Our deadline in the editorial office is two months ahead of publication date. I’m writing this on 28 April, the day after the fourth death anniversary of the founding editor of Misyon, Fr Niall O’Brien.
Father Niall was a great admirer of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, recognized by Pope John Paul II in 2000 as a ‘Servant of God’, meaning that the cause for her beatification has been approved. Dorothy was a pacifist, a social reformer, but with an intense traditional Catholic spirituality. She used her talent as a journalist to draw the attention of people to the plight of the poor.
Unlike some reformers, Dorothy cared for those in need here and now while advocating change. She lived with the poor in New York City in one of the houses of hospitality that the Catholic Worker established. There are now around 200 throughout the world. These homes welcome homeless people who need a place where they can eat and sleep. There is always soup simmering in the kitchen and Dorothy once wrote that it was a symbol of the community – always changing. Leftovers go into it each day and nothing goes to waste. As there are constant newcomers, both assistants and persons needing shelter, and others leaving, the community keeps changing, just like the soup.
I find Misyon to be something like that. Some magazines are planned in detail months in advance. Your editor can’t function that way. Maybe his staff gets anxious on occasion. Some items come in because we invite people to send us a story. Other items come in unexpectedly. Like the news this morning that the new Papal Nuncio to Mongolia is Archbishop Osvaldo M. Padilla. There are only three bishops in the world with the family name ‘Padilla’. All three are Filipinos and all three are working outside their own country, two as nuncios and one as the first ever bishop in Mongolia. Two of the three are involved in the tiny church in that huge country that is more that five times the size of the Philippines, but with 2,400,000 people, compared to the more than 82,000,000 here, of whom only about 540, if that, are Catholics.
At one level these facts are simply trivia. But at another they show how the Church in the Philippines has radically changed in the last few decades. The theme for this year’s world Youth Day and for our essay contest is ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses’ (Acts 1:8). Filipino Catholics are now witnesses to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus in many countries, as bishops, as leaders of international missionary congregations, as missionaries, priests, religious and lay, and as overseas workers in many professions, such as Mindy Miñoza and Belinda Pantaleon, featured in this issue.
When Misyon began twenty years ago it couldn’t have published stories from or about Filipino missionaries in the Marshall Islands, Mongolia or Myanmar, as this issue does, because there were no such persons, and relatively few anywhere else.
In Ireland, where your editor is from, being ‘in the soup’ means being in trouble. But he is more than happy to be ‘in the soup’ that is the ongoing, growing and changing reality of the missionary dimension of the Philippine Church, rather like the soup in the kitchen of Dorothy Day’s houses of hospitality, a ‘soup’ that nourishes us with the Word of the Risen Lord when it is stirred with the power of the Holy Spirit.
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