I first saw Hermana Virginia before I ever met her. I first knew there was something special about her before I ever spoke with her. This week I will celebrate a Memorial Mass for Hermana Virginia Herrera MESST with her community and friends. It will be a time to reflect and remember a remarkable woman who served our Catholic Church for many years as a member of the Eucharistic Missionaries of the Most Holy Trinity (MESST)
When I was teaching at St. Lawerence the Martyr School I would often, during vacation time, attend daily Mass at St. Martin of Tours parish in San Jose. It was there I first saw Hermana Virginia. She and her sisters would often attend daily Mass in the small chapel at St. Martin and I would watch them as they filed in finding their seats. They spoke mostly Spanish to each other which made her and her sisters strangely exotic and a curiosity. It was only after I was ordained and assigned to St. Martin that I began my time truly getting to know her and the congregation as women of deep faith and service to the Church.
I also knew there was something special about Hermana Virginia, something I wanted but something that seemed elusive and remote, in her focus and prayer. I remember how when she knelt in prayer before Mass began how there would be this deep peace and tranquility that would descend upon her, unlike how I experienced my prayer as fraught with doubts, intrusions and tumbling from one thought to the next without this peace or tranquility I saw in her.
“Let’s be reminded that a Eucharistic Missionary of the Most Holy Trinity should look for souls in the tabernacle before the Blessed Sacrament, in their prayers and communication with God…The better Missionaries will be those who are prayerful souls. I’ll be watching over you with the strength of the Eucharistic sacrifice so that all you need is given to you.” (Venerable Pablo Maria Guzman, MSpS founder)
The words above, written by the congregations founder, are a beautiful way to understand the tranquility and peace I was witnessing. When I was assigned to St. Martin of Tours as my first assignment the sisters invited me to come and celebrate Mass with them in their convent once a week, something that I have continued for the last 15 years. It has been a great blessing getting to know, both Hermana Virginia and the other sisters throughout this time. Their commitment to spending time in prayer and service of seeing others in and through the Eucharist in the missionary activity they are called to live. It is a lesson I have continued to re-learn, my true peace and happiness is found in seeing others as a tabernacle of the Lord and this is what I was first able to see and understand in watching her in prayer.
“Religious should remember that the example of their own lives is the best commendation of their institutes and is an invitation to others to take on the religious life.” (#24 Perfectae Caritatis: Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life from Vatican II)
Living a life of holiness and peace is Jesus’ command to all his disciples from the Pope down to the newest baptized baby. This call draws others and allows them to know who the person of Jesus is as our Savior. (Jn 13:15) Hermana Virginia served in many parishes both in her native Mexico but also in San Jose and Orange CA. Her life and hopefulness in the trials and tribulations of life was an example of Christian virtue and mercy. She had a gentleness undergirded by a firm resolve to follow the Cross of Jesus Christ in all circumstances of life. For me, as a priest, it was the constant reminder of how our call to service, those in the consecrated life, those in the priesthood and the lay faithful both married and in the single state, is a invitation to a fuller life of love and blessing with the community of the holy Catholic Church.
“We are affected more deeply toward God by a ten-minute visit with a saintly person than we are in ten years spent with a mediocre individual. If the consecrated woman is to do great things for God in apostolic involvement, she will have to be interiorly rich in her person. She will have to be a woman of prayer before she is anything else.” (p 121-122 “And You Are Christ’s” by Fr. Thomas Dubay, SM)
Lastly, I was blessed to spend much more than ten minutes with Hermana Virginia. When she was assigned to our Diocese of San Jose the weekly Masses, Spanish lessons over breakfast and the conversation of life made my life more “interiorly rich” and deepened by prayer life and a brother in Christ. It was a true blessing to serve with and know her, a true gentle woman of God.
Rest in peace Hermana and Dios lo bendiga
God Bless
Fr. Mark
https://www.facebook.com/misineraseucaristicas.delasantisimatrinidad