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Dear Parishioner, The Dominican Order is divided into 80 Provinces. The priest elected to be over each Province is called the Prior Provincial, or Provincial for short. The Provincial for the Western U.S. Dominican Province, of which I am a member, is the Very Rev. Roberto Corral, O.P. Fr. Roberto on April 27 has informed me that I am being transferred to our Western Dominican mission in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, effective July 1. My present plan is to visit there to get the lay of the land May 23-27, then to leave here on June 29, the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, arriving there July 1, the Feast of Blessed Junipero Serra. All three of these saints were outstanding missionaries, and so I picked the dates of my departure and arrival to correspond with their feast days as part of placing my missionary endeavor under their patronage. My mailing address as of July 1 will still be in California:
I am presuming that the American Dominicans in Mexicali prefer using this Private Mail Box just over the border in CA because it is more reliable than getting mail in Mexico. The tel. no. however is that of the Dominicans’ residence in Mexico. I will know more after I get back from my tour of inspection on May 27, including regarding the phone and email situations. For those of you writing from within Mexico itself, here is my contact data:
The parish church itself is at some distance from the above residence:
The parish has 100,000 parishioners and only one full time priest, Fr. David Bello, O.P., so he needs help. The streets are unpaved, so when it is dry, there is a dust cloud over the parish territory 20 feet high, and when it rains, one must slosh through mud. In the summer it is 116 degree Fahrenheit and in the winter it drops to the 30's and sometimes the 20's. Right on the border is the California town of Calexico, population 20,000. Right across on the Mexican side is Mexicali, with 1,000,000. Pray for a good transition for me. To those of you who are moved to give me something as I depart Benicia for Mexicali, I am informed that I will have no office but only a bedroom twice the size of a twin bed. So please do not give me anything that takes up space! The best gift would be a monetary donation which I could apply to useful projects. Thanks. As I have been saying the morning offering with our school children these past few days, we have been praying for the Pope’s mission intention for April, that every parish bring forth a missionary vocation. Well, for St. Dominic’s in Benicia, that has turned out to be me. Beware what you ask children to pray for! I am sad to leave Benicia because I have made friends here and the various programs and activities with which I have been involved, some of them at their inception, are developing well thanks to the great spirit of cooperation in this parish. I will also miss the wonderful weather, the beautiful little city with so much history and so many things to do, and the deep tradition of the Mother Church of the Western Dominican Province, including having all our former Friars a few blocks away at St. Dominic’s cemetery. Thinking of which assures me that I will be back for sure some day. I started my career in campus ministry at 55 years of age, and that turned out well. Though it is not common, I now begin my missionary career at 65 and I look forward to the adventure. For sure, my Spanish will improve, as will my tan. For Mexicali, check out http://www.mexicali.gob.mx/, and http://www.mxl.cetys.mx/. I hope to learn how to use a digital camera or a camcorder so when I visit I will be able share my experiences with you.
Yours in Jesus and Mary, June 2005 Dear Reader, In Mexicali, the capital of the State of Baja California, in Mexico, the Western Dominican Province has a mission. It is the parish of St. Mary of Guadalupe. We call it a mission because it is out of the U.S. and it is underdeveloped. As you know, on July 1, 2005, the feast of the great Franciscan missionary, Bl. Junipero Serra, I will begin my life as a not so great nor so blessed missionary in this parish. To reconnoiter the place, I visited it from the 23rd to the 27th of this month. Allow me to share with you what I have learned. Mexicali has a population of 1,500,000. Our mission lies in middle of the western extension of the city which has water and electricity for almost everyone, but which is not paved. Even though the city is in the desert, the ground is not sand but dirt, deposited there ages ago by the Colorado River before it changed course. The average yearly rainfall is only 5”, but then the area turns to mud. Usually however there is a great deal of dust. The dirt renders the area very fertile so that fields that are irrigated are very productive of grain and vegetables. The U.S. is taking increasingly more water from the Colorado River for agriculture in the Imperial Valley and for the city of San Diego. As a consequence when the Colorado finally goes south of the border, it is carrying decreasing amounts of precious water for Mexicali and Baja California. Mexico is trying to negotiate with the U.S. over this. Almost all of the houses are rigged together with scraps of metal, wood and cement. One house I saw had a thatched roof. The rectory is a rented house but too small. It is well built, has air conditioning, and has become attractive since the pastor, Fr. David Bello, O.P., fixed it up and painted it. My bedroom is tiny. I have a small office about 2 mis. away next to the parish Church. The parish is long and narrow, 3 x 15 mis., running along the U.S. – Mexican border. Consequently a number of foreign-owned assembly plants, called maquiladoras, with their workers and issues of social justice. The border crossing at the east end of Mexicali is in our parish, so that to cross into Mexico here is to step right into our parish. On the north side of the border lies the town of Calexico, California, U.S.A. Calexico is practically an extension of Mexicali because most of the people who work there or buy or do business there live in Mexicali. Consequently there is much coming and going between Mexicali and Calexico, and Spanish is almost as necessary in Calexico as in Mexicali. Mexicali is very hot. The average temperature July to Aug. is 116° F. (47̊ C.), but at times it goes up to 125̊ F. (51̊ C). The parish has the principal church, Santa Maria de Guadalupe, and three chapels: Saints Martin de Porres and Juan Macias (both Dominicans, so this place of worship is also known as the Chapel of the Dominican Saints); Our Lady of the Incarnation; and St. Juan Diego. The first three are proper church buildings (the first two with air conditioning), while the fourth is an overhang open to the dusty air. The parishioners, who number 40,000, are welcoming, serious, and clean. The men are in work clothes, the boys in play clothes, the girls and women nicely dressed and well groomed. The majority of people I saw were under 16, so we have more than 20,000 children and teenagers in the parish. Happily in the parish there are two Mexican Dominican Sisters who help greatly with these younger people. The two priests already there are friendly, cheerful, and they gave me a warm welcome. Every Wed. the Fathers and Sisters meet to plan their apostolate, and I was invited to their meeting. This was followed by a delicious meal in the Mexican style, but the delicious-looking carnitas I could only look at because of my high cholesterol. At 7:30 a.m. we celebrate the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer in the rectory chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is kept both for devotion and for taking to the sick when we are called to their bedside. We have breakfast around 8:15 a.m. A local lady who is a fine cook works in the rectory from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The main meal is at 1:30 p.m. There is only one daily Mass, at 7 p.m., in a different church or chapel of the parish according to the day of the week. There will be another Mass if there is a funeral, wedding, quinceaZera, or some other such special occasion. We get back to the rectory about 9 p.m., when we gather in the chapel for Evening Prayer and Compline. Supper follows around 9:30 p.m. This schedule is quite different from those in the States and causes problems in finding mutually convenient times to speak by phone with relatives and friends in the U.S. We will be three Dominican priests but for a good part of the year only two will be present, with one or the other away preaching Mission Appeals in the U.S. When we are assigned a Mission Appeal in a parish near my friends or relatives, I may be the one to go, and thus be able to visit with you as well as preach for the missions. In the parish are found Jehovah’s Witnesses and generic Protestant groups which call themselves “the Christians” even though they do not teach much that Christ taught. These groups have converted to their ways of believing a number of Catholics who were well educated neither in the Catholic faith nor in secular matters. A large number of well-financed Protestant “missionaries” come in the summer months. The owners of the assembly factories fear the Church’s teaching on social justice, and so the suspicion is that they contribute generously to the Protestant ministers in the hope that the Church’s power to nudge toward social justice will be diluted. This has been seen in the southern state of Chiapas, where the Protestant groups and even the Muslims have the support of the wealthy, who use their power to take cruel advantage of the peons and the native Indians. God has blessed the diocese of Mexicali (http://www.diocesismxli.org/) with so many vocations that it has three seminaries: a high school, a retreat house where they next spend a year, and the major seminary for college and postgraduate studies. The major seminary is next to our parish. Within our parish are two colleges, one run by the Opus Dei and the other by Catholic laymen. In the city is also the University of Baja California run by the state. Despite its economic, cultural and climatic disadvantages, many from other parts of Mexico are drawn to Mexicali by the high quality of its institutions of post-secondary education. Many stay after graduating because of the job opportunities to be found in the border city of aggressive pioneers. One of the Dominican priests in our mission took me to meet the bishop, the rector of the cathedral and one of the associate pastors there, and each of these three exuded that same vigorous and creative energy for God and His Church which permeates the city, even in the poor areas, for improving their living situations. Our parish is blessed by having with its boundaries a monastery of cloistered nuns, “Las Adoratrices”, dedicated to prayer and penance for the priests of the diocese. Check them out at http://www.diocesismxli.org/Institutos/Adoratrices/adoratrices_carisma.htm. The vehicle assigned to me is a 2002 Toyota stick-shift pickup truck. This is good for the streets of dust or mud. However most corners have stop signs forcing one to always be changing gears at almost every cross street, which I find a bother. I will be having an overdeveloped right arm. In a misguided effort to even things out, the sun will leave me with an overly tanned left arm. In Mexicali my same email address will be valid until further notice. I will have a cellular phone with a U.S. area code, as well as a Mexican one, so can both communicate with my parishioners and others in Mexico, and maintain communication with my relatives and friends in the U.S. as before. The only difficulty will be coordinating convenient times, as explained above.
Praying for you peace and faith, Dominic was untiring in promoting “pax et fides” because without peace the faith cannot flourish, and he described himself as pursuing this goal by "singing and gentleness, preaching, imploring and weeping." Cf. Process of Canonization at Toulouse, nos. 3, 7, 13, 18; M.-H. Vicaire, O.P., St. Dominic and His Times, pp. 62 (and nt. 7), 146, 147 (and nt. 80). |