The national director of PMS Spain, Father José María Calderón, explained the importance of “making all Christians aware of the fact that evangelization is not only the task of missionaries but of all the baptized.” To do so, in 2023 PMS Spain held more than 80 conferences and roundtables along with dozens of missionary exhibitions, contests, music festivals, and diocesan meetings.
Serafín Suárez, missionary of the Spanish Institute of Foreign Missions who has been evangelizing in the Diocese of Hwange, Zimbabwe, for 30 years, expressed his desire to humanize and put faces and names to all the numbers contained in the report.
Suárez conjured the image of “a tapestry in which colors, landscapes, and people appear that everyone praises for their beauty: Turn the tapestry over. And we are going to find that there are only ropes and knots,” he pointed out. “Missions are that. What appears is the beautiful tapestry, but it would be impossible if the knots and ropes were not behind it.”
“Missionaries are the fruit of those ropes and those knots,” Suárez continued. “We are bearers and spokespersons for what we have behind us,” which is many people who “without going outside, live and help the mission.”
Suárez said the missions are characterized by two hands. In one hand is “the bread of the Word” because that is the commission the missionaries have received: “Try to transform the world in which you live from the word of Jesus.”
This becomes difficult, he pointed out, when most missions are carried out in disadvantaged countries, making it necessary to extend another hand “with another bread, our daily bread.” Both, he added, “are complementary.”
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