The missions, social projects and solidarity actions are a constant in the action of the Augustinian Recollect Family. The Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine has always lived in mission, since its very birth was motivated by the opening of the first evangelization missions in the Philippines in the 17th century. Since then, he has carried out his evangelizing activity following the mandate of Jesus in the places today called “frontiers”: there where it is necessary to defend the dignity of human life, social justice, equal opportunities, the defense of the most vulnerable.
The opening of new fields for evangelization without the dependence of governments brought about an authentic missionary expansion throughout the 20th Century that took the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino to places which they had never thought of going.
At first, the religious directed themselves towards inhospitable zones lacking clergy. There were religious in Chepo and Darién (Panama), on the Columbian Coast of the Pacific, in the Brazilian states of Bahía and Pará or in the Venezuelan Guyana. They were places of unhealthy climates, humid, insanitary, and endemic in malaria and yellow fever. Many religious lost their lives and good health in these places.
The arrival of Pius XI to the papacy in 1922 gave a general impulse to all the missions in the Church. The Recollects were associated with the epic Chinese mission (1924) and in the prefectures of Tumaco (1927) in Columbia and Labrea (1925) and Marajó (1928) in Brazil.
The restoration of the rest of the Provinces in the Order divides in this moment the history of the missions of the Province of Saint Nicholas and of the missionary history of the Order, for almost all the new provinces will include missions.
NEXT PAGE: a. The Philippines in the 20th century
TABLE OF CONTENT: MISSIONS
- 1. Augustinian Recollects: Missionaries out of necessity
- 2. Mission, a complex and all-embracing term
- 3. Religious, lay people, and volunteer missionaries
- 4. Missionaries according to the laws
- 5. Missionaries by inheritance
- 6. The Province’s missions in the 19th century
- 7. The Province’s missions in the 20th century
- 8. Prelature of Labrea (Amazonas, Brazil)
- 9. Diocese of Shangqiu (Henan, People’s Republic of China)
- 10. Boys’ Town (Agua Calientes de Cartago, Costa Rica)
- 11. St Monica’s home (Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil)
- 12. CARDI, the Augustinian Recollect Centre for Integral Development, Mexico City
- 13. Service to immigrants: United States, London, Madrid
