CLARETIAN MISSION DAY 2008

MESSAGE FROM FR. GENERAL

This year once again, we invite you to celebrate our Claretian Mission Day on a universal scale. Every day, with the help of the mass-media, we are able to see pictures of everyday life in towns. By comparing statistics, we can draw conclusions concerning the demographic, economic, educational and sanitary circumstances in their various countries, these continuing to alert us to the outrageous differences that still exist in the standard of life for many human beings.

We now live in a world of tele-communications, and yet there are still many people who have never heard those most fundamental messages of brotherly love and solidarity. God our Father has given each of us a heart capable of feeling profound pain when we contemplate these sad facts, and we long to participate in finding an answer to them by our faith in God's everlasting Kingdom, proclaimed to us by His Son, Jesus.

Our Claretian Community wants to play its part in finding this answer. We want to establish ourselves firmly in places where we can live shoulder to shoulder with all God's people. We include all those who share our own faith, as well as those following other traditions, or humanists, because we share with each of them our dream of brotherly love for all mankind. We also need to support all those people who live in far away countries, in towns where, every day, they experience problems far worse than our own, and sometimes have to fight to protect their faith and their dreams of God's promise to all His children.

This we do by means of our dear brothers who live their lives in towns like these and offer to their people their love and their labour. We also show support through gestures of solidarity which express the sincerity of our desires for justice and peace for all.
By celebrating the Claretian Mission Day universally, we wish to broaden our horizons and bring a feeling of fraternity to all those living far away, for they are also part of our lives as well as that of so many of our brothers. We wish to continue our presence in those towns where we are established because we believe in God's love, as well as the right to human dignity for each one of his sons and daughters.

We ask you once again this year to repeat our message in all your Education Centres, in the parishes and Youth Clubs, in the Institutes of higher education, in your homilies and sermons and in all the diverse forms of meeting places where you find yourself engaged, about the life of our brothers, who work among those experiencing the sad consequences of our unjust world. We ask you to help us to be able to form Claretians who know how to live their missionary vocation with generous devotion to all.

Your own vocation will be seen to be energized by your commitment and the Christian life of your people will grow by experiencing your communion with them all. I ask you, therefore, to participate with the same enthusiasm and vigour, in all the new initiatives to be carried out by our Procurator General.

In this year of the Bicentenary of the birth of our founder, we must all endeavor to bring to life the significant, universal dimensions of the mission with which we have been entrusted.

June 2008, Rome

Fr. Josep Maria Abella, cmf
General Superior