Missionary Road Is Not for the Faint of Heart

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Sister Elizabeth Roach, M.M., remembers how she was first smitten with the idea of being a missionary. The parish priest from her church in Pittsburgh had come to visit her seventh-grade class and gave a talk about Jesus. After he was finished a nun approached a large map on the blackboard and pointed to Tibet, telling the students that people there had never heard of Jesus.

“I knew I wanted to be a missionary,” Sister Elizabeth recalled when she talked to CNY before the annual Mass to mark World Mission Sunday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Oct. 19.

“I asked, ‘Can girls be missionaries, too? And he said, ‘Yes, there are Maryknoll Sisters,” she said.

Sister Elizabeth, who turned 86 on Oct. 18, never got to Tibet. But she did get to Peru, Bolivia, Panama and Hawaii during long years of service in missionary ministry. She served first as a medical technologist and then as a high school science teacher. She tended to the sick. She helped children born into severe poverty grow up to a much better life as doctors, chemists and engineers. She passed on the faith.

And she saw a fellow missioner, Father Bill Kruegler, M.M., gunned down Aug. 7, 1962, outside his church in Montero, Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

“He said Mass that morning and he was shot at the door of the parish,” Sister Elizabeth recalled. “It was a man who was just angry because (Father Kruegler) was defending children.” Sister Elizabeth explained that the priest had come into conflict with the man who operated a bar next door to the parish and was illegally selling liquor to the local children.

As in Jesus’ time, missionary work is not for the faint of heart.

But it is expected of all of us who are baptized, noted Auxiliary Bishop Peter Byrne, episcopal vicar of Dutchess, Putnam and Northern Westchester counties, during his homily to the assembled missionaries and their families at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Clergy representatives from the Church’s mission-serving religious communities joined Bishop Byrne, the principal celebrant, on the altar.

“The Holy Spirit is the protagonist, the principal agent of the Church’s mission. It is he who leads the Church on her missionary paths,” the bishop said. “So the Church, urged on by the spirit of Christ, must walk the road Christ himself walked, a way of poverty and obedience, of service and self-sacrifice, even to death: A death from which he arose victorious by his Resurrection.

“Inspired by the Holy Spirit, we’re all called upon to walk missionary paths,” he continued. “We all know that in the world today the Church is very viciously persecuted in some areas. And people are sacrificing their lives as we speak as witnesses to the Gospel. But we also have the ancient saying; the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. That witness inspires us to greater courage in our own lives.”

Sister Jeanne Houlihan, M.M., a fellow Maryknoller who served in China for 46 years and returned home in 2010, described her service there as a “fulfilled dream.”

“I was working with girls from ages 12 to 18,” she recalled. “Of course, most of them were not Catholics. But we gave them values that enabled these girls to become great women that have used the values we taught them to serve society.”

Sister Elizabeth, an author of children’s books, continues her missionary ministry with a modern form of technology that allows her to visit many countries, even possibly Tibet, without ever leaving her home at the Maryknoll Sisters Center in Ossining.

“I visit children all over the world by Skype,” she said proudly. “Just recently I visited children in Pakistan. And I’ve got three visits lined up right now for Wisconsin, Texas and Georgia. So I still get around.”