Special to The Dialog
The needs of the people with whom Father Antony William Rajayan works go beyond the physical conditions that place them in Christiana Medical Center.
While medical teams work on their physical health, he said, the patients and their families often also seek someone who can help “from a spiritual point of view. They are asking for a priest, if they are Catholic, or a religious leader.”
They want someone to pray with them, to listen to their hopes and fears and concerns, someone just to be with them. Catholics, both active and those who are separated from the church, want Communion and perhaps the sacrament of anointing the sick; those who have left the church may want to reconcile with their God and their faith.
Father Rajayan’s chaplain ministry directly carries out one of the church’s corporal works of mercy, to visit the sick.
This year’s Annual Catholic Appeal will help Father Rajayan continue in his ministry, and more than 35 other offices and ministries to put the corporal and spiritual works of mercy into action in Delaware and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
That commitment to the works of mercy is underscored by the theme of this year’s campaign, “Blessed Are the Merciful, for They Shall Obtain Mercy.” The theme is taken from Pope Francis’s proclamation of a Holy Year of Mercy.
Appeal leaders hope to raise $4,434,000 this year. Commitment Weekend, when Catholics in the pew will be asked to make donations or pledges to the appeal, will be April 9-10.
While Father Rajayan works with people who are hospitalized at Christiana and at Wilmington Hospital, Father Edward Fahey ministers to the elderly and the infirm at 21 nursing homes in northern New Castle County. His work also is supported by the Annual Catholic Appeal.
Their efforts relieve pastors who would otherwise make hospital and nursing home visits on a regular basis so they can attend to other pastoral needs within their parishes.
Father Fahey celebrates Mass and the sacraments of reconciliation and anointing the sick and makes personal room visitations in his regular rounds. His Masses feature “dialogue homilies which include pop quizzes about the Catholic faith and moral tradition as well as soliciting their faith experiences that they feel comfortable sharing.” His homilies also include “holy humor [since] laughter so many times is the best medicine.”
His approach toward nursing home ministry was honed by his experiences working in the kitchen of a nursing home while in high school. That work, he said, “was really good preparation to realize that sometimes the best consolation you can bring to a nursing home or assisted living care resident … is to be an empathetic listener, to help a person prayerfully discern viable options available with whatever situations are most pressing at the time, and to share heartfelt prayer and well wishes with each and every one you meet.”
But it also has helped him. “This ministry has been the all-time best for me in participating in the corporal and spiritual works of the Gospel,” he said.
Father Fahey and Father Rajayan share a fondness for the works of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, a nun well known for her work with those considered the poorest of the poor.
Father Fahey said he can relate to Mother Teresa’s hope during her life of “being a pencil in the hands of God.” He met Mother Teresa in 1995 when she met with priests in Trenton, N.J., where Father Fahey was ordained.
While Father Rajayan never met Mother Teresa, he knows first-hand the extreme poverty in which she worked. He also is from India, though from the state of Tamil Nadu in the extreme southern part of the nation; Calcutta is in the far eastern portion.
“I come from India. She is a great model,” he said. “I know the suffering, the needy, the people who are in the slums” of his state, he said, just as Mother Teresa knew those of Calcutta. “I worked with them even before ordination. I was always drawn that way.”
Now, he is drawn to work with people in a different sort of need, people who often are “distraught and in pain.”
He recalled one woman, in her late 70s or early 80s, who had not gone to church for years.
“I told her about the Year of Mercy and what the pope had told us,” he said. While he sensed she needed more time before completely returning to the church, “the message brought peace on her.”
The Annual Catholic Appeal helps Father Rajayan deliver that type of peace to others.
