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Fr. Ken Thorson O.M.I., Fr. David Purcell C.Ss.R., & Fr. Mbugua S.J., will host a retreat in Canmore, AB for young Catholic men (18 - 35 years) who are interested in a weekend of community and prayer. We’ll be hiking, praying and talking about our journey with God. Canmore and the Rockies will be our backdrop. Join with others like yourself who are seeking to know God’s will for their lives.
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Are you interested in religious missionary life as a priest or brother? Share a week of the life, ministry, and prayer of the Oblates at Our Lady Of Guadalupe Parish and St Jude Shrine. Read more
World Youth Day 2013 is coming quick, and Fr Ken and other Oblates from Canada are going to be there with groups of young pilgrims from St Teresa’s Parish in Pelican Narrows SK, St Charles Parish in Edmonton, and St Albert Parish in St Albert, AB. Oblates and youth from all over the Oblate world will gather with the Oblate Superior General, Fr Louis Lougen at the Brasilian National Shrine in Aparecida. After this we’ll make our way to Rio di Janeiro for the World Youth Days.
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"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do."
- Pope John XXIII
"Here is the Christian invitation, therefore, no longer to live at the surface, not to live at the level of glitter and triviality, but to be filled with the peace and the love of God…"
- John Main OSB
"Wherever we work, our mission is especially to those people whose condition cries out for salvation and for the hope which only Jesus Christ can fully bring. These are the poor with their many faces; we give them our preference."
- Oblate Rule C.5
The central desire in the life of St Eugene de Mazenod, the Founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, was helping people to see who they were in the eyes of God. In his 1813 Ash Wednesday Homily spoke these words to the poor and forgotten of Aix en Provence in France:
"You are creatures of God, and you are God's children, the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ... you are kings, you are priests, you are, in a way, Gods... Within each of you there is an immortal soul, made in the image of God whom it is destined one day to possess, a soul which has been redeemed at the cost of the Blood of Christ... God alone is worthy of your soul. Only God can satisfy your heart.
We are missionaries. We began 188 years ago, on January 25, 1816, when Father Eugene de Mazenod and four companions came together to preach missions in Provencal, in the rural countryside of southern France. And currently, how many are we? Where are we? What do we do?
We are 4,440 Oblates in all - young men, old men, Oblates in formation, priests, Brothers! Of this total, almost 600 are in formation, having already made their first commitment.