Adapted from Remarks at the 150th Anniversary Gala at Duquense by  Provincial Fr. Don McEachin, C.S.Sp.

As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Spiritan Province of the United States, there are two simple questions for us to ponder.  One, why did we come here?  And two, where do we go from here?

Pittsburgh in 1872 was popularly known as “hell with the lid off”.   Workers died at a young age.  The average male life expectancy was 42 years.  Many recently arrived Catholic families  were at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and looked to the Church for comfort and guidance.  Bishops were looking for priests to meet the needs of this growing church and the seminaries here could not keep up with the needs.  And the German Spiritans who came were being persecuted and exiled by Bismark and his Kulturkampf.   So this was why they came here, at least on a human level.

On a spiritual level, they came because they were sent.  Sent by the Lord, guided by the Holy Spirit, to seek out the places where the needs were the greatest, where the Church had difficulty in finding workers.  They found themselves, led by the Spirit, in Pittsburgh, in pastoral ministry to immigrant communities, offering quality education to the disadvantaged and excluded, and promoting an inclusive vision of society beyond the boundaries of race, color, or religion.  The Spiritans quickly extended their pastoral care of immigrants following immigrant families to Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Michigan. 

Spiritans in the US also discerned a pressing need to minister to African American communities in a highly segregated and prejudiced society.  In collaboration with Mother (now Saint) Katharine Drexel and her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, numerous African American parishes, missions, schools, and a military academy for African Americans in over a dozen states, in the Northeast and in the South were founded.   Eventually, the growing Province founded its own seminaries for training educators and missionaries, who were then sent to the church in Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. In recent decades, the U.S. Spiritans developed a model for integrating the laity as full partners and collaborators in our mission, ministry, and community life.

So where do we go from here?  That is the part of the story yet to be written.  As Spiritans, we are called to be good listeners.  We are listening to the people we serve, listening to the Church, to our Bishops, and to Pope Francis.  We are listening to the Holy Spirit and the signs of the times.  To the reality of the contemporary waves of immigrants and refugees.  To the reality of living in an ever more multicultural society and multicultural congregation.  Listening to the question “How do we respond to a society increasingly polarized, culturally divided, and secularized.”

We look forward to writing the next chapter together with our lay collaborators and friends. We’re confident that God who has brought us this far will continue to lead and guide us, to build Spiritan communities of radical welcome, open and inclusive, where we celebrate our multicultural heritages and together build something new and wonderful.  In the words of Isaiah, the Prophet, ”The Lord has done great things for us, but Remember not just the events of the past, the things of long ago, behold, I am doing something new!  Do you not perceive it?”

And so let us together honor the past, celebrate the present, and with the Spirit to guide us, make something new for the future.