This year, we will hold our special collection for the Diocesan Missionary Cooperative Appeal to benefit the Diocese of Kumbakonam, India, on the weekend of July 30-31.
This Diocese started in 1899 in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, has an area of 7824 sq. km. (3,020.8 sq. mi.) and a Catholic population of 2,13,000 (6% of the population), living in 94 parishes and 610 missions served by 224 diocesan and 79 religious priests, 620 nuns, 12 trained catechists, 330 untrained lay catechists, and two social service centers.
What does the Diocese Need?
These are its most pressing missionary needs:-
- Establishing eight more new parishes, each with a new church. Also, the large missions need to be made independent parishes with the resident priest for better pastoral ministry. But the people are unable to give financial support.
- Providing the 136 Catholic schools and 22 orphanages in the missions with better facilities, building, infrastructure, educational and technical tools, children’s Bibles, a projector, catechetical materials in the form of videos, pictures, textbooks, and workbooks to improve the quality of religious and faith formation of Catholic and non-Catholic students in mission schools. Schools are our main means of ushering in progress at all levels. Education is a main means of evangelization and boosting the prospects of the youth.
- Enabling 480 nuns and 4955 Catholic Teachers in charge of catechetical, educational, medical, and social ministries throughout this rural to educate the children and adults in the Catholic faith and to help the people, particularly the poor and the marginalized, for their integral development, through annual seminars on Scripture and Catechetics.
- Projecting the healing touch and loving care of the Divine Healer through our diocesan hospitals for lepers, homes and school for deaf and hard of hearing children, children of HIV patients, and the many rural medical staffed by nuns.
- Education of more young men in the seminary since the diocese abounds in vocations to the priesthood and religious life. This would allow the diocese to send some of the young people as missionaries to missions abroad where there is a shortage of priests.
Note: Every year an average of 120 young men and women go from this diocese to other missions and religious orders in India and abroad as missionaries.
- Educating 4,800 very poor or orphan children, from families of single mothers and widows, and of addictive and abusive fathers by providing them with free boarding and lodging, in order to eradicate child labor. Such children are forced to tend cattle, work in hazardous conditions in factories, hotels, or farms in order to eke out a living for the family.
The above mission projects are 80% dependent on MCP funds. Due to acute poverty of 65% of the Catholics, the diocese depends mostly on funds from the annual mission appeal for the pastoral, educational, medical, and socio-economic emancipation of the marginalized and QOOI converts.
Your Christ like intervention and sacrifice of:
- $20 will feed a poor child or an orphan for a month.($200 annually).
- $50 will enable a single mother or widow feed her family of three for a month.
- $100 for monthly pay for a catechist.
- $250 will provide four goats to maintain a family of four.
- $500 will educate a physically challenged child (annually).
- $600 will pay the bill for healthcare & family maintenance of a leprosy patient for a year.
- $700 will fix the roof of a hut.
- $800 will provide a cow to feed an entire family of five or more.
- $900 11 provide a grocery store, and employment to feed a family of 10 with elderly parents and grandparents.
- $1000 for treatment and rehabilitation of an individual afflicted with leprosy.
- $2000 to sponsor a seminarian for a year.
- $6000 for a home a family.
- $2,5000 will build a mission chapel.
Please prayerfully consider a donation to the appeal. Thank you for your generosity!
