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In encouraging and nurturing their relationship with lay associates in the present day, the Missionaries of the Precious Blood are following in the footsteps of their founder, St. Gaspar del Bufalo, who placed a priority on leading and working with lay people nearly 200 years ago.

Fr. Jerry Stack, C.PP.S., explored St. Gaspar’s strong connection to lay groups during a retreat for C.PP.S. Companions in the Kansas City and Cincinnati Provinces last fall. The retreat was entitles From Confraternity to Companions: Gaspar’s Charism and Lay Spirituality.

St. Gaspar worked extensively with the laity, Fr. Stack said, “more than I thought before I started my research. He saw to the establishment of lay associations. These associations had monthly meetings where they would study and pray—it sounds a lot like Companions (lay associates).”

The beginning of the Congregation was rooted in a lay association, he said. In its early years, Missionaries worked under the auspices of the archconfraternity of the Precious Blood, founded by Fr. Francesco Albertini in Rome in 1808. It was well established when Gaspar founded the Missionaries of the Precious Blood in 1815; the confraternity, which was sanctioned and encouraged by the Church, was the umbrella under which the Missionaries worked.

St. Gaspar continued to work with the laity throughout his years of missionary work in the countryside of what is now Italy. The focus of the Congregation in those days was preaching missions. They traveled from town to town to revitalize parishes and call people to personal conversion by preaching about the merits of the Precious Blood.

St. Gaspar did not want the work of the mission to end when the Missionaries moved on to the next town. He urged his Missionaries to form lay groups in the towns in which they preached, which would continue the work of spiritual renewal after the Missionaries had gone.

“Gaspar established these sodalities to make sure the fruits of the mission would continue,” Fr. Stack said. “There would be separate sodalities for priests, for adult men, adult women, for boys, for girls, and also for farm workers. Priests would come back to a town after preaching a mission there to check up on how things were going.”

Lay associations were very important in St. Gaspar’s day, he said, because “parishes were not places of great spiritual excitement or nourishment. One historian compared parishes to spiritual registries; people went there to get married, baptize their children. But the burning spiritual life of the people was in these spiritual associations,” the confraternities and sodalities.

The importance of such lay associations only points to the desperate need for renewal in the Church of Gaspar’s day, Fr. Stack said. “Gaspar’s times were difficult times. There was revolution in the air. Crime and violence were rampant. Many clerics were indifferent. Things were in bad shape. Pius VII responded by inviting Gaspar and his Missionaries to spread devotion to the Precious Blood throughout the Papal States.”

Text and Photo courtesy of Jean Giesige, Cincinnati Province

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