My Journey with Partners In Mission
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June 30, 2022My history with PIM began in Puerto Rico long ago. I can remember what I call a sort of “pre- PIM history.”
It began after I was named Vicar of the Vice-Provincial. We began, as our job always did, with making up the appointments for the new triennium, and one evening I was travelling with Fr. Tom Forrest, also a member of the Ordinary Council.
We decided to stop on Route One, the highway from San Juan to Caguas, to have supper. We began to talk of what we were doing, making up new appointments for the Vice Province which included two foundations in the Dominican Republic, three in the Virgin Islands and 12 in Puerto Rico, and we had about 90+ confreres to fill these commitments but doing so was difficult due to the “manpower shortage.”
We decided to talk to all the Bishops to see if they could cover any of our parishes. The Archbishop of San Juan said he could and thus we ended our commitment to serve the parish of Miramar, in San Juan. However, our job was still difficult. At supper that night, Fr. Tom, asked, “What are we going to do in the future?” And I remember that I answered him with just one word, “Laity.” That is where my commitment to laity in mission began and at first this translated into encouraging the involvement of more and more Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist in our parishes. Later some of these became Deacons.
And from then on lay men and women began to participate more actively in all our preaching and teaching ministry, and the administration of the Eucharist in our Churches and Chapels, including bringing it to the sick who could not attend, and later in other ministries like the recruitment and formation of future seminarians, where their gifts were generously employed and greatly effective.
As Vice Provincial, I went to the General Chapter in Rome in 1973 and, as I remember it, there was not much talk of the use of laity in our ministry. But later, in the General Chapter of 1979, the conversation began. Fr. “Scotty” Stratton, the new Provincial of the Province of Oakland, and I, as well as others, began to talk about a change in how we viewed “Oblates.”
Instead of an honorary title for those who normally offered their professional services to the congregation “pro bono” we talked about what we called “Oblates in the Extended Sense of the Word.” We proposed that they would be persons who would be united to us, like PIM is today. They would be persons who, aware of their Baptismal commitment, would share with us our life and our mission and form part of the Redemptorist family. We were able to affirm these ideas in the General Statutes on Oblates, #02 which now reads as follows: “The Congregation may take as associated ‘oblates’ both cleric and lay. In doing so, it should envisage and seek to recruit helpers for our apostolate. They may be either permanent or temporary.
(Vice) provinces should define in more detail the actual forms this association will take. (cf. 085). And that statute reads: “Oblates who share the spirit and missionary zeal of the Congregation must have the benefit of proper initiation and constant contact with the Congregation, according to the norms to be laid down in the individual (Vice)provinces.” (cf. St. 02) Our clumsy title, “Oblates in the Extended Sense of the Word” was not mentioned but some of our ideas were.
It was not until 12 years later, in the General Chapter of 1991, in Itaci, Brazil that the whole concept of involvement of laity in our mission was developed with the help of Fr. Juan Manuel Lasso, our Superior General, and the title of this effort became PIM (Partners in Mission) because other proposed titles were difficult to translate in the various languages of the Congregation. Later, under the direction of Fr. Lasso, the General Council in 1995 published the Communicnda #4, with the title “Collaboration Between the Redemptorist Community and the Laity.” This became the “foundational document” of the PIM movement in the Congregation.
Back in Aguas Buenas where I was stationed in the 1980s, armed with the ideas we shared on Oblates in the Chapter of 1979, we faced the situation of Marcos Gonzalez, a lay “Hermano Cheo,” a member of a group of laymen and women which was started around 1915 to combat the entrance of other religious sects to Puerto Rico. He organized a group of 10 or so “lay missionaries” with their own Music Ministry and they used to go around the town and country of Aguas Buenas to give missions on street corners, basketball courts, or outside the Chapels in a common place.
Marcos also lived with us as a full member of our Redemptorist community. He had his room and his office, and many people would come to him for spiritual direction. He also helped in house duties. Sadly, for our community and his group of missionaries, he died of a sudden heart attack which left his group orphaned. Our Redemptorist community met, and we decided that two of us, FrWillie Caragol and me, would try to continue his important work and for our project we took over the convent that the School Sisters had left.
There we had our training sessions, our weekly meetings, our library, etc. We did this because we believed that our lay missionaries should have a place that they can call their own where they could meet and store their materials. Thankfully we had this in Aguas Buenas.
So, we continued the weekly missions monthly in the local areas that Marcos and his team began, and we were blessed with having our own “Traveling Music Ministry” with their own sound system. We believed that music was important for the mission. Often, we would invite Padre Pablo Straub, C.Ss.R., to come from Bayamon where he had his own lay missionary group, to come and give the first talk of the mission so that our missionaries could learn from seeing this great missionary in action.
When we decided to give missions in the Public Housing Developments in town, we invited another group of lay missionaries to share their experience with us since this was their special calling. Some even came to help us with the “apartment visiting and inviting” weekend which preceded the weeknights of the preached mission.
(Part 2 of this installment will come in the July issue of The Baltimore Beacon, to be released on August 1.)
