My History with Partners in Mission (PIM)
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August 4, 2022After my experience with lay-missionaries in Aguas Buenas, I was stationed in the retreat house and we offered a wide variety of retreats. We had over 40 lay presenters for these retreats, many of them professional people who volunteered their time and experience.
We, the professed religious were there for counseling, Sacrament of Reconciliation, prayer services and the Eucharist and liturgies, which were always an important part of the retreats and our ministry there.
In 2000, we invited Father Juan Manuel Lasso, our former Superior General and considered the founder and now the key promoter of PIM, to come to Puerto Rico and give a workshop/retreat on this subject. He gave four presentations: “The Hour of the Laity in the Church,” “A New Alliance between Redemptorists and Laity,” “The New Face of the Redemptorist,” and “Lay Missionaries of the Most Holy Redeemer.”
His presentations were excellent and treasured as an explanation of his vision of the new Redemptorist family composed of Laity and Professed Religious. St. Alphonsus would be proud of him for leading the Congregation into a brighter future, which is only now beginning to be fully realized.
My next appointment was to the parish of St. Agustin in San Juan. We had an empty convent which we converted into an inner-city retreat and counseling center where we offered retreats and counseling services at no charge. It was there that we decided to start our PIM group. There were 10 or 12 parishioners who accepted the invitation. We gave them a space in the Rectory that they could call their own.
As always, our pastoral reality determined our mission. Most of the parish consisted of five public housing apartment buildings. We took it as our PIM mission to go to visit them and invite them to our regular church services. When the government demolished one of the housing developments, we celebrated an outdoor mass to say goodbye and “blessings on your way” to the residents. I always believed that our PIM group was an important continuation of something that was very evident in the Puerto Rican soul, which was the desire to be actively involved in the mission of their church.
After Puerta de Tierra, I returned to the States and was stationed at Mount Saint Alphonsus Retreat Center. Most of the retreats that we offered were given by paid members of our staff – quite different from Puerto Rico! When I became director there, I decided that we needed to form a PIM group.
After a period of formation, we decided that their mission could be offering retreats to those that had left the Church and were looking for a way back home. It was based on material we received from Liguori Publications and similar to a retreat that our Lay Missionaries offered in Puerto Rico.
Over the year, we gave these retreats at the “Mount”. The attendance was small, but the retreats were powerful. Years later I met one of the men who made this retreat. He had just come out of Mass, and you could see that he had the same joy in his heart that he had that Saturday night.
These retreats bring people back to life, a kind of Resurrection, and the laity, like PIM, are the right ones to call them forth from the grave. The testimony of their faith in action is so convincing. And when all the team got down on our knees and humbly asked their pardon for anything the Church may have done to cause their leaving, it would bring tears to our eyes.
It followed an important aspect of these retreats which were modeled on Jesus’ many meals with the outcasts of his time. They were all about acceptance, forgiveness, healing, and compassion. No one was condemned nor denied a place at table. This is how I see PIM. They are a group of committed laities reaching out, as St. Alphonsus did, to the most abandoned, to other laity who may be unwelcomed by their church community, or even worse, wounded by them. We learned that these PIM retreats, and PIM itself, were all about reaching out to the wounded and being compassionate.
Now I am here in another Retreat Center, in Canandaigua, NY, destined to be transitioned to lay administration in a year or so, and I am trying to form a circle of PIM to continue our mission. So far, we have almost 20 persons coming to our hybrid meetings, some in person and some by Zoom. But more on this later. For now, I am asking your prayers.
