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to Vietnamese Missionaries in Taiwan Home PageI was sent on a mission during a period when the Socialist Revolution wanted to assert its victorious force. And the place I was sent to was a place where the greater part of the population was made up of very faithful Buddhists, Hoa Hao.
This was a challenge for me. Faced with these difficulties, I deemed it necessary to start by developing the Good News, not religion. After 23 years, reality shows that the Good News can be marvellously developed and the Catholic Church is well-respected. To find the reason for this development, I would like to confirm that the principal agent is God-Love, full of mercy, very close. The Good News changed hearts. I feel this at the bottom of my heart.
If we needed to specify our way of collaborating with Christ, I could enumerate the main attitudes:
1. The humility of recognizing the fact that humanity needs to be saved. We wish to be saved no matter what.
2. A simple contribution to Christ's economy of salvation through love. A very sincere love which is at the same time a gift to others and reception of the Holy Spirit.
3. Sincere acceptance of the crosses which often accompany saving love. To be willing to take up the cross and to accept its wisdom, especially in self-denial for love and service: this is our daily vocation.
From experience I am certain that to achieve a well-prepared collaboration with Christ, our Saviour, the disciples of Christ must take heart a contemplative, ascetical, humble and charitable spirituality, concentrating on good examples and the words of Christ. A profound spirituality is considered a necessary condition for mission, because with Christ we must fight against a great system of individual, collective and structural sins, and against a very strong force, i.e. Satan, the untiring destroyer of the kingdom.
They must also be alert and vigilant and know how to receive the newness of the Good News that the Holy Spirit presents to us through the history of the Church and the signs of the times.
By bearing witness to these, I believe that the encounter with Christ is the definitive element for development of the Good News. This encounter must be living, personal and receptive, led by the Holy Spirit. This encounter will grant us the grace for a conversion of freedom and love.
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