10 October 2023 – homily for Tuesday of 27th week in Ordinary Time – St Daniel Comboni – Luke 11:5-13

     As we hear about Martha and Mary in the Gospel today, we might reflect upon how we are to achieve balance in our lives of faith, to be both people of action and people of faith and of prayer. In conjunction with today’s Gospel, I thought about the saint we celebrate today, with whom I have a direct connection. I went to Ecuador as a lay missionary for three years with a Catholic religious order called the Comboni Missionaries. That religious order is named after Daniel Comboni, the saint we celebrate today. Daniel Comboni captured my imagination when I was out in the jungles with the order of priests, brothers, and sisters that he founded. He was born into a poor family of farm workers in Italy in 1831. He is the only one of 8 children who made it past childhood. He was ordained a priest in 1854, the same year the Immaculate Conception was declared as dogma in the Church. He always dreamed of being a missionary to Africa from the time he was a youth. He went on his first trip to Africa to the Sudan as he and his companions journeyed for 4 months on camel from Egypt to get to their mission site. Many of his companions died along the way, but Comboni survived, being touched by the poverty and hardship that the people there had to endure. He eventually became the first Bishop of the Sudan. He had great faith in the people of Africa, wanting them to be in positions of leadership and authority in the Church and in their society, founding many schools and training the native population to be priests, doctors, and teachers. He died at the age of 50 from all of the hardships he went through as a missionary and for the way he worked tirelessly promoting the missions. However, his love for God lives on in all priests, brothers, sisters, and lay people of the Comboni missionaries who work all over the world. I remember some of the Comboni priests telling me how in 1964 all of the Comboni missionaries were expelled from the south of Sudan when an anti-Christian government took power there. Many Comboni missionaries returned to Rome after having served in the Sudan most of their adult lives. Daniel Comboni and so many of the Comboni Missionaries willingly gave up their lives for Christ’s Gospel message and in service to their calling. In that same missionary spirit, all of us have a call we receive from God as disciples of Christ. And we are all called to be missionaries wherever we are in life.