‘You don’t wait for people to come to you’

This article was written for Catholic New York when Bishop Dennis Sullivan was named a bishop in 2004.

Then-Father Dennis J. Sullivan was sent to the Dominican Republic shortly after his ordination in 1971 to learn Spanish and to experience the challenges of pastoral work there. He was asked to offer a scheduled Mass the evening he arrived.

‘‘The village church was packed,’’ he said. ‘‘There were no lights. I remember thinking, ‘My God, they don’t have electricity.’’’

The church was wired, but there was a power outage. Parish assistants brought candles and placed them on the altar so that he would be able to read the prayers. As he offered Mass, he had what he called ‘‘a spiritual awakening.’’

‘‘I had one of my first realizations of how the Eucharist unites us with those present and with the whole church,’’ he said. ‘‘Here I was in this very poor mountain town, surrounded by all these people in the dark, with the candles flickering on the altar around this bread and wine that I was consecrating — that was becoming, through my prayers as a priest, the body and blood of Christ. … Here I was, not in the splendor of some basilica but in a rather dilapidated chapel, but that made no difference because Christ was here, feeding his people.’’

The priest of the parish was responsible for 24 chapels, and the bishop-elect remembers visiting them, traveling by jeep and sometimes by mule over mountain streams. There was a system for announcing the arrival of a priest:

A catechist would light Roman candles, and ‘‘the people would come streaming out of their homes,’’ he said, for baptisms and marriages and to arrange for memorial Masses for the dead.

He said he began to understand ‘‘what it means to be a missionary,’’ carrying out the mission of the church.

‘‘That’s something I tried to bring to the parishes that I served in,’’ he said. His message was: ‘‘We might not be in the poverty of the Third World, but … we have a mission.’’

For himself as a priest, he added, that means that ‘‘You go out. You don’t wait for people to come to you. You go out to them and you meet them where they are.’’