It walks through our doors every Sunday.
Our parish counts families from 23 countries and 5 continents, the majority from the State of Puebla in Mexico. Mass is celebrated each weekend in English, Spanish, and Polish. We are five priests serving on the pastoral team: one from Brazil, one from Indonesia, one from Poland, and two from the Philippines. We each bring our own culture, traditions, and dreams to the same altar.
After the Masses we gather outside at the food kiosk for tamales, pozole, and the flavors of home prepared by our parishioners. Children run between the tables. Neighbors, who arrived as strangers, become family. Our year reaches its height in December with the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We have mañanitas before dawn and a church too small to hold everyone. That night, the Mother who appeared to Juan Diego, gathers children from every country under her mantle.
At our parish, mission wears many faces. It is Mass and the sacraments, counseling and faith formation. It is a Holy Hour, couples meeting in Bible circles, a quinceañera prepared with care.
Our ministry goes beyond the walls of the church. We sit with families tangled in immigration paperwork, a mother separated from her children, and a household bracing for a deportation. Most of this will never appear on a slide, a photo or in a video, yet it is exactly what the missionaries of my childhood were doing.
St. Arnold Janssen taught us that proclaiming the Good News is the first and greatest act of love of neighbor. A parish lives out that conviction when every member understands that baptism has made them a missionary. The parish is where mission is lived.
Every October, as the Church celebrates World Mission Sunday, I think of that boy watching slides projected on the wall in Brazil. I pray that our young people will feel the same fascination, not only for faraway lands, but for the mission right in front of them. Perhaps one of them will hear the same call I heard when I was 13 years old.
The mission field is not only “over there.” It is here, and it is ours.