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Listening to Restlessness and Taking a Risk |
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U. S. A. | APOSTOLATE
| TESTIMONIES |
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Jon and Cindy Morris Found Catholic Family Mission
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| Jon and Cindy Morris with Juan and Lucia Arroyo. | |
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Great apostolates often begin with a vague but
persistent sense of “I should be doing something more”. Listen
to that initial feeling and follow the dream, because it
might be the beginning of something great for God.
Jon and
Cindy Morris, members of Regnum Christi, are a dynamic, youthful
couple who started off with a threefold dream: they wanted
to do something beautiful for God; they wanted to serve
the poor on missions; and they wanted to help families
have the transforming experience of missionary service among the poor.
A
Regnum Christi apostolate with all three of these elements did
not yet exist in the United States, so they rolled
up their sleeves and created it… and Catholic Family Mission
was born.
Their first Catholic Family Mission trip to the Mayan
jungle was held in mid-April, just after Easter. Details about
upcoming missions are posted on the Catholic Family Mission web
site at www.CatholicFamilyMission.com.
In the interview below, Jon and
Cindy Morris share their experience of creating an apostolate and
living out the dream for the first time.
Q: What moved
you to create an apostolate like Catholic Family Mission?
Cindy: We
had both experienced missionary life among the poor when we
were young and single, and it stuck in our hearts
all these years.
As we were raising our children,
we wanted our family—and others— to share the powerful experience
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| One of the six thatched huts in Nuevo Durango. | |
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of helping the poor.
Jon: We wanted to
make sure our kids had the experience of understanding how
the other world lives.
Q: So how did
you start making the dream a reality?
Jon:
Through the Regnum Christi Movement, we made contact with Juan
and Lucia Arroyo, who are very hardworking, foundational members in
the Movement in Mexico. (Juan Arroyo actually went to school
with Fr. Alvaro Corcuera; they used to go on mission
trips together, and his heart was always moved by the
people they met there.) The Arroyos have been involved in
laying the groundwork for Catholic World Mission’s humanitarian service programs
in remote Mayan villages—and this was exactly the type of
work we were looking for: to bring Christ by our
actions. We were looking to build something.
Cindy:
When we visited Cancun to look for a place to
establish our mission base, the Arroyo family took us with
them on their normal missionary routine, in the work that
they do for Catholic World Mission in Familia Misionera. They
drive down every Saturday and go through about 15 Mayan
villages, catechizing the people and building relationships with them. When
we went with them, I could see how they gave
themselves totally as a family to the mission, working from
morning to nightfall. They serve the Church and Regnum Christi
in a profound way and they were immensely helpful to
us.
Jon: Through the Arroyos, we found out that the local
Bishop, Bishop Pedro Pablo has 2 priorities that fit with
our vision. One was to get the churches in his
diocese rebuilt after the two hurricanes that struck two years
back. There were only a few buildings in those towns
that were able to withstand the 62 hours of hurricane
force winds, so the bishop wanted the churches to be
rebuilt not only for preaching purposes, but also to provide
a safe shelter for the poor during the storms. The
second was to bring Christ’s message, to evangelize and catechize.
The Mayan people are a simple people and because of
their lack of education and knowledge of the Catholic faith,
many Christian sects as well as Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses
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| The interior of the “Mayan Hilton”. | |
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are working in these small villages and “converting” our Catholic
brothers and sisters. In response, the Bishop has begun training
full-time catechists to support the local priests, who often have
as many as 30 remote parishes to serve. So that
became the central focus of our mission: to rebuild churches
in the poor Mayan villages of his diocese and to
raise funds to support a full-time catechist.
Cindy: It
was also providential that Juan Arroyo is a civil engineer;
he designed the roof for the church structure that we
built in Nuevo Durango. Much of what we all did
there was due to his efforts and time and incredible
self-giving.
Q: How did you find the place that has
now become your permanent mission base in Mexico?
Jon:
We were looking for specific qualities in the place that
would become Catholic Family Mission’s base of operations. We were
looking for a village where the Blessed Sacrament was kept
in the chapel. And since this was going to be
a family mission and not a youth mission, we couldn’t
have people sleeping on church floors. We wanted to ensure
that there would be clean, comfortable, and safe sleeping quarters,
and that the food wouldn’t make people sick. And we
also wanted to make sure that there would be enough
work to do for future missions in the surrounding area.
Cindy: God provided all of that in a little
village called Nuevo Durango. This village was one of the
few that had permission to have the Blessed Sacrament in
their humble chapel because everyone there was Catholic except for
one man who had fallen away, and you could see
that this man’s story was a sorrowful, painful thing for
them to talk about. Not all of the people are
well catechized but there is that faithful remnant that is
so devoted, very spiritual. They are a unique, happy people.
Jon:
They also happened to be kind of innovative. The people
of Nuevo Durango were trying to attract paying tourists as
a way to build up their local economy, so with
some government aid, they built six authentic Mayan huts with
thatch roofs and stick walls, concrete floors, beds, and a
tiny bathroom with a functioning toilet and (cold) shower in
each hut. The grounds around the huts were beautifully landscaped,
and there was a path leading to a central kitchen/dining
room area with picnic tables where 32 people could eat.
It was the perfect space for families to gather for
their meals.
Cindy: We wanted safe lodging and
safe food for the families and children, and this village
had it. A local Mexican group had been working with
the people of Nuevo Durango to teach them hospitality and
hygiene skills. The cooks wore hairnets, used purified water to
prepare the food, cooked over a wood fire, used a
fridge to store the perishable food, and washed the cooking
utensils in chlorinated water. Every day they made our beds,
swept the floors, and scrubbed them with chlorinated water. It
was the Mayan Hilton!
Jon: And from this village,
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| The church in Nuevo Durango BEFORE reconstruction. | |
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our future mission will have plenty of work to do:
within an hour’s radius, there are 25 churches that we
can rebuild.
Q: How did your first mission go
in April? What was “a day in the life” like?
Cindy: Well, since it was a first time experience,
we didn’t know what to expect, but it ended up
blessing us and blessing the people there. Even before we
started, we were getting phone calls and e-mails from people
who had heard about the mission by word of mouth.
We met a Protestant couple who were also good friends
of a Regnum Christi couple in Albany, NY, and they
were so impressed by the apostolate that they gave us
a $2,000 dollar donation. We’ve found families that have said,
“We’ve been praying for this.” And we know that it’s
the Holy Spirit, that it goes beyond us and it
really is God putting this together; we’re just instruments along
for the ride.
Jon: We took four of
our six children with us on the mission, along with
a Legionary priest, named Fr David Kluk, LC, and a
total of 12 people. From the start, we had about
20 local men helping us to rebuild the church. They
were so proud of their church coming together and they
wanted to be part of it.
Cindy: The
children would come after school to help, too. The kids
that didn’t go to school would just stay there all
day with us. The kids made friends and found ways
to communicate with each other across the language barrier, especially
my nine year old son who knows zero Spanish!
Jon: The construction of the new church roof and floor
is now almost complete thanks to the continued work and
supervision of Juan and Lucia Arroyo. For this mission, and
for every mission, our goal is to raise $10-15,000 to
fund the construction. For this first mission, we raised $10,000
dollars specifically for the church, plus another $5,000 so that
we could hire a full-time evangelizer for a whole year.
We hope to fundraise the same amount for every mission
so that we can raise up the physical structure of
the church and also help catechize the people in an
ongoing way.
Cindy: Although the primary purpose of
the mission was to build, we also did some spontaneous
door-to-door evangelization and ran a little K4J activity one afternoon.
Father Kluk heard the confession of a man who hadn’t
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| A shy but lovely Mayan girl. | |
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been to confession in 20 years.
Jon: Another
part of the mission was the time we spent in
recreation and play with the townspeople. Before we came, Juan
told us not to think that we were coming there
to “save their town”. The first priority was to develop
a relationship with the villagers, and that’s why it was
important to play baseball and relax with them. It couldn’t
all be about work; the human relationships were most important.
Cindy: Equally important throughout the trip was the
spiritual life that we lived. We lived all of our
Regnum Christi commitments together: morning offering, meditation, rosary, the angelus,
a formative talk around noon, the sacraments, spiritual direction, adoration
and holy hour. The spirituality that was maintained was key.
Q: Looking back, what would you say were
the fruits of the mission in your own family?
Cindy: It was like being on a retreat, because you
leave so blessed. You go down to help the poor
and you walk away a new person, a stronger person.
The crowning gift for me, as a mother, happened on
the last day. As we were leaving the village to
come home, we had to drive through the Cancun hotel
strip and we were seeing all these glorious, rich, beautiful
hotels and cars. And all of the kids said, “I
would leave this in a minute to go back and
do what we did.” It was so important to me
that they had acquired such an awareness of Christ and
of his presence in us. When we strip away the
things that fog our vision and prevent us from hearing
him—all the noise, the glitz, the distraction, the television, all
of that—and we go away as a family and have
an experience like that… it’s transforming. That made it all
worthwhile.
Jon: Going on mission as a family
has been life changing for us. Through the graces we
received we have sown seeds of love for the poor
and service to others, and this has brought about many
conversations and discussions within our family. The effects of the
mission will be with us forever!
For more information
check:
www.CatholicFamilyMission.com
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