The only Catholic priest on Catalina Island, Father Dario Miranda, is used to seeing new faces. His parish, St. Catherine of Alexandria Church in Avalon, is a few blocks away from the harbor that welcomes vacation-goers via ferry from Los Angeles every day.
So when he saw three men in the parish patio one sunny afternoon in early July as he returned from bringing holy Communion to hospital patients, he didn’t think much of it.
“I thought they were tourists, so I just said hi,” said Miranda.
But as they began to talk, Miranda learned that the three men had actually come to Catalina to deliver him some news.
“They started telling me their life stories, their testimony about what Jesus Christ had done in their lives,” recalled Miranda, the pastor of St. Catherine since 2023. “It was super refreshing, it was inspiring, it was just what I needed to hear that day.”
Miranda wasn’t the only priest to get a surprise visit that week. From July 5-12, some 3,000 young Catholics fanned out across the United States in groups of two or three to visit every Catholic parish in the country, following the “two-by-two” apostolic mission described by Jesus in the Gospel: taking “nothing for the journey” — no food, money, clothes, or even a cellphone.
The youth are from parishes where through the Neocatechumenal Way, an itinerary of Christian initiation, they are beginning to rediscover their baptism.
“Our baptism sends us,” said Mary McCarthy, a laywoman on the team responsible for the Way in Northern California. “Our baptism sends us because we are learning that every faithful has the right and the duty to announce Jesus Christ. We are not doing any ministry. We are just sharing what Jesus Christ did in our lives.”
McCarthy, originally from New Jersey, said the mission shows that the world and the Church need the “radicality of the Gospel.”
“It doesn’t matter who you are. We all need a messenger, a witness, to announce that God created us to be happy and loves us just the way we are. And that love is not a theory or an idea, it is experienced in the lives of real people.”
Of the hundreds of teams that went out, many slept on sidewalks, in parks and in homeless shelters. Others were welcomed into the homes of laypeople. McCarthy explained that the mission was inspired by the Jubilee Year of St. Francis of Assisi, proclaimed earlier this year by Pope Leo XIV to mark the 800th anniversary of the Italian saint’s death.
“St. Francis discovered that poverty was his biggest asset,” said McCarthy. “It helped him love Christ more, and made him a more credible witness of the Gospel to people who really needed to hear it.”
One of Miranda’s visitors that day was Rafael Zaragoza, 36, of St. John the Baptist in Baldwin Park. During a retreat in the Diocese of Stockton the week before, his name was put in a basket along with more than 500 others to be sent anywhere in the Western U.S., including Alaska, Arizona, or even Hawaii. Instead, the lottery destined him closer to home: the San Pedro Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“Spending a week abandoned to Divine Providence, it was life-changing. God was with us at every moment, even if we didn’t realize until later,” said Zaragoza, whose team took a ferry to Catalina Island thanks to the generosity of parishioners they’d met at Holy Trinity Church in San Pedro.
“It was as much for me as it was for the priests and people we met.”
Zaragoza’s team was one of 25 that visited the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The team assigned to its northernmost deanery in the Santa Maria area visited Father John Mayhew, CJ, a Josephite Father born in England who has spent most of his 61 years as a priest in the U.S. When Mayhew realized what their mission was about, he arranged hospitality and offered to drive them to the other parishes in the deanery.
“I began to see that the brief story of each of these fellows had sort of congealed into a very simple message that would encourage people who might be adrift to get back into following the Gospel,” said Mayhew, who at 88 serves as associate pastor at St. Louis de Montfort Church in Santa Maria. “Each of them had a story which they were grateful for, and they just told it.”
After the week on the streets, the missionary teams met together by region — eight in total around the U.S. — for two days to share their experiences.
In Baker, Oregon, a team encountered a young man on the street who’d just lost his wife and unborn child to a drug overdose. After hearing them, he thanked the missionaries and confessed that hours earlier he’d made up his mind to commit suicide — until he heard their message of hope.
In the Diocese of Lincoln in Nebraska, a trio of police officers offered the missionaries transportation in their squad cars to cover the vast distances between rural parishes on their list to visit.
In Tucson, Arizona, one team had little luck contacting parish priests, but were given a warm welcome from some 30 homeless people in a park, where they slept peacefully each night.
In LA’s Skid Row, a pair of missionaries were assigned to evangelize among the homeless rather than visit parishes. Each day, they would attend 7 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, pray morning prayer at the tomb of St. Vibiana, and spend the rest of the day with the homeless.
“Those people were way more sincere than I am,” said Jose Alfredo Lupercio, a father of three from Modesto on the Skid Row team. “They opened up to us about what they’ve suffered in life. Some told us they did drugs in order not to think about their past.”
On the other side of the country, teams in the mid-Atlantic region were welcomed back to their post-mission gathering in Washington, D.C,. by Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, who assured them of the “support and blessing” of Pope Leo XIV.
“We are following Jesus in doing what you are doing … and this experience is a way in which the Lord gives us proof and assurance of his presence,” Caccia told the missionaries. “You are not alone in this mission. All the baptized, all the Church, are in a mission because we cannot keep for ourselves what we have received.”
Across the country, some teams had success getting unscheduled face time not only with priests, but with bishops, including in dioceses in Iowa, Massachusetts, and West Virginia.
In Camden, New Jersey, a group of three men knocked at the door of the residence of Bishop Joseph Williams. They were surprised when the bishop not only welcomed them inside but grilled them burgers. Later, he asked them to pray for him as they prayed together in his chapel. Williams told Angelus that he gave them his blessing — and a swag bag of Seton Hall University gear.
Back in Catalina Island, Miranda got an idea as he listened to the young men share their life stories. Could they spend a couple of hours knocking on doors in the area and share the Good News with random strangers?
“I told them that I would feed them and host them, but they were going to have to work for it,” laughed Miranda.
The Mexican-born priest said he still gets emotional remembering the visit, which reminded him of the episode in Genesis when three mysterious men visit Abraham to tell him that his elderly wife would have a child the following year. He called the mission a “battery recharge” for his ministry.
“I told them, you don’t know what your visit did to me,” Miranda told Angelus. “I’m on an island, and it’s lonely here. But I saw the Trinity in them, the Providence of God, telling me ‘courage,’ don’t give up.”
