Their numbers are down, their average age is up, and their last names are as likely to be Vu or Gonzalez as Kelly or O’Brien, but one thing that has not changed about Maryknoll priests and brothers in the past century is their commitment to live and work among the poor in distant lands and unfamiliar cultures. (Barbara J. Fraser, Catholic News Service)

One of Maryknoll’s greatest contributions to Catholic mission has been “seeing and affirming the value and individual worth of all people and all cultures,” Father Raymond Finch, Maryknoll superior general from 1996 to 2002, told Catholic News Service.

“That has been (true) from the beginning, whether it was in China or in Latin America, with indigenous cultures,” said Father Finch, 62, who currently directs the Maryknoll Mission Center in Cochabamba in Bolivia. “Especially seeing the contribution, the worth and the beauty in people who are on the margins and who have been hurt by society, the marginalized, the poor – that has been something that we have been blessed with.”

The mission sites around the globe where Maryknoll priests and brothers work with refugees, AIDS patients, farmers, children and youth may not be what Fathers James Anthony Walsh and Thomas Frederick Price had in mind when they founded the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America in June 1911 to send missionaries to China.

The first priests arrived in China in 1918, and missions in Korea followed. Political upheaval in those countries forced Maryknollers to leave for a time, and the society expanded to Latin America in 1942 and Africa in 1946.

FULL STORY

The church’s Marines: Maryknollers older, fewer, but still going strong (Catholic News Service)

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