Br. Paul Bednarczyk, C.S.C., Superior General, announced in a communication to the Congregation on Monday, March 25, 2024, that the General Council in its recent meeting had selected the pioneering missionary team for the new mission to the Diocese of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. He also announced that the new mission, which had been accepted by the Council of the Congregation on November 15, 2023, would be named for the Holy Family.

The team to inaugurate the mission will consist of eight missionaries, four Holy Cross Brothers, and four Holy Cross Priests. The equal number of brothers and priests is purposeful. It is in keeping with the vision of the Congregation’s Founder, Blessed Basile Moreau, who, in the words of the current Constitutions, envisioned Holy Cross as “a religious Congregation composed of two distinct societies of religious, one of religious priests and one of religious brothers, bound together in one indivisible brotherhood” (1:6).

The eight missionaries come from seven different jurisdictions of the Congregation and hail from five different countries of origin. No pioneering missionary team in the Congregation’s history has ever been that diverse.

Read more about the Papua New Guinea mission

“It was not lost on us as a General Council that just as Blessed Basile Moreau sent out the Congregation’s first international missionaries from Le Mans, we were meeting in the same place to pray and to select the team to open the new mission in Papua New Guinea,” wrote Br. Bednarczyk. “Without a doubt, our founder is proud to see this select group of missionaries as they are a wonderful portrait of the international Congregation that we are today.”

Br. Bednarczyk went on to explain that the General Council had decided to name the new mission in Bougainville the Holy Family Mission. He wrote that the Council was inspired by Blessed Basile Moreau’s selection of the Holy Family as one of the models for the unity of his religious family.

The Superior General added, “As we do in our apostolic works around the world, we want to become family with the people we will serve, for as our Constitutions remind us, ‘We come not just as servants but as their neighbors, to be with them and of them'. In addition, many of the pressing pastoral needs in Bougainville relate to family life, so our hope is that as ‘educators in the faith,’ we can support those to whom we minister ‘in their efforts to form communities of the coming kingdom.'" (2:12,13)

The new missionaries will gather at the Holy Cross Generalate in Rome in August for a two-week orientation. The plan is for the majority of the missionaries to arrive in Papua New Guinea before the end of the year.

The drive to open a new mission came from the Congregation’s 2022 General Chapter, which recommended “the General Administration work with jurisdictional leaders to explore possibilities for ministries in new countries in alignment with Congregational Mission priorities.” The selection of Papua New Guinea came at the recommendation of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization after the Congregation had asked the dicastery where Holy Cross might best serve the needs of the Church