Dear parishioners of St. Simon Catholic Church,

Blessings to you from Fr. Antony Gaspar, a missionary priest from the Diocese of Dindigul in South India. We are privileged to receive the opportunity to share with you about our missionary work, and seek your prayers and financial support in the weekend of July 9 & 10, 2022.   Our Diocese of Dindigul was newly created in 2003. This region has high rate of illiteracy, poverty, and un-employment. We serve nearly 3 million people of different faiths, but Catholics are only about 146,000. Although we are a minority, the Catholic faith has taken a deeper root in the lives of the people. They are very happy to be Catholics, and express their deeply held Catholic values, beliefs, and convictions in their faith practices, in schools, social interactions, and in cultural celebrations. The Church is truly vibrant.  Our missionary efforts to share God’s love with the people through education, social work, medical missions, and other charity works have inspired the people of other faiths, and they freely wanted to embrace our Catholic faith. Thus, the opportunity for the evangelization work is huge in our diocese. But the resources to train catechists and faith educators, and constructing faith formation centers, churches, mission chapels, schools, orphanages, and primary health care centers are all daunting tasks for our diocese. Being a new diocese, we have to build it up from the scratch which requires a lot of resources.

The mission appeal in your parish will concretely help our diocese in three ways:

  1. To support the education of 56 seminarians in our diocese who are aspiring to become priests to serve God and His people.
  2. To provide housing, education, and medical needs to 1000 poor and orphan children in our diocesan administrated orphanages and study homes. We have 10 homes that provide care for the orphan and poor children 24/7.
  3. To support training Catechists who are at various stages of their formation. These men and women will soon become leaders who will care for the spiritual, pastoral, social, and economic needs of the people in our diocese.

We depend upon the generosity of the people like you to help us to take care of these needs. Therefore, we request you to pray for us, and be generous with your contribution at the special Mission Collection on the weekend of July 9 & 10, 2022. We deeply appreciate your kindness and generosity.

With Sincere Thanks,

Rev. Antony Gaspar

Mission Representative