St. Columban’s Day 2018.
We wish you all every blessing on this our Feast-day of St. Columban.
Columban was a great abbot, scholar, preacher, educator, hermit, one of the greatest missionaries in history. We Columban missionaries call on him as our patron to lead all people because each one of us is a missionary by our Baptism.
Pope Francis, as he was bidding farewell at the World Meeting of Families 2018 at the Phoenix Park in Dublin, insisted on the need for encouragement in the modern world and stated that mission is ever alive and challenges us to go forth to all the peripheries of our world:
“The Church as a whole is called to “go forth” to bring the words of eternal life to all the peripheries of our world”.
But he also acknowledged that the task of bearing witness to this Good News is not easy. Recalling great Irish missionaries like St Columbanus, Pope Francis said:
“The task of bearing witness to this Good News is not easy. Yet the challenges that Christians face today are, in their own way, no less difficult than those faced by the earliest Irish missionaries.
I think of Saint Columbanus, who with his small band of companions brought the light of the Gospel to the lands of Europe in an age of darkness and cultural dissolution. Their extraordinary missionary success was not based on tactical methods or strategic plans, no, but on a humble and liberating docility to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
It was their daily witness of fidelity to Christ and to each other that won hearts yearning for a word of grace and helped give birth to the culture of Europe.
That witness remains a perennial source of spiritual and missionary renewal for God’s holy and faithful people”.
Pope Francis emphasized the witness to love and said: “Because living in love, even as Christ loved us (cf. Eph 5:2), entails imitating his own self-sacrifice, dying to ourselves in order to be reborn to a greater and more enduring love”.
Allow Christ to paint His image on you.
St. Columban.
