Archbishop Pérez Unveils Plan for ‘Missionary Hubs’ to Reach ‘Disconnected Catholics’| National Catholic Register

‘We’re calling it planting,’ the shepherd of Philadelphia told EWTN News.

Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Pérez is creating what he calls “missionary hubs” at parishes with full-time staffs meant to serve not active parishioners but rather the vast majority of Catholics who aren’t going to church.

“We’re calling it planting,” Archbishop Pérez said during an appearance Monday night on EWTN News Nightly.

He said he hopes the domestic missionaries will be “reaching out to that community and bring them back to the altar, bring them back home to the Church.”

About 83% of baptized Catholics don’t participate in the life of the Church, according to archdiocesan statistics.

Archbishop Pérez wants to see at least 10 missionary hubs established in each of the archdiocese’s five counties during the next 10 years, according to a pastoral letter he published in January.

The staff, which would work under the pastor of a parish, could include “service coordinators, communications experts, event specialists, and missionaries all focused on facilitating an encounter with Christ and his Church,” according to the letter.

“I want to begin to close this distance between many of our loved ones and the Church. I want people to know that the Lord is still calling them, that they are of great worth, have a divine purpose, and an eternal home,” Archbishop Pérez wrote in the letter, as reported by Catholic News Agency, the Register’s sister news outlet, at the time.

He said in January that he sees the missionary hubs as antidotes to church closures.

“I didn’t come here to close parishes; I came here to build up the Church of Philadelphia,” Archbishop Pérez wrote in the letter.

He also said he wants to reach those who are “feeling lost or disconnected.”

The missionaries, he told EWTN News Nightly on Monday, will be “reaching out, meeting them, preaching Christ to them and touching their hearts and bringing them back, back to home, to the Church. It would hopefully involve five people in addition to what that parish community might already have as their staff, but their focus is going to be outward.”

“It’s facing the Church to the outside world around it,” he said. “It’s actually the living out of Pope Francis’ vision of a missionary community, a community of missionary disciples that he outlines in Paragraph 24 of The Joy of the Gospel.”

Archbishop Pérez was referring to an apostolic exhortation known in Latin as Evangelium Gaudium, which Pope Francis issued in 2013, the first year of his papacy.

In Paragraph 24, the Pope says the Church ought to be “a community of missionary disciples” who “move forward, boldly take the initiative, go out to others, seek those who have fallen away, stand at the crossroads, and welcome the outcast.”

“An evangelizing community gets involved by word and deed in people’s daily lives; it bridges distances, it is willing to abase itself if necessary, and it embraces human life, touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others,” the Pope says in the document.

Tracy Sabol, who anchors EWTN News Nightly, noted during the interview that Monday was the feast day of St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), a Philadelphia native and heiress to a vast banking fortune who used her wealth to fund missionary efforts among American Indians and Blacks that she founded and led.

Archbishop Pérez said St. Katharine “actually did what we’re doing.”

“She asked a question in her heart. I don’t know she asked it with these words. But the question we’re asking is: ‘Where does the Church need to be — and how?’” Archbishop Pérez said.

“And she answered that question across the country, right? Where did the Church need to be among our African American brothers and sisters and our Native American brothers and sisters? And then away she went, right?”

WATCH ON EWTN