Bulletin reflection - St Jude Catholic Church - Pearl Mississippi - Sunday 13 October 2019

      As we hear in our readings today of the healing of two different lepers, we can reflect upon the way we are called to reach out to the most lost and abandoned in our discipleship in Christ.  During Extraordinary Missionary Month this month of October, Pope Francis has asked us to learn from the missionary saints and martyrs of our Church. Daniel Combini, whose feast day was celebrated last week, is a great missionary saint who is felt the calling to bring the Gospel to the poor and the vulnerable.  Comboni really captured my imagination when I was out in the jungles of Ecuador as a missionary with the religious congregation that he founded: the Comboni Missionaries.  He was born into a poor family of farmers in Italy in 1831.  He is the only one of 8 children of his parents who made it past the early years of childhood.  He was ordained a priest in the year 1854, the same year the Immaculate Conception was declared as dogma in our Church. He always dreamed of being a missionary to Africa.  He went on his first trip to Africa to the Sudan, when he and his companions journeyed for 4 months on camel from Egypt just to get to their mission site.  Many of his missionary companions died along the way, but Daniel survived the journey.  He was affected deeply by the severe poverty and hardship of the African people that he encountered on that journey and during his missionary service in Africa. Daniel eventually became the first bishop of the Sudan in Africa.  He died at the young age of 50 from all of the hardships he went through as a missionary, but his love for God lives on in all priests, brothers, and nuns 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 in the country.  Thousands of missionaries returned to Rome, many of whom had been in the Sudan most of their adult lives serving the Lord in the missions there. Like the faith of the leper in the Gospel today, Daniel Comboni and so many of our missionaries had such a strong faith that never gave up through all their hardships and struggles.  Many of them so willingly gave up their lives for their love of their faith and in service to the calling they received from God. We give thanks for the ways our missionaries have enriched our lives, for the way they still speak to us today.  All of us have a calling we receive to God.  And we are all called to be missionaries wherever we are in life.