Feast Day: September 15th
3 times he had already gone back to Italy. This time it was for good. The year was 1907, and Fr. Paulo Manna, a 35-year-old would-be missionary, was returning to his home country ill, a “failed missionary” as he called himself, to Burma (now called Myanmar). It had looked so hopeful. He had entered the Institute for the Foreign Missions at the age of 19, was ordained a priest at 22, and by 25 arrived as a missionary in the Eastern Burma territory of Toungoo, meeting his beloved Ghekkú tribe for the first time.
A perusal of pictures from the Institute sketches the scene: a smiling, grizzled, priest clad in white is surrounded by the local children, grinning from ear to ear, everyone standing in front of a new school, or an ambulance, or collected in a makeshift choir. Now Fr. Paulo was leaving that all behind because of tuberculosis. He didn’t make the cut as a missionary. One year later, in 1908, he went on pilgrimage to Lourdes. He did not go asking for a physical healing, nor even for clarity on what to do next, he just asked for greater personal holiness and purity, and eternal salvation for himself and everyone he loved. Kneeling at Our Lady’s shrine, he surrendered the failure into God’s hands.
What was God intending for him? Where was this zeal for carrying the Gospel to the ends of the earth supposed to carry him if not to the ends of the earth? He looked at what was already happening in the Church for the work of the missions. Three different major organizations were already founded: the Propaganda Fidei, which begun by the lay woman, Pauline Jaricot, in 1815, its first big initiative being a worldwide collection to support the Church in Louisiana (this being just a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, that second diocese of the United States was an overwhelming territory for Bp. Louis Dubourg to care for). There was also already the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, founded in 1889 by another lawwoman, Stephanie to support the training of local clergy in mission territory. And, lastly, there was the Association of the Holy Childhood, which collected alms from children in Christian lands to support their peers growing up in poverty throughout the world.
So you had organizations fundraising for missionary lands, training foreign priests, and caring for impoverished children. What remained? Years later this is how Paulo Manna described the breakthrough:
We missionaries often wonder why the work of the conversion of the non-Christian world goes so slowly. We usually give various reasons to explain this painful fact, and in truth the problem may be considered from many angles, some of which do not concern our responsibility. But for the part that does concern us, and it is the main part, the problem has a very clear solution. To save the world, God in his infinite wisdom wanted to have co-workers. God does his part well: do the people called to help him do their part equally well? … The missionary problem has been, and still is almost ignored by the Christian people. Those who were interested in the past were always a minority, and it is extremely painful to see today too, although some progress has been made, how the enormous question is far from being understood and faced fully by clergy and people.
The world will not be converted by one great missionary, nor an organization that trains priests or funds schools, or builds hospitals. All that is splendid, and necessary, but the breakthrough that was needed was to make every Catholic in the world a missionary. To remind the Church, every single member of the Church, that they were also called to be missionaries in their own backyard.
And so he began the fourth and final of the great Pontifical Mission Societies of the Church. Its work would be to cultivate in all priests, and laypeople, a sense of the missionary work of the Church, and the call to mission that was given to them. Three years later, in 1919, Pope Benedict XV penned an apostolic letter to the world dismembered by World War I, choosing as his theme Christ’s mandate to “proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” Vatican II would also take up Manna’s insight, that every Christian is called to be a missionary in their own part of the world. What was the only pre-requisite to be a missionary? Vatican II would call it the “universal call to holiness”, but Manna described it decades before:
… neither brilliance nor prudence, nor courage have made [the great missionaries] great in our eyes and the eyes of God. They have been great, they have saved many souls, they have founded Churches, mainly because they were holy men, that is, spiritual men. This is the secret, the soul of their zeal, their perseverance and their success; this is the solemn teaching they have handed down to us and which I love to remind you of, so that our missionaries of today and those of tomorrow may always build upon it the first and essential reason for their own sanctification and the sanctification of the souls that are, and will be entrusted to them.
– Fr. Dominic often likes to engage those big questions: How to share the Gospel? How to save our country? How to make an impact? How to bring peace to our world? Bl. Manna tells us that all of those are answered by a simpler question: “What today is getting in the way of my holiness?”