WELCOME DR. GEETHA YERUVA, founder of the Foundation for Children in Need (FCN), the beneficiary of our Annual Mission Cooperative Appeal taking place at Queens this weekend. While Catholics in the United States account for just 7% of the global Catholic population, some 60% of the assets held by the global Catholic Church are here in America. We are so blessed. Like his predecessors before him, Pope Leo XIV asks us to share with our Catholic brothers and sisters who are not as fortunate, giving them the most basic necessities of life, things that we all too often take for granted.
Dr. Geetha founded FCN to provide food, clothing, shelter and education to some of the poorest children in the rural villages of India. FCN does everything from funding surgeries to sponsoring scholarships. The word Catholic means ‘universal.’ When we support the missions on foreign soil, we live out more fully what it means to be a Roman Catholic Christian of the Latin Rite, recognizing that our church has a footprint in 193 of the world’s 195 sovereign countries. That’s 99% of the world covered by the Catholic Church! The only exceptions are Saudi Arabia and North Korea, where the practice of Catholicism is not permitted.
There is also the situation with the Catholic Church in China, where the Church in union with Rome exists clandestinely in secret and under the constant threat of persecution. The Communist government long ago set up its own ‘state-sponsored Catholic Church,’ which interestingly never criticizes the many human rights abuses of the regime.
Suffice it to say you are part of something global and timeless. When we support the foreign missions, we recognize the human dignity of people we’ve never met and finance the spread of Gospel charity in places we may never visit. We do so because the Bible tells us to feed the poor and welcome the stranger.
Our Mission Appeal does not include a second collection. We choose instead to promote giving in one of two ways: using the online link through our website (scroll down for ‘mission appeal’), or you may bring your own mission gift to mass this weekend or next. You might also take home and return one of the envelopes provides in the pews for that purpose. Checks should be made payable to Queens with ‘Mission Appeal’ written on the memo line of the check or the front of the envelope. These can be placed in the collection at Mass or dropped off at the parish office over the next few weeks.
