When we asked ourselves what kind of life we hoped our missionaries would lead, two saints kept coming up in conversation: a young Italian layman who loved the mountains and the poor, and a fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary whose letters still set hearts on fire.
Pier Giorgio died at twenty-four. He spent his short life climbing mountains, visiting the poor in the back streets of Turin, gathering friends around the sacraments, and waging an unspectacular war against the spiritual dryness of his own generation. He looked, in many ways, like the friends our missionaries are trying to reach.
Catherine reminds us that the mission is not first a strategy but a friendship with Christ. From the cell of self-knowledge, she said, comes everything else — the courage to speak the truth, the patience to walk slowly with another soul, the joy that draws others to want what we have.
“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
St Catherine of Siena
