In late 1970, two priests from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis traveled to Ciudad Guyana in Venezuela in time to celebrate Christmas Mass, said Deacon Mickey Friesen, director of the Center for Mission. At that point, Father Don Schnitzius, who served as director of the archdiocese’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith, proclaimed that the archdiocese would assist that metropolis.
Father Schnitzius had been sent to Venezuela on behalf of the archdiocese to visit several prospective sites for establishing a mission diocese. The idea of sharing clergy with a growing Church in Latin America was seen as a gift to that region of the world, Deacon Friesen said.
Deacon Mickey Friesen
“For the last 50 years, we have been sharing our priests and sharing our people, our resources, and have been in a relationship with the Church in the now-Diocese of Guyana and (it) continues to this day,” he said.
Because of the pandemic, the Center for Mission did not celebrate its 50th anniversary year last fall. “We decided to delay it a year and just say we’ll have a whole year of celebration,” Deacon Friesen said.
He recently joined “Practicing Catholic” radio show host Patrick Conley to share an overview of the archdiocese’s service in Venezuela.
The mission’s original focus was to provide ministry in “a very growing area” and to help form lay people and leaders in the Church, Deacon Friesen said. That took place in four parishes, and was whittled down by the mid-1990s to the parish Jesucristo Resucitado.
“That became what they call ‘the final parish,’ … where we have been stationed for more than 20 years,” he said.
Over the years, priests were joined by Franciscan sisters from Little Falls, Minnesota, and lay people served as volunteers.
Conditions in Venezuela the past several years have deteriorated, with disruption of civil life and a poor economy that dramatically impacted people’s lives, including the area where the mission parish is located, “which already is in the poorest part of that area,” Deacon Friesen said.
In addition to what the Church and mission have done for 50 years — attending to residents’ spiritual and sacramental lives, and inviting them to grow in their faith — over the last 10-plus years the mission has also served “just the real human needs of people” — from providing a weekly soup kitchen for children and the elderly to caring for shut-ins.
“They have what we’d call a St. Vincent de Paul Society,” he said, which brings food and assistance to the elderly and homebound, and helps homeless children and teens. Beyond basic human needs, physical and social needs have taken on a more dramatic urgency in recent years, Deacon Friesen said.
Today, Father Greg Schaffer is the archdiocese’s only priest serving in Venezuela. One consequence of the current situation in Venezuela is that it is very difficult for priests to secure a religious worker visa to serve there, Deacon Friesen added. “So, as we celebrate 50 years, we also know that there’s a big question mark,” he said.
Deacon Friesen asked for prayers for the Venezuelan people, to help restore some order in the country so people can live their lives with more dignity and have basic needs met.
“We could pray surely for the mission in Venezuela, which has become an anchor in that community — to provide a source of hope and to provide a resource for basic needs, to lift people up there and to gather them together,” he said. “Their faith is extremely important to them.”
Deacon Friesen said the Venezuelan people have shared a gift of inspiring generosity of spirit. And from their service in Venezuela, he said one of the gifts archdiocesan priests have received in return is the ability to come back from Venezuela ready to bring that ministry to the Spanish-speaking communities in the archdiocese.
To learn more about the Venezuelan mission, visit archspm.org/venezuela/.
To hear the full interview, listen to this episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show. It airs at 9 p.m. Oct. 15, 1 p.m. Oct. 16 and 2 p.m. Oct. 17 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who discusses the upcoming Synod of Bishops called by Pope Francis and its relationship to the Archdiocesan Synod, and Nick Chalmers from the Mirandola Ensemble, who discusses sacred choral music.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at:
soundcloud.com/PracticingCatholic
tinyurl.com/PracticingCatholic (Spotify)
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