a message from the president

Rekindle our missionary impulse: The Second Vatican Council proclaimed, "The Church on earth is missionary by her very nature” (Ad Gentes, Decree on the Mission Activity of the Church, 1965, #2). Through the Great Commission, the Church has been entrusted with the responsibility of sharing the mission of salvation with the whole world. Father Peyton is a man who was in every way a missionary. He identified his mission priority as being to families around the world and his message as being the need to return to God or the practice of faith in families through family prayer. He was a man marked by a zeal for God and Our Blessed Mother.  

A missionary spirit is not alien to who we are as Holy Cross Family Ministries. It is part of our heritage. We urgently need to renew this missionary impulse and missionary vision. We need to set our hearts on fire with the desire to be missionaries to families all over the world, accompanying families in their understanding of our faith and fostering their practice of prayer. 

Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, taught and emphasized that zeal for mission needs to mark all his sons and daughters and, by extension, their collaborators. Moreau defined zeal as that flame of “burning desire to make God known, loved, and served” (Bl. Basil Moreau, Christian Education). Father Peyton was a man marked by a zeal for mission, and we, as individuals and collaborators, need to re-ignite the same fire.   

Attention to contextual realities: When Father Peyton founded our organization, families were ordinarily composed of a father, mother, and children. The reality is that the nature of families has changed over the years, and we need to accompany all families in whatever shape they come. Contemporary families are marked by divorce and separations, an absence of spouses, less openness to bearing children, less practice of faith, poverty, addictions, etc.  

While the core mission of Holy Cross Family Ministries is the spiritual accompaniment of families, given the contextual realities families are dealing with nowadays, we must incorporate into our program's new ways of accompanying families that recognize and respond to the socio-economic and psychological realities of contemporary families, such as offering professional counseling to the families or individuals to whom we minister. This should not be seen as antithetical to our mission; rather, it is what we are called to do. 

Together in Mission,

Father Fred Jenga, C.S.C., Ph.D.

President, Holy Cross Family Ministries