Please join me in congratulating our newest Maryknoll priests, featured in our cover story. Fathers Joshua Maondo and Charles Ogony were ordained on June 8 at Maryknoll’s Our Lady Queen of Apostles Chapel in Ossining, New York. While ordinations are already joyous occasions, the presence of the two men’s Kenyan compatriots lent an especially festive character to the day. The celebration was enlivened by singing and dancing to irresistible East African rhythms.
Following our ordination story, Father Joseph Veneroso writes in his Spirit of Mission column about Jesus as a wounded healer. He sets the theme for the rest of this issue, in which we focus on mission stories of healing and caregiving.
From Bolivia, Brother Ryan Thibert tells us of his ministry as a brother to neglected, abused and orphaned children and to 50 residents at a home for the abandoned elderly. Filo Siles and Joe Loney, a Maryknoll lay missioner couple also in Bolivia, focus on health, education, social inclusion and economic sustenance for almost 800 children, youths, adults and seniors with disabilities. Maryknoll Affiliates member Erin Rickwa writes about her nonprofit organization, which recently expanded to Tanzania, that provides grants for health care for sick and disabled children. Other articles describe the decades of recovery from the trauma of a coup in Chile and healing through art at a Maryknoll-run AIDS clinic in Nairobi.
As newly ordained Father Maondo says, the world needs healing, and “that’s what mission is all about.”
Lynn F. Monahan
Editor-in-Chief
