When high school senior Severyn Parsons signed up for a Commissioned by Christ mission trip to Piura, Peru, he didn’t know what to expect. “I feel like I haven’t been serving as much as I could in my faith, and this seemed like an incredible opportunity and a chance to do that,” he said.
Parsons and 13 of his classmates at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington soon discovered that they would receive spiritually more than they served.
The Catholic Herald joined the O’Connell group to visit Peru at the same time with CBC, a nonprofit in the Arlington diocese that organizes short-term mission trips domestically and internationally for Catholic adults and families. CBC celebrated its 15th anniversary last fall and has hosted nearly 50 domestic and international mission trips.
A group of young adult missionaries, coordinated by the diocesan Office of Youth, Campus and Young Adult Ministries, conducted a second mission trip alongside the high schoolers. Father Peter M. McShurley, chaplain of Bishop O’Connell, and Father Robert C. Renner, parochial vicar of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Church in Fredericksburg, accompanied the groups as chaplains.
The missionaries arrived in sunny Piura Feb. 24 and served through March 2 at the parish of Santísimo Sacramento.
For some of the missionaries, Peru is a familiar destination. O’Connell senior Mia Senzano often visits family in Lima. “I came here two years ago, and this time, I brought all my senior friends with me,” she said.
San Miguel de Piura, or simply Piura, is a small city in the desert of Peru. Centered in urban Piura, Santísimo Sacramento acts as the backbone of the local community and surrounding villages. Many in Piura live in poverty, and the parish’s abundant ministries, schools, clinics, projects, and programs provide basic needs, employment, and housing. The parish’s food delivery service alone provides food staples for 500 families monthly.
Father Joseph Uhen, a native of Milwaukee, serves as pastor. “Father Joe,” as the staff calls him, arrived in Piura as a seminarian in 1993 after hearing about the persecution of Peruvian priests. “That was a motivation for me, that the church was being persecuted,” he said. After his ordination, Father Joe was named pastor of Santísimo Sacramento and expanded the parish and its ministries.
From an abandoned lot filled with trash, Father Joe worked with local farmers to develop it into a private school, Madre Del Buen Consejo (Mother of Good Counsel School). The school serves 950 students from pre-K through 11th grade and offers scholarships to families. Located on the same lot are the parish’s Hospicio Los Ángeles (Los Angeles Hospice) and a trade school currently under construction, Centro San Juan Maria Vianney. The hospice provides a peaceful environment for the terminally ill to receive medical care and spend their final days. The trade school features a two-year program for careers and trades such as cosmetology, baking, masonry, carpentry, computing, mechanic training, and nursing. On a separate campus, the parish’s San Miguel Mental Health Center offers physical, psychological and speech therapy, as well as the Nueva Vida en Cristo (New Life in Christ) rehabilitation center that assists men struggling with alcohol and drug addictions.
Santísimo Sacramento assists those in the local community looking to start a business or buy a home through a “micro-loan” system that can lend up to several thousand dollars. The parish hosts a “Family to Family” program that matches an American donor family with a Peruvian family in need.
“Poverty in and of itself can be a virtue: when you live a simple life and understand that you don’t need to be dominated by consuming goods,” Father Joe said. “But poverty is an evil when it is an obstacle to the development of one’s vocation.”
With new neighborhoods growing around Piura, Father Joe saw a need for more chapels, which act as both a place for worship and a community center. Father Joe said that many of the older workers building the chapels, some in their 70s, may not live to see the chapel’s long-term impact on the community after its completion.
The missionaries noted the workers’ joy, even as they labored in the 90-degree heat. “These people live for the God of the future, whereas we live for the God of now,” missionary Nicole Doepper said. “These people are okay with participating in projects that they can’t see in their lifetimes.”
Santísimo Sacramento fosters partnerships with local institutions, such as the Hogar de Santa Rosa (St. Rose Home) orphanage and a private school for girls, Hogar Madre del Redentor (Mother of the Redeemer Home), run by the Daughters of Mary Immaculate and Co-Redemptrix. Missionaries visited both institutions during the week, savoring every moment of holding babies at the orphanage or playing sports with the students.
The week challenged the missionaries to go beyond their comfort zones. They packed themselves into vans with no air conditioning and drove along unpaved roads to deliver food packages, care for the sick and elderly, mix cement floors, build a roof, and assist with chapel construction.
One day, several missionaries piled into the back of a pickup truck with more than 500 pounds of donated clothing and set off to a local village. As they passed through rows of bamboo homes, they shouted, “¡Ropa, la capilla!” (“Clothes at the chapel!”) As they arrived at the village chapel, parents, teens and children rushed from their homes to form a line. Inside, the missionaries dumped bags of clothes onto a quilt while men and women sorted and selected up to eight articles of clothing for their families.
The missionaries often felt a sense of helplessness when witnessing extreme poverty. Several marveled over the generosity of a group of eight young children sharing a water bottle. “I hadn’t realized the level of suffering that some of these people experience,” said O’Connell senior Lucas Soriano-Molla. “I sort of understood that there would be a great deal of people in this situation, but I had not thought about the extremity of that suffering.”
“I think it’s important for each of us to come to terms with: We have so much suffering in this world, often we want to fix it, but sometimes there is no fix, all we can do is be there with someone who is suffering,” Father McShurley said. “I think it’s an invitation for us to be like the Blessed Mother, as she stood by the foot of the cross.”
By the end of the week, the missionaries felt spiritually renewed and inspired by the exuberant faith of those they served.
“When you go on a mission trip, you think, ‘I’m going to serve, and I’m so happy to serve.’ But I feel like I’ve been served more by these people with their generosity, beauty and joy,” said Grace Gretz, a program specialist for the youth ministry office.
Experiencing the familial culture of Piura can be a surprise for American missionaries, said Michelle Haworth, executive director of Commissioned by Christ. “You realize on a more profound level, charity is woven through their society, their families, their communities. They see everyone around them as an extension of themselves,” she said.
For Senzano, service is transformative for young Catholics. “I think it’s so important to get out of the country and go somewhere else,” she said, “because there’s so much love in places you’ve never expected.”
Harvey can be reached at [email protected] or X @annaharveyACH.
Find out more
For Commissioned by Christ, go to www.cbc-missions.org/
To donate, go to bit.ly/3Pkdpm0
For the Family to Family Program, go to bit.ly/3wYHjWM
