The Feast Day of St. Martin De Porres

Bulika! Or for the 4:30 Saturday evening and 6pm Sunday evening Mass crowds, Zanoori!

These greetings in FraFra, the local dialect of the people in Zuarungu, Ghana, (Upper East part of Ghana) mean “good morning” and “good evening.”

Today is the Feast Day of St. Martin De Porres, November 3rd. Just as we celebrate St. Luke’s Feast day at our parish every year with “Oxtoberfest”, so the people of our Sister Parish, St. Martin de Porres and the 7 Outstation parishes connected with St. Martin De Porres, celebrate their parish Feast Day on this Day in Zuarungu, Ghana.

We just celebrated the feast of All Saints Day which always seems to remind me of the Catholic or “Universal” nature of the Church. Saints from so many different time periods, places, family backgrounds, nations, struggles, and, of course, victories are almost too innumerable to count! Yet, many, if not most of us, at the very least know of, or even have a very strong relationship and spiritual connection with a particular saint friend in heaven and ask for their prayers and help at different times in our lives.

The Saints help us to remember that our Church really is a divinely established, universal Community of divine faith, hope, and love, founded on the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. I remember a couple summers ago when Bishop Agyenta, Bishop of the diocese in which our Sister-Parish is located, visited us at St. Luke’s. He commented on how the Sister-Parish relationship between us and St. Martin De Porres is a living, concrete example of the “Global Village” (as he called it) that we live in in today’s world and how it is also a concrete and living reality of the Catholic dynamism and mutual solidarity of cultures united in the common and one Catholic faith.

Today, let’s remember our friends in Zuarungu, Ghana at our Sister Parish in prayer. Let’s also share in their joy, as they celebrate their great feast day of a great saint, St. Martin De Porres. May we, like St. Martin De Porres and St. Luke the Evangelist, answer Jesus’ Call and summons to strive to be modern-day saints, striving together as brothers and sisters in Christ in our “Global Village.”

Fr. Ryan