By Gary Topping–
Last November on this blog, Mike O’Brien posted a tribute to the Family Home Evening program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). He and his family have adapted the Mormon idea to their own needs to provide a little family togetherness as a break from their busy lives. This week I’d like to acknowledge my admiration for the Mormon missionary program and to suggest that there might be ways in which we lay Catholics could emulate it.
Missionary work is indigenous to the Catholic Church, going all the way back to St. Paul’s journeys throughout the Mediterranean world. Later, as the West encountered the wider world, missionaries were there to preach the Gospel wherever it had never been heard. And we still have missionaries today, operating social, economic and humanitarian programs wherever there are poverty, injustice and suffering.
But I like the way the Mormons harness the idealism and energies of their young people, calling them to two years of service in missions around the world. And I particularly like the way in which the church in recent decades has added service projects to its proselytizing. (Nothing would please me more than if they would stop trying to convert Catholics altogether, but I’m not holding my breath.)
I don’t foresee the Catholic Church starting some big lay missionary program like the Mormons. But I don’t think asking individual Catholic young people (or maybe even retirees) to give up a certain portion of their life to missionary work is unreasonable. Even the secular world has institutions that harness youthful idealism: witness the Peace Corps, VISTA or Americorps. I have a friend who works in the construction trades building houses. He is a member of a Pentecostal denomination. Some years ago he traveled to somewhere in Latin America at his own expense and built a church. Some of us Catholics could do that.
I’m not even suggesting we have to travel to another country. Surely there are plentiful missionary opportunities right here in our far-flung Diocese of Salt Lake City, where pastors of rural parishes and missions are stressed to provide even minimal pastoral care. I have more than a good hunch that if one of these idealistic and energetic volunteers I am describing were to show up on the doorstep of one of those rural rectories and offer to start a music program, teach in the RCIA program or any number of other roles for which lay people are suited, he or she, before they could draw their next breath, would find themselves fully employed.
