For the last several weeks at Sunday Mass, we have been hearing from the 12th chapter of Luke’s Gospel. In that chapter, Jesus is attracting huge crowds who are very interested in what he has to say. Some in the crowds are his disciples. They take his teachings to heart and want to learn from him. However, there are others such as the scribes, temple officials, and Pharisees who are interested in what he says, but they also want to criticize Jesus and make life difficult for him.
Sometimes we need to directly confront the reality around us in order to eventually solve any problems or tensions that exist. That is what Jesus is talking about when he says that he has come to create division, even to the point of creating situations where households are divided. Perhaps we can identify with this with what we have gone through during the pandemic, of a harsh social reality and division that we have had to face, rather than ignore.
In the context of this challenging Gospel reading, I come to you as a brother of Christ from a missionary diocese here in our own country, the Diocese of Jackson, located in the state of Mississippi. Yes, we have mission territories overseas, but mission territory also in our own county as well. The Diocese of Jackson is very large geographically, taking up most of the state of Mississippi, except the area along the Gulf Coast. We are the largest Diocese geographically east of Mississippi River, but we have the lowest % of Catholics in any Diocese in the US: 2.3%. Whereas, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has more than 4 million Catholics covering about 5,400 square miles, our Diocese of Jackson has about 55,000 Catholics covering more than 37,500 square miles, an area almost seven times as big as the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Currently we have 90 parishes and missions, but most are rather small, reflecting the rural nature of our state. Most of the 65 counties in our Diocese only have only one parish; some don’t have even one parish.
I’ve been a Diocesan priest for 14 years. My first assignment as pastor was in the communities of Yazoo City and Belzoni in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the cotton growing region along the Mississippi River, which has one of the highest levels of poverty in our country. While stationed in the Delta, I served as the priest in 3 parishes and 2 prisons. The territory I served in these two counties encompassed about 1,400 sq miles, a very large area. However, the population was only about 37,000 people in these two counties combined. I had a 30 mile drive between two of these parishes in which there was just cotton fields and swamp land, no towns or gas stations in between. While serving there, one of those counties, Humphreys county, had the highest child poverty rate and lowest median family income of any county in the US.
From my accent, you can probably detect that I am not from Mississippi originally. Hopefully, you can detect a little bit of a California accent. Although I am originally from Chicago, I lived as a teenager in Santa Ana in Orange County. After serving as a missionary in Ecuador and Canada as a young adult, I decided to become a priest in a mission area of the United States, which brought me to Mississippi.
I had mentioned that I had served as pastor of the Catholic Church in the small town of Yazoo City. There is actually someone from that town who could be canonized as a saint one day. Thea Bowman, who was born in that town in 1937, was educated at a Catholic school in our Diocese. Raised in a Methodist family, she converted to Catholicism as a girl and decided to join the order of sisters that taught at that school, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration from Wisconsin. She was the first African American sister in that order. Sister Thea Bowman became a renowned professor in literature, African American church music, and African American Catholic spirituality. She later returned to our Diocese to head the office of intercultural ministry and to work on racial healing in Mississippi. F. She brought a lot of joy and love to many people within the Church. She worked to bring people of different races and cultural groups together, respect their unique gifts. Her life was cut short when she died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 52. Her cause for canonization was approved by the US Bishops in 2018, when she was named a Servant of God. I thought of Sister Thea and her witness of faith as I was preparing for my mission appeal at your parish, as she truly represents the missionary spirit of our Diocese, of bringing the Gospel and love of Christ to the people of Mississippi and beyond, of working together in the rich cultural diversity and traditions that make up our Church.
I want to thank all of you for the opportunity to share with you our experiences in the Diocese of Jackson. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ and it is important for us to be in solidarity together in proclaiming God’s kingdom here on earth. We are going to take up a second collection for our Diocese. C. Those funds are used to help fund the small mission parishes and schools in our Diocese. As I will pray for all of you, I ask that you pray for our Mission Diocese of Jackson.
