Basilica of Bandra, eucharistic adoration dedicated to the Extraordinary Missionary Month
The Holy Hour on the first Friday of the month was led by Mgr John Rodrigues, rector of the basilica. God, he said, “is asking you not simply to go through life, but to give life; not to complain about life, but to share in the tears of all who suffer.”
Mumbai (AsiaNews) – The Basilica of Our Lady of the Mount in Bandra, Mumbai, dedicated the Holy Hour of Eucharistic Adoration on the first Friday of the month to the Extraordinary Missionary Month, which opened on 1st October. Some 200 people participated in the Eucharistic adoration, including religious and laity, families, students and young people.
Mgr John Rodrigues, auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese and rector of the basilica, led the prayer. He explained that "the pontiff emphasises that the Church is called to be missionary, eager to give the Good News to others. All members share in this mission.”
Commenting on the Parable of the Talents, the rector noted that God “is asking you not simply to go through life, but to give life; not to complain about life, but to share in the tears of all who suffer. This parable explains how God entrusts people with his greatest treasures: “our own lives, the lives of others”.
God, the bishop added, does not want those gifts to be “stored in a safe,” but to be dedicated “with boldness and creativity to a true vocation that will bear fruit".
In the parable, the master is pleased with his enterprising servants as “good and trustworthy” and harshly criticised his fearful servant as “wicked and lazy.”
God severely reproaches the fearful servant because, Mgr Rodrigues explains, his evil “was not having done good; he sinned by omission. Omission is the opposite of mission,” he said.
People sin by omission “whenever, rather than spreading joy, we think of ourselves as victims, or think that no one loves us or understands us. We sin against mission when we yield to resignation, ‘I can’t do this: I’m not up to it.’”
Songs, readings of the Holy Scriptures, commemoration of the martyrs killed for the faith accompanied the Eucharistic adoration.
Mgr Rodrigues reminded all those present that Pope Francis has called on everyone – fathers, mothers, young people, bankers, restaurant workers, the unemployed, the sick – to fulfil the mission of the Church.
"The Lord is asking you to be a gift wherever you are, and just as you are, with everyone around you,” he added.
“We sin against the mission when we complain and keep saying that everything is going from bad to worse, in the world and in the church,” he said.
This happens “when we become slaves to the fears that immobilise us, when we let ourselves be paralysed by thinking that ‘things will never change’,” and when life is lived as a burden, not as a gift, “when we put ourselves and our concerns at the centre, and not our brothers and sisters who are waiting to be loved.”
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