Witness to life in India sees vibrant faith, the universal Church

When Marta Pereira visited St. Antony’s Pilgrim Shrine during an immersion trip to the Diocese of Vijayapuram in India, she was awed by the thousands of faithful who gathered for the sacraments and eucharistic adoration on a Tuesday, the Church’s traditional day to honor and pray to the saint.

“People were coming from work, and you can see they’re poor people, but there’s this sense of devotion that they have, also for the Eucharist,” said Pereira, 50, a parishioner of Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul who led the nine-member delegation on an immersion trip organized by the Center for Mission.

Pereira said she went to India in 2019 with a desire to listen with an open heart and to share in the experiences of the people she met in the diocese in the coastal state of Kerala. What she saw was a vibrant faith, lived in God’s providence, that helped rejuvenate her experience of the universal Church.

Describing the trip as a “beautiful journey that we did with the Church,” Pereira said she and the delegation visited Basic Christian Communities — groups of parishioners who meet regularly in homes to read the Gospel, pray, share and have a meal together — in the city and villages throughout the diocese. They also participated in prayer, liturgies and conversations with lay Catholics and clergy.

It was Pereira’s first trip to India, but not her first mission experience. She did mission work for eight years in Central America and the Caribbean as a religious sister of the Carmelite Missionary Sisters, a Spanish missionary congregation. Separately, she traveled on mission to Guatemala with the Center for Mission in 2013.

Pereira said she has been inspired by Pope St. John Paul II’s 1991 exhortation, “Do not forget that faith is strengthened and grows precisely when it is given to others.” She said she’s also seen her faith strengthen through the faith of those she’s met.

“I have always felt like when I’m in a position supposedly to witness, I’ve been mostly witnessed to, because in the beauty of a faith that is lived, particularly by the poor, there’s a sense of total abandonment and a total openness that poor communities have in different ways, and really an openness to the Spirit,” she said.

Families in the four or five different Basic Christian Communities that Pereira visited opened their simple homes in hospitality as they shared life with fellow parishioners outside of Mass — something she saw as a possible model for other dioceses.

“I think the sense of sharing life outside the sacramental life, because sometimes we can just think that being a Christian is just going to Mass or my personal prayer,” she said.

Through her experience in the Vijayapuram diocese, Pereira said, she’s re-encountered a sense of mission beyond a “just me and God” mentality, which she hopes to share with students she works with at the University of St. Thomas’ campus ministry in St. Paul.

“We are a Church that is mission driven,” Pereira said. “We would not be a Church if we weren’t that. It is our commandment to go and spread the Good News, and I think the Good News comes through that encounter that brings God, but also encounters God through others.”