By Anthony Barich
Outback missions established by Blessed Mary MacKillop’s Religious Order are in serious jeopardy unless lay workers replace the ageing Sisters, the director of the Pontifical Mission Societies’ Australian arm said.
Paying tribute to the pioneering work of the Sisters in the East Kimberley, Catholic Mission director Martin Teulan said the shortage of pastoral associates in the Broome diocese needed to be “urgently addressed if the faith missions the Sisters of St Joseph have pioneered with Aboriginal people are to be carried into the future”.
Five Sisters currently work as pastoral and family support workers in remote areas with three lay volunteers managing the Mirrilingki Spirituality Centre in Warmun, 600 miles north east of the diocesan centre in Broome.
There are no lay pastoral associates in the region, sources told The Record.
“There is a real need for volunteers for practical and pastoral work with the Kimberley Lay Missionary Association,” he said, calling on Catholics to financially support its Home Mission Fund during World Mission Month in October.
“There is a great need for funds to undertake many worthwhile projects with the indigenous people. These projects are led by priests, Sisters and wonderful Aboriginal elders.”
He said the Sisters had been answering the call to bring Christ to the East Kimberley for over 45 years, since they set up their first school at Wyndham in 1964; 2,000 miles north east of Perth.
Catholic Mission, he said, is trying to tap into Mary MacKillop’s “Christ-like humility; working for the poor in the face of persecution” to inspire Catholics to help give Third World countries more access to the Eucharist in the lead-up to World Mission Sunday on 24 October.
Blessed MacKillop’s humility, modelled on the suffering of Christ on the cross is “a humility that Catholic missionaries throughout the world emulate in the midst of terrible human suffering and persecution,” a 24 September Catholic Mission statement said.
Catholic Mission’s Perth Archdiocesan director Francis Leong said this humility enables Catholics to “build authentic communities united in Christ, exalting the lowly, the marginalised and persecuted, the poorest of the poor.”
“It is a humility we are all called to support and emulate as missionaries in our own community.
“In his World Mission Sunday 2010 message, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that ‘building ecclesial communion, communities united together in Christ, is the key to mission’, and that ‘an authentically Eucharistic Church is a missionary Church’.”
Catholic Mission also wants to ensure that the Eucharist is “present, accessible and available”, especially to the Third World, “to peoples desperate for the healing and hope that it offers amidst unrelenting suffering”.
Mr Leong also cited the Pope’s February 2007 Apostolic Exhortation, The Sacrament of Charity: “Those who eat the Bread of Christ cannot remain indifferent before those who lack daily bread.
“We cannot approach the Eucharistic table without being drawn into Christ’s Mission in the world, which is meant to reach all people.”