Raising two daughters with her husband on the outskirts of San Salvador, Clelia Estrada de Cruz instilled in them her own parents’ values. “They taught us to be generous with others, and to share,” Clelia says. The family belongs to Cristo Salvador, a resilient parish in the Zacamil neighborhood of Mejicanos, El Salvador, where Maryknoll Fath...
Partners In Mission
Partners in Mission: A Faith of Our Own
Growing up as a Korean American Catholic isn’t easy. In addition to the usual challenges children face, like making friends and doing well in school, many of us born into immigrant families also struggle to learn our parents’ language. For me, that meant there were things we weren’t fully able to share, and one of those was our Catholic faith...
Partners in Mission: Words, Deeds and Love
Fung-Bing Ho has encountered several Maryknoll missioners throughout her life and says, for her, that’s simply “God’s will.” Born in 1951 in Guangzhou, China, Ho was a child when her family moved to Macau, where she briefly attended a Catholic school. When her family moved again, this time to Hong Kong, she lost contact with Catholicism. On...
Partners in Mission: Love Lives On
ears flowed from her eyes as Maureen Long recalled her parents’ last wish. Francis and Patricia Lafferty, a couple from Pennsylvania who were married for 58 years, wanted their wedding rings to become part of an enduring sacred symbol. A few months before Patricia passed away in September of 2022, she expressed this wish: “That our wedding ring...
Partners in Mission: Healing with Art
In these stormy times of climate change and global unrest, Brother Mickey McGrath uses his talent as an artist and storyteller to connect people to each other and the beauty of creation. The Oblate of St. Francis de Sales says he felt called to his vocation. Being a religious brother, he says, allows him the freedom to share his passion as an artis...
Partners in Mission: Return to the Border
In July 2023, Doctor Guadalupe Jimenez signed up for a Maryknoll immersion trip to El Paso, Texas. But it wasn’t her first time at the border. Thirty-nine years ago, her family crossed that same border after a perilous journey from Puebla, Mexico. Hunger, poverty and danger had driven them to seek a better life. “I was in my mom’s wo...
Partners in Mission: Maryknoll Dreams
My name is Sandro Aldo Paiva Crispin and I am a 44-year-old Maryknoll volunteer in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I serve in the museum at the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers Center, where we share our collection of photos, publications and historical objects about Maryknoll in Latin America. This legacy is a wealth we cannot keep to ourselves. I was born i...
Partners in Mission: Christian Charity in Action in Taiwan
It was the spring of 2019, and I was about to finish my undergraduate studies in philosophy and theology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. I could recite lines from papal encyclicals and regurgitate Greek words for different forms of love. In short, I knew Christian charity from a chalkboard in a seminary classroom. All that changed when the ...
