Our Spirituality

Identity and mission Of Caritas

Serving Out of Love

Serving Out of LoveThe source of Spirituality for Caritas is the Life and Ministry of Jesus Christ. His actions. His words. His very person, Who went about doing good, healing the sick, returning sight to the blind, and proclaiming the Good News of salvation, revealing to us the infinite love of His Father and our Father.

Bible

Inspired by the Scriptures and the tradition of the Catholic Church

Catholic Social Teaching (CST)

Guided by the social teaching of the church

Serve

towards the Kingdom in solidarity with the poor

Spiritual

To live a spirituality of the encounter

Spirituality of Caritas

The charity of Christ urges us.

Spirituality is a mode of life in the Spirit; docility to its life-giving power, which mobilizes all areas of our existence. In the Gospel of Luke, we see how Jesus understood his mission. He was anointed and sent to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and the recovery of sight to the blind; to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. The mission entrusted to Caritas as an integral part of the Church consists in following Jesus’ footsteps, by doing what the Master did.

His Charity

He went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil because God was with him (Acts 10:38).

His Suffering

He was never indifferent to any suffering.

His Compassion

He is the good Samaritan (Luke 10, 29-37), a man of compassion who cares for the wounded and the abandoned.

His Humility

He is wounded and abandoned, seeking our attention and immediate care.

Our Patron Saints

In the solidarity with the poor.

Patron saints are chosen as special protectors or guardians over areas of life. These areas can include occupations, illnesses, churches, countries, causes – anything that is important to us.

Learn from them

They are someone to use as a model - to pattern our behaviour after them in a certain area of our lives. We can follow their example.

Pray to them

We can ask them to pray to God for us, which is common among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Catholic practices.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

She took care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, now part of Macedonia, on 26 August 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of eighteen, she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months of training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on 24 May 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun and the perpetual ones in 1937.

From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on divine Providence and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

On 7 October 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity”, whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.

The Society of Missionaries has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The order also has houses in North America, Europe, and Australia, where they take care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers.

Missionaries of Charity throughout the world are aided and assisted by Co-Workers who became an official International Association on 29 March 1969. By the 1990s there were over one million Co-Workers in more than 40 countries. Along with their Co-Workers, the lay Missionaries of Charity try to follow Mother Teresa’s spirit and charism in their families.

Mother Teresa died on 5 September 1997. Two days later, John Paul II described her as follows: “Present in memory is her minute face, marked by an existence lived at the service of the poorest, but always full of inexorable inner energy: the energy of Christ’s love. Missionary of charity: that was Mother Teresa, by name and in facts”.

Oscar Romero

His unswerving commitment to the poor brought about his martyrdom.

Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador. He was assassinated on Monday 24 March 1980, as he celebrated Mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence Cancer Hospital where he lived. 35 years later, he was declared a martyr of the Church, killed out of hatred of the faith, and was beatified on 23 May 2015.

Born on 15 August 1917 to a humble family in Ciudad Barrios in the Diocese of San Miguel, Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez studied for the priesthood in Rome and was ordained in April 1942. He lived simply; he was a popular preacher with real compassion for the poor.

He gave dedicated pastoral service in San Miguel for over two decades before becoming secretary to the Bishops’ Conference and subsequently Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador in 1970. There he gained a reputation as being unsympathetic to the new social justice thrust of the Latin American Church; he was critical of the clergy and the Base Christian Communities of the archdiocese who worked alongside the exploited rural poor, promoting social organizations, unions, and land reform.

Three years as Bishop of Santiago de Maria from 1974 opened Romero’s eyes as he witnessed the misery and hardship of the rural workers on the coffee plantations and the harsh repression they suffered at the hands of the security forces. In February 1977 he was appointed as Archbishop of San Salvador at a time when the country was plunged into civil conflict. Just weeks later his close friend, the Jesuit Fr. Rutilio Grande, was assassinated by a death squad. This was a turning point for Romero. He ordered that the following Sunday, 20 March, all churches of the diocese be closed and all Masses cancelled. He celebrated a ‘single Mass’, attended by 100,000 people, in front of the Cathedral.

Over the next three years, the conflict intensified with electoral fraud blocking peaceful change, and non-violent protests being met with army massacres and death squad killings. Through his weekly sermons broadcast from his pulpit, Archbishop Romero became the voice of the voiceless poor. In a society of cover-up and lies, he spoke the truth of what was happening; he denounced the killings, the torture, and the disappearances of community leaders, catechists, and priests; he demanded justice for the atrocities committed by the army and police and he set up legal aid projects and pastoral programmes to support the victims of the violence.

As armed groups emerged on the far left, civil war loomed.

Archbishop Romero, rejecting violence from the left as well as from the right, appealed for peaceful solutions to his nation’s crisis. He was vilified in the press, attacked and denounced to Rome by Catholics of the wealthy classes, harassed by the security forces, and publicly opposed by several colleagues’ bishops. The death threats against him multiplied, but he was resolute. In his homily of Sunday 23rd March 1980, he called on the military: “I beg you, I implore you. I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”

The following day, at 6.26 pm on 24 March 1980, a death squad marksman murdered him with a single bullet to his heart as he said Mass in the hospital chapel. His unswerving commitment to the poor brought about his martyrdom. In his life, he was the voice of the voiceless, and in his death, he became the name of the nameless. His example has been an inspiration to millions across the world who pray to him as “San Romero de America”.

San Martin De Porres

He offered other services to his sick fellow human beings.

Martín was born in a very complicated social context. The conquistadors had reduced an entire population to slavery. Martín’s father, Juan de Porras, a Spanish nobleman, belonged to the Order of Alcantara, and his mother, Ana Velázquez, was a free black Creole born in Panama. He was born in December 1579. His baptism certificate reveals all the drama unfolding around this infant and the state of inferiority he was born into in the eyes of the world. The baptismal register of the Church of San Sebastián de Lima states:

“On Wednesday 9 December 1579, Martín, son of an unknown father and of Ana Velázquez, a free black woman, was baptised. The godfather and godmother were Juan de Bribiesca and Ana de Escarcena. Signed by Juan Antonio Polanco”.

The young Martín used to kneel and pray every evening before the image of the Crucified Jesus and during the day he was inclined to assist other people with their misfortunes. From an early age, he learnt the profession of barber-surgeon, alongside his friends, Mateo Pastor, a pharmacist, and Marcelo de Rivera, a surgeon. He was 15 years old when his mother, full of emotion and humility, accompanied him to the monastery. At the age of 24, after nine years in the Order, he took up his profession as recorded in the monastery’s register of professions: “On 2 June 1603, Brother Martín de Porras, a mulatto and son of Juan de Porras, a native of Burgos, and Ana Velázquez, a free black woman, dedicated himself to this monastery for all the days of his life; he was born in this city and swore obedience on this day for his entire life (…) Signed: Brother Martín de Porras.”

At that time, the Rosario monastery housed around 200 religious, without taking into account the slaves, for whom there was a separate infirmary. Martín had to take care of all of them. But his charity was not confined to the boundaries of his monastery as an infirmary. The renown of this compassionate Samaritan soon spread throughout the entire city. As soon as he knew that someone needed relief and was in pain, he went out and offered help, as promptly as he came to the assistance of his brother the monks.

Martín built bridges between the three groups in colonial Lima: black, indigenous, and Spanish people. The son of an unknown father turned into the spiritual father of many people. He always called black and indigenous people his “sons and daughters”, and due to this filial love, he often ended up in situations in which he had to protect and defend the poor. Some upper-class people in Lima also had a profound respect for Martín. As his life neared its end, he was doing good to everyone. He died on 3 November 1639.

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Caritas Penang comes under the jurisdiction of The Titular Roman Catholic Bishop of Penang.