By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
ROME – Continual conversion and centring one’s life on Christ will help members of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate be better missionaries and attract vocations, said the Order’s newly elected Superior General.
Oblate Fr Louis Lougen said his Order’s founder, St Eugene de Mazenod, called on his brothers to be saints. Fr Lougen said, “I think that if we continually hand our lives over to the Lord in conversion, we will be Oblates, we will make of our lives an oblation, we will be better missionaries, better leaders,” attract vocations and be closer to the poor.
Members of the Oblate general chapter elected Fr Lougen, who served as provincial of the United States since 2005, to a six year term as Superior General on 28 September, his 58th birthday.
Like many Religious Orders, the Oblates are facing a major demographic shift with vocations falling in Europe and North America, but growing in Latin America, Asia and Africa, he said.
He said recruiting new Oblates and rallying support for the vocations they have, especially in poorer regions, are some of the challenges facing the Order which has 4,000 missionaries working in 66 countries around the world.
While prayer is an important element in their vocations strategy, personal conversion and an expanded communications effort are also key, he said.
If the missionaries live their lives centred on Christ and live their communal life “with joy, with conviction and with a real commitment, I think that is the best vocations ministry we could have. Our own life will attract” new members, he said.
“As Oblates, our charism is that we don’t blow our own horns. So we work hard, we are close to the poor, we do wonderful work, but we don’t tell our stories,” he said.
Getting the word out “in a way that is humble and true” about who they are, how they live and what they are doing should help foster vocations, promote joint initiatives with other Religious communities, laypeople and dioceses, and attract donors who want to support the good work they are doing, he said.
Fr Lougen said at first he felt “terrified,” then just “a bit overwhelmed” at the thought of being the new Superior General of the Oblates. But, he said, many Oblates saw his background in spending 18 years as a missionary in some of the poorest areas of Brazil and serving as the US provincial superior as being valuable assets for his new role.
Those who chose him to lead the US province “did not want a CEO. They wanted a brother, someone who was present” to all the priests and brothers, he said.
“In my five and a half years as provincial, I lived out of a suitcase so that I could be among the province, meeting the men” and seeing the work they were doing in the US, Canada, northern Mexico and Zambia, he said.
He will continue to bring that gift to the order as Superior General, he said, “to be present to people, to know them, to be a friend, to be a brother.”
Fr Lougen succeeds Fr Wilhelm Steckling, who served the maximum of two six year terms as Superior General. The new Superior, from Buffalo, New York, attended the Oblate-run Bishop Neumann High School in Buffalo and entered the Oblate’s juniorate in Newburgh, New York in 1970. He attended the novitiate in Godfrey, Illinois and continued his formation at Oblate College in Washington, DC, earning degrees in Philosophy and Theology.