Dear Friends and Benefactors,

The roller-coaster ups and downs of our daily lives lead us over and over again to prayer. We pray for help to get through another day, another week. Our prayer is answered when it becomes a prayer of trust: “I put my trust in you, O God.” God never fails and, often unbeknownst to us, carries and sustains us. Without this trust, this deep and sure hope, our lives become a desperate and frantic running from one “solution” to another. Although we may deny it, sometimes these “solutions” become our biggest problems! Our prayer for help, then, is a prayer to be able above all else to entrust our lives to God and place all our hope in God.

And this is Good News! It is the Good News of Jesus who entrusted His life to His Father, even to the very end. It is Good News to know that we can be free from fear and that God truly loves each and every one of us. The mission of the Oblates is to preach the Good News to the poor and abandoned. In serving the poor, we learn from them. We recognize ourselves in them and we commit ourselves to live in solidarity with them.

As this issue of Oblate World shows, Oblates and their collaborators are preaching the liberating Good News of Jesus in Africa, Asia, the United States and beyond. Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate are missionaries in many and varied ways, but always with a great love and passion for the poor and abandoned, with their many faces. In my still-new ministry as provincial I am amazed to see the great variety of works my brother Oblates and their many lay collaborators are creatively and passionately pursuing in parishes, retreat centers, missions and institutions here in the United States and in places like Zambia, where I recently visited.

This creative love and passion were especially true in the life of our founder, St. Eugene De Mazenod. As Bishop of Marseille, St. Eugene wrote in 1847: “Charity embraces everything and, whenever necessary, for new needs it invents new means: whether they be spiritual aids or temporal helps, they are all given generously in the name of Jesus Christ.” May God bless the efforts of the Missionary Oblates and all of you who share the Good News, leading us all to lives in which each of us can discover the freedom to say and pray: “In You, my God, I put all my trust.”

Sincerely in Christ and Mary Immaculate,
Fr. Bill Antone, O.M.I.
Provincial, U.S. Province