About the celebration of the Missionary Year, Palabra Nueva spoke with holguinero father Dayron Hernández Martín, secretary of the National Mission Commission of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC). From his remote place in the Cuban East, where no Internet access has, this young priest makes the mission literally our daily bread. Perhaps, therefore, it is so familiar and so simple to specify even the slightest information about it. It is like that popular phrase of recent times, which, while related to reading, marvels at the missionary experience of this young field priest: “you read it, you live it”. To which we would say then, “he does, he lives it.” Here goes the dialogue sustained thanks to the goodness of email.
Why this decision of our Conference of Bishops to celebrate a Missionary Year in Cuba? In the dynamics of this question, why does its opening coincide with the closing of National Youth Day (JNJ)? Why a missionary year, when his missionary action is “identity” of our Church?
“The decision arises from the National Mission Commission and is proposed and accepted by the COCC and arises as a result of the desire to take the pulse of the missionary life of the Church in Cuba and revive it. The reason of the Church is to evangelize and for every Christian, ‘as for the whole Church, the missionary cause must be the first’,1 of this the Church in Cuba has always been aware, especially in recent years.
“In 1986, at the time of enEC, the Church chose to be a missionary. In 2015, at the time of the First National Assembly of Missions, the Church made five calls herself around missionary life. Fifteen years later, the Church in Cuba, which does not want to forget its raison d’etion, invites this missionary year to prepare the Second National Assembly of Missions to be held in El Cobre from August 3 to 7, 2020, to ‘rediscover’ and resuscitate its choice to be a missionary Church ‘because if it wasn’t, it would be like a sect that goes straight to Phariseeism and ceases to be the Church.’2
“The National Mission Commission wanted the opening of the missionary year to be on August 4, the day scheduled for the closing of the JNJ in Cuba, because young people, as Pope Francis has repeated to us on several occasions, are the present of the Church, they must be invited to be ‘street of faith’.3 They, by temperament , they are bold, generally do not know the ‘cannot’, the ‘has always been done like this and there is no other way’. Young people, St John Bosco said, can fail, yet we cannot say that they are evil, young people can be good and someone has to tell them. The National Mission Commission relies on young people, their creativity to bring the gospel to people and places in Cuba where it is not yet known. The National Mission Commission believes in young people and their courageous testimony of faith, which becomes missionary testimony they give every day. The National Mission Commission encourages young people not to look so much at the clay pot that we are all, but at the treasure of the gospel of which they are bearers and who are called to share, in the ways that only they know and can do, with others.”
To what peripheries is our Church called in Cuba in its missionary action? Are there no peripheries also within the Church itself? According to your answer, what should our ad intra mission look like?
“The first to be evangelized is the Church itself, in the Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis invites ‘that all communities seek to put the necessary means to move forward on the path of pastoral and missionary conversion, which cannot leave things as they are’.4 And reminds us that ‘The Second Vatican Council presented ecclesial conversion as openness to a permanent reform of itself for fidelity to Jesus Christ’. The Pope quotes: ‘The whole renewal of the Church consists essentially of increasing fidelity to her vocation […] Christ calls the pilgrim Church to perennial reform, of which the Church herself, as a human and earthly institution, always needs.’5
“The ad intra mission that the Church needs in Cuba, in my view, must go around being more fraternal communities, that fraternity may be breathed in our temples, that those who are discovered brothers and sisters and those who arrive feel welcomed. Like the first Christian communities that by their way of life earned the appreciation of all the people and where many, seeing their way of life, joined the group of believers who accepted salvation (cf. Acts 2.42-47). Among us Christians we should live the secret of evangelization that St Francis of Asseses gives to Brother Leo: ‘Look, to evangelize a man, is to say to him: You are also loved of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. And not just tell him, but really think about it. And not only to think about it, but to behave with this man in such a way that he feels and discovers that there is something in him as saved, something greater and nobler than he thought, and thus awakens to a new self-awareness.’6 A great existential periphery to evangelize is the little love we have.”
How important can it be for the bishop, the priest, to have that much-needed missionary spirit of our Church? Is it time for confessional or missionary priests? Or both of them?
“The question touches me quite closely because I am a priest. I don’t think it’s time for priests of confessionals or missionaries, I think it’s time and the Church needs Christian priests. Priests who felt disciples of Jesus, apprentices of Jesus. Priests who sit at the Master’s feet to learn to pray, to learn to treat others. Cures that we create and live the Word of God. You heal us to forget about us, our feelings, our projects to seek to look and love people as Jesus looks at them and wants them, to seek out and build his Kingdom and not ours. And whether in the confessional or in the mission, with young people or the elderly, with an active and fruitful pastoral life or quiet and seemingly unper productive, in our priestly ministry we will be ‘alter Christi’, not only because we act in his person when we celebrate the sacraments, but because every day that passes we look more like Him. Here I ask you what Pope Francis asks so much for him, pray for us priests, because we carry this treasure in clay vessels.”
What actions does this missionary year entail? Why the election of Blessed Maria Dolores Sopeña and St Anthony Maria Claret as patrons of the Missionary Year?
“In preparatory meeting of the Missionary Year and the Second National Assembly of Missions, the commission proposed as patrons St Anthony Maria Claret, bishop who in Cuba, from 1849 to 1856, visited most of the parishes in his care bearing witness to pastor and missionary, and Blessed Dolores Sopeña, who in the short period from 1873 to 1876 knew how to discover and correspond to the needs of the poorest of his time. Both were testament to missionary life in our Cuban lands.
“Some of the proposed actions to encourage the missionary life of our communities have been carried out, such as the one planned for December 2019 that invited and organized small groups of missionaries to welcome people who came to see birth and explain its meaning to them. It has also been conceived, on dates close to the patron saint celebrations of each Christian community, to encourage a mission that has as its recipients the people who once participated in community life and for some reason have turned away. As of February 2020, we continued visits to the sick to encourage them to pray and offer their mission sickness and missionaries in Cuba.
“During Family Day (from Mother’s Day to Grandparents Day), missions will be organized that will target family members involved in community life. In addition, by February 26, 2020, parishioners will be invited to offer the Ash Wednesday fast for the mission and missionaries in Cuba. On April 9, Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, we will encourage parishioners in communities to have a charitable gesture toward those most in need, making them realize that when we serve others we are anomaly for them that God loves them, that God has not forgotten them; we’re doing a mission.
“On April 26, III Easter Sunday, we will invite a community member to share their testimonies of missionary life. On the eve of the Solemnity of Pentecost, we will organize a prayer vigil for the Second National Assembly of Missions. From June to August we will promote parish missions in all communities.”
Finally, what importance do you attach to missionary work led by children, adolescents, and young people?
“It is very hopeful to see how as many as children, many become bold missionaries. The best evangelizers of children, adolescents and young people, are the children themselves, adolescents and young people, because they usually live in the same environments, have the same dreams, go through the same problems and can thus better understand each other and discover when one of them needs a word or just a gesture of affection and closeness. They, as Pope Francis has reminded us, are not only the future of the Church in Cuba, we have to look at them as the present and take them into account to write, as a Church, our believing history, our history of salvation.”
Notes
1 St. John Paul II: Letter Enc. Redemptoris missio, 86.
2 Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba: “Inaugural Address of the ENEC, delivered by Msgr. Adolfo Rodríguez”, at the Cuban National Ecclesial Meeting. Final document and pastoral instruction of the Bishops of Cuba, Mexico City, National Work of the Good Press, A.C., 2005, p. 24.
3 Pope Francis: Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 106: “How good it is that young people are ‘street of faith’, happy to bring Jesus Christ to every corner, to every square, to every corner of the earth!”
4 Pope Francis: Ex Ap. Evangelii Gaudium, 25.
5 Ibid.
6 Heoi Lecrec: Wisdom of a poor man, in https://books.google.com.cu.
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