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Visit either the featured mission ministries for children, MercyWorks online or the home of Missionhurst CICM. Thank you for your interest in and support of our mission work!
MercyWorks raises funds and awareness for mission ministries around the world that are dramatically impacting the success, health, and prosperity of children in need. It is an initiative of Missionhurst CICM.
MercyWorks is a project of Missionhurst CICM that is focused on bringing dignity to the world’s most marginalized children by meeting their basic educational, psychological, and physical needs. MercyWorks is made up of mission ministries serving children at every stage of life, from building schools in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to providing medical care to infants in Guatemala.
We comfort the afflicted, shelter the homeless, instruct the ignorant, and give food to the hungry. We extend a healing hand of mercy to the most vulnerable children.
Close to 700 students attend school at St. Jean Bosco, our Catholic parish school in the remote mountains of Haiti. Although it only costs $120 to send a student to school for a whole school year, including tuition, daily lunch, textbooks, and more, many families are not able to afford this amount of money despite their best efforts.
view projectsThe DRC is one of the poorest countries in the world, with well over 50% of the country living in poverty on less than $1 a day. Our missionary priests are running hundreds of parish schools in the DRC, working to lift children and their families out of poverty through education.
view projectsThe Bethany Center is a network of ministries dedicated to offering pre and post natal care to expectant mothers in Guatemala. Nearly 30 out of 1,000 mothers in Guatemala will lose their baby due to a lack of basic education, hygiene, and medical care. We also offer skills training, regular meals, and a place for joyful community for impoverished families who are struggling to feed their children.
view projectsThe Sunflower Center serves abused, neglected, homeless, and trafficked children between the ages of 0-6 years old. Our staff and volunteers work to re-integrate children with their families or find new adoptive families, while offering them physical, psychological, and emotional support in a warm, loving, playful environment.
St. Charles School is currently under construction, on track to open in fall 2023. In Chisankhwa, where St. Charles is being built, there is a great need for a new school. Presently, many youths in this area do not attend school because they cannot walk the long distances required to attend. This can also tragically lead to higher rates of forced child labor. When completed, the school will serve 300+ students in grades 1-6, two-thirds of which will be young girls.
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Fr. Francis, a native of DRC who has been a part of the Missionhurst congregation for 28 years, served for 15 years in the Philippines before being called back home to serve as provincial superior of the province of Southern Africa
Father Charles Lutumba spends a lot of his time with the CICM seminarians. He accompanies the seminarians as a spiritual director and mentor. He imparts to them his childlike wonder in the face of the small, everyday ways that God reveals himself.
“Miracles happen every day,” Fr. Charles insists, “if we are attentive, we can see them...Waking up in the morning is already a miracle because when we go to sleep at night, we don’t know if we will be up the next day.”
Fr. Kevin has been apart of the Missionhurst community since 2005 and particularly focuses his missionary on refugee support and relief. Today he serves in the Dominican Republic and works with the many undocumented Haitians there helping them to attain citizenship and grow in their identity as children of God.
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Because we are dedicated to corporal and spiritual works of mercy and because we know from experience that acts of mercy and compassion work to change the trajectory of children’s lives.
Many of us can imagine what it’s like to do a work of mercy–that moment when we offered forgiveness to someone who wronged us or went out of our way to visit a sick friend. But can you imagine an entire life dedicated entirely to works of mercy? And can you picture the impact a high-quality education can have on an impoverished child, struggling with malnutrition, from rural Guatemala? The impact shelter and therapy can have on the souls of abandoned street children from the Philippines?
What’s different about MercyWorks is that our missionary priests are men who have given their whole lives to the service of specific children in specific places around the world. They bring their own background and experience, their knowledge of other cultures, and their education with them, but ultimately, they are willing to give all that up out of love and compassion, ready to take on the works of mercy that are most needed. They become a part of the local community, they share the joys and sufferings of the children they serve, and above all, they stay, letting the slow impact of their work unfold over time as they see children grow and develop under their care.
MercyWorks is about projects that make a tangible and meaningful difference in the lives of children, projects and activities that “work” to change the amount of love, truth, well-being and opportunity that will enter into the life of a marginalized child.