By Allison Auth
One of my favorite parts of homeschooling is the ability to learn alongside my kids. Take, for example, the life of Marco Polo. I knew he had traveled to modern-day China, and I yelled his name dozens of times as a child playing the game named after him, but that was the extent of my knowledge of Marco Polo. So I’ve been fascinated this fall with just how treacherous yet successful his travels were—well, successful in many ways except one.
Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Mongolian Empire, asked Marco Polo, his father and his uncle to bring back some oil from the Holy Land and one hundred priests so the emperor could discern whether or not Christianity was the true religion. Despite their efforts, the Polos could only find two Dominican monks willing to make the long and dangerous journey. But those two priests didn’t make it that far – they left the traveling party and went home after becoming terrified of Mamluk bandits.
It’s hard to know how history would play out since a little while after the monks left, marauders attacked the Polos’ party, and most of their company was killed or sold into slavery. Still, what difference could 100 priests – or even only the two Dominicans – have made in history if they had arrived? By all accounts, the Khan was a wise and generous ruler, and he may have seen Christianity for what it really was.
The idea that no priests were willing to go to China haunts me. It reminds me of Our Lady’s message to the children at Fatima, when she told them if we didn’t consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray the rosary and offer reparation, Russia would spread the errors of communism everywhere, and there would be more wars. Though various popes consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart, Russia specifically was not consecrated until 2022. You only have to look around to see the consequences of such a delay.
This all becomes personal for me when I realize that I am responsible for not only my actions but also my omissions.
When I fail to evangelize the people around me, will someone else take my place? I recently read and reviewed the new book Mission-Ready Friendship by Jason Simon. In it, he compares a lifeguard watching a person get carried out to sea by a riptide and hoping for the best to a friendship in which one watches a friend get carried away by the riptides of life. A lifeguard who doesn’t intervene while watching from shore could be held liable, and yet, isn’t that what we sometimes do when we see people struggling and send “thoughts and prayers” and do nothing more? Simon encourages us to intervene by disrupting the facades they live behind and walk intentionally with others to share the good news of God’s love.
Simon urgently calls faithful Catholics on to missionary holiness, to reach out to those the Holy Spirit puts in our lives and disciple them one-on-one. If we hope that weekly Mass, religious education or some other program will do the job, we underestimate the powerful currents of the culture.
“Hoping for the best isn’t good enough for people who follow Jesus. Love demands that we do more than hope for the best. God calls us and empowers us to intentionally deepen relationships, get to know the riptides that threaten people we know and love and pull them to Jesus,” Simon writes.
Pope St. John Paul II would agree. In Redemptoris Missio, he wrote, “The universal call to holiness is closely linked to the universal call to mission. . . Every member of the faithful is called to holiness and to mission” (90).
The saintly pope then urged every member of the faithful to remember the missionary enthusiasm of the first Christian communities, and that mission is our path to holiness.
This is not to say that hoping and praying for people from afar isn’t important. It’s simply the first step. We must ask the Holy Spirit to open opportunities to get to know the person next to us in the pews or to inspire us to start a conversation that might lead to deeper friendship in Christ.
We don’t have to join Marco Polo’s expedition and go to China to be a missionary. We just need to be willing to get out of our comfort zones and invest time with our neighbors, sharing the love of Jesus and the need for repentance of sins. In the end, Mary’s Immaculate Heart will triumph. Our mission is to bring many souls to her so she can lead them to her Son.
