Nairobi, 20 December, 2025 / 9:03 AM
As Christmas and the close of the year 2025 approach, the challenge of “missionary availability” has come into sharp focus among the Rome-based leadership of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Spiritans/Holy Ghost Fathers/CSSp.), the Superior General has said.
In his Christmas 2025 Message addressed to his “Confreres and members of the Spiritan Family,” Fr. Alain Mayama, the first African Spiritan Superior General, speaks about “the challenge of availability for mission among some of us” as a concern raised within the 322-year-old Religious and missionary Congregation with members in all continents, most them natives of Africa.
Fr. Mayama’s Christmas Message does not settle into regret or accusation. Instead, it charts a deliberate movement – from concern to conversion; from lament to “here I am” renewal – anchored in the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary; the two Spiritan founders, Claude François Poullart des Places and Venerable François Marie Paul Libermann; and the lived witness of Spiritans past and present.
2025: A year marked by gratitude, not just questions
At the outset, Fr. Mayama situates his reflection in gratitude rather than anxiety. Looking back on the ending year, he recalls the two-week-long meeting of Spiritan leaders dubbed the “Enlarged General Council” (EGC), which kicked off on June 22 in Chevilly-Larue, near Paris, France. What stands out most for him is not the complexity of discussions, but the generosity that made the gathering possible.
“With a certain pride and joy,” Fr. Mayama salutes “the availability of the confreres and lay Spiritans associated with the Province of France, without which the Enlarged General Council would not have been such a huge success.” He says that their “availability and dedication, to the best of their abilities,” did contribute “to making our stay in Paris pleasant and historic.”
From gratitude to theology and on to availability
From gratitude, Fr. Mayama moves naturally to theology. “The mystery of the Incarnation that we will soon celebrate,” he says in his 2025 Christmas Message, “inspires me to reflect on missionary availability as Spiritans today, in the spirit of our founders.”
Christmas, in Fr. Mayama’s reading, is not a sentimental pause but a radical revelation of God’s way of acting: humility, self-gift, and trust. At the heart of this mystery stands the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose response at the Annunciation becomes the lens through which missionary availability must be understood, he affirms.
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38) is, for the Spiritan Superior General, what “sums up the essence of Mary’s availability to serve.” He describes Mary’s statement as “an attitude of free and total acceptance of God’s will,” and one that expresses “an act of faith and obedience that is absolutely personal and unique.”
The availability of the Blessed Virgin Mary is not passive resignation, but an active entrustment of her life to God, Fr. Mayama says, and adds that in her cited words, Mary “entrusts herself completely to God; she makes herself a servant and is ready to accept and fulfill the divine will with confidence and humility.” It is in this Marian posture that the Spiritan Superior General since his election in October 2021 finds the deepest roots of Spiritan missionary life.
Honoring everyday witnesses of availability
Before naming any difficulty, Fr. Mayama pauses again to honour those who continue to live the spirit of availability. He pays tribute to his confreres “- senior, middle-aged, and young, each according to his age, situation, and health – who continue, at different levels, to give us beautiful examples of missionary availability and generosity.”
He shares one testimony in particular. An elderly confrere celebrating 65 years of Religious Life wrote back to Fr. Mayama, stating, “I still try to be of service, even though I am limited in my movements. I get around with a walker, but that doesn’t stop me from celebrating High Mass on Sundays and feast days throughout the year.”
In highlighting this witness, the native of Congo-Brazzaville subtly reframes availability. It is not defined only by movement across borders, but by fidelity, perseverance, and the daily choice to remain at the service of God’s people.
Naming the concern without losing hope
Only after grounding his message in gratitude and witness does Fr. Mayama address the concern that he says currently weighs on the Religious and Missionary Congregation founded in France in 1703.
“Halfway through our term, we are also discovering the challenge of availability for mission among some of us. Availability for the Congregation seems to be, at times, a personal project,” the Spiritan Superior General elected on 18 October 2021at the end of the Spiritans’ three-week General Chapter that was held at Bagamoyo in then Tanzania’s Catholic Diocese of Morogoro – Bagamoyo Diocese since it was established in March 2025 – notes.
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The 2025 EGC in Paris, he recalls, expressed “concerns… about cases of confreres refusing to accept the missionary appointments offered to them.” In some instances, Fr. Mayama continues, “mission seems to be conceived more as a short-term adventure than as a gift of self in following the Lord in the Congregation in service to a people.”
He goes on to name the underlying temptations, saying, “Personal well-being easily takes precedence over offering ourselves to others; ties to our natural family and network of friends take precedence over the mission and the people to whom we are sent.” The consequences are tangible, Fr. Mayama further says, highlighting “excessive mobility, instability, and a lack of continuity in our missions,” which he says risk weakening the Congregation’s missionary presence.
Yet even here, Fr. Mayama refuses to let lament dominate. His tone is sober, not accusatory, and his purpose is restorative. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he writes, “we must admit that it would be very serious if we lost this willingness and generosity for a missionary institute such as ours.”
A call back to the heart of the Spiritan vocation
The seriousness of the challenge of missionary availability lies precisely in Spiritan identity, the Spiritan Superior General says, and citing the Spiritan Rule of Life (SRL) goes on to remind his confreres that “one basic characteristic of the Spiritan calling is an availability for the service of the Gospel” and a readiness “to go where we are sent by the Congregation” (SRL 25).
This availability, Fr. Mayama insists, is not an optional extra. It is the soil from which missionary fruitfulness grows. “Let us never forget,” he writes, “that the missionary growth we are experiencing today in many countries where we work is the result of the availability and sacrifices of the confreres who preceded us.”
The present, therefore, must be read in continuity with the past, he says, adding that the vitality seen today stands on the shoulders of men who embraced mission as a lifelong offering, not a provisional project.
Learning availability from the Spiritan founders
To deepen his call for missionary availability, the Spiritan Superior General turns to the founders, beginning with Poullart des Places, a native of France, who gave up the practice of law to study for the Priesthood and founded a community for youthful men with the wish to become Priests in 1703, dedicating the community to the Holy Spirit, and calling it the Congregation of the Holy Spirit.
In discerning his vocation, Fr. Mayama recalls, Poullart des Places expressed a radical openness to God’s will, saying, “The matter is too important for me not to call on you for help… Speak, my God, to my heart, I am ready to obey you” (Cahiers Spiritains, no. 16, p. 41).
This interior surrender bore concrete fruit, the Spiritan Superior General further recalls, noting that Poullart des Places “gave his whole life to God in the service of the poor,” establishing a community shaped by trust in the Spirit rather than personal security.
Francis Libermann echoed this same availability when he required missionaries to make a prior act of consecration, Fr. Mayama notes, referring to the second founder of the Spiritans, who, some nine days after his Priestly Ordination in 1841, established the first house of the Holy Heart of Mary Society, commissioning three priests to begin missionary work.
In 1848, Libermann’s Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Congregation of the Holy Spirit by Poullart des Places were fused, thus the official name of the Spiritans, the “Congregation of the Holy Spirit under the protection of the Immaculate Heart of Mary”.
In his 2025 Christmas Message, the Spiritan Superior General recalls the words of Libermann, which demonstrate his missionary availability: “I offer and give myself to you entirely and without reserve to be used all my life for the salvation and sanctification of souls… I devote and consecrate myself particularly to those who are most despised and neglected…” (N.D. II, 361).
For Fr. Mayama, the texts from the two Spiritan founders are not historical relics. They reveal the spiritual root of missionary availability: “total abandonment into God’s hands.”
Mary at the center of Spiritan spirituality
In his 2025 Christmas Message, the Spiritan Superior General draws the line explicitly to Marian spirituality. He says, “Our founders, as well as our Rule of Life, give Mary a special place in our spirituality.”
Poullart des Places insisted that students “will also have a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, under whose protection they have been offered to the Holy Spirit” (Cahiers Spiritains, no. 16, p. 79), Fr. Mayama recalls.
He further recalls that Venerable Libermann, in turn, proposed “the heart of Mary” as “a perfect model of apostolic zeal” (Provisional Rule, N.D. II, p. 238).
The SRL gathers these insights into a living synthesis, Fr. Mayama says, and explains, “We live out our mission in willing obedience to the Holy Spirit, taking Mary as our model… It is the wellspring of our ‘apostolic zeal’ and leads us to being completely available and making a complete gift of ourselves” (SRL 5).
Further, he tells his confreres, “in every aspect of our lives, but particularly in our prayer, Mary is our model of willing obedience and faithfulness” (SRL 89).
From concern to renewal
The challenge of missionary availability, Fr. Mayama suggests, is ultimately spiritual. It calls for “a return to Spiritan spirituality” and “a return to authenticity in our traditional devotion to the Virgin Mary.”
As members of the Congregation continue to implement resolutions during the 2021 Chapter dubbed Bagamoyo II, Fr. Mayama challenges each Spiritan “to return to prayer with Mary, the abundant source of our apostolic spirit,” so that the Lord may “renew in us the grace of our religious consecration in obedience and openness to the Holy Spirit.”
Formation, too, plays a crucial role, the Spiritan Superior General says. Deepening religious life is “a prerequisite for accepting the vow of obedience as availability, and especially availability for the mission,” he says.
Obedience, Fr. Mayama insists, “is not only availability to the requests of a superior but above all a generous and willing offering of oneself.”
Christmas: The final word is hope
The Spiritan Superior General concludes his 2025 Christmas Message where it began: with Christmas. “The feast of Christmas,” Fr. Mayama writes, “invites us to contemplate the humility of God and that of Mary in order to find new energy and a new joy in evangelical availability.”
In the face of the concerns about missionary availability, Fr. Mayama refuses despair. He invites his confreres and members of the Spiritan family to rediscover their soul, to hear again the Marian “yes,” and to allow that “here I am” to shape Spiritan life today. Concern, in his reflection, is not the final word. The “here I am” renewal is.
ACI Africa’s Editor-in-Chief, Fr. Don Bosco Onyalla, is a member of the Spiritans.
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