– Marco Carvalho
“Be a man of God, proclaim God in your daily life.” This was the call made last Saturday by Bishop Stephen Lee during the solemn Eucharist with which the Diocese of Macau bolstered the celebrations of the Extraordinary Missionary Month. The ephemeris was proclaimed by Pope Francis with the aim of marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud, a papal document in which Pope Benedict XV defines evangelization as “the great and most holy mission entrusted to his disciples by Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Early Saturday night, the stairs in front of the Ruins of St. Paul were packed with attendees who witnessed a revival of the spiritual nature of the former Mater Dei Church, fifteen years after it last hosted a liturgical celebration.
Before an attendance of more than two thousand people D. Stephen Lee took on the words of the Supreme Pontiff and urged the local believers to share the gift of faith. In a homily conducted in four languages – Cantonese, Portuguese, Mandarin and English – the bishop of Macau urged those that took part at the celebration to look at their experience of Christ with a renewed sense of mission: “Divine life is not a product that we can sell. It is a treasure that is given, communicated and announced. This is the real meaning of our mission. We received this gift for free and for free we shall share it, without excluding anyone. God wants all men to be saved, all men to understand the truth and the experience of his mercy through the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation,” D. Stephen Lee proclaimed in an emotional sermon that lasted for more than half an hour. “Each one of us is a mission because we all are the fruit of God’s love,” he reiterated.
The appeal seems to have been well received by the attendees. In a celebration in which prays and psalms were said and chanted in various languages – and in which there were representatives of the different communities that have the Macau as their home – D. Stephen Lee’s call for Catholics to conceive their experience of faith as a mission touched the hearts of many, Maria Lucia Fonseca, sister of the Congregation of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, believes: “I am quite sure that many have heard the message of the Bishop. When a priest speaks, when the Eucharist speaks, it is God that speaks to us. Everyone heard his message. The seed has fallen. And I’m quite sure it fell on many hearts, even in the heart of those who usually don’t go to Mass. I am sure they left the celebration with this seed deep in their heart, they will take it to their homes and it will bear fruit,” she says.
The solemn Mass with which the Diocese of Macau marked the Extraordinary Missionary Month offered local Catholics a rare experience of faith. One needs to go back in time more than fifteen years to the Year of the Eucharist, celebrated in 2004, to identify the last occasion in which the Ruins of Saint Paul received a celebration at a Diocesan level.
For Jenny Lao-Phillips, teacher at the University of Saint Joseph, there is no other place in Macau that best embodies the spirit of mission that Pope Francis wants to see adopted by each and every Catholic: “The Mater Dei Church was, at a certain moment, the largest cathedral in the Far East. It was here that the missionaries were prepared to go to China, to go to Japan and other parts of Asia. It has a huge significance in the context of this celebration of the Extraordinary Missionary Month and that is why we asked the Government, at the end of last year for the authorization to celebrate Mass here,” explained the dean of USJ’s School of Business and Law. “I believe many here are very happy. A celebration like this is not something that happens every day. We were very happy to be able to celebrate the Eucharist at the Ruins once again,” says Lao-Phillips.
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