On Sunday, October 26, seven girls from St. Francis Girls' Home in Cochabamba received their First Holy Communion.
Praise be to the Sacred Heart of Jesus!
Dear Padrinos!
On Sunday, October 26, in a small Franciscan church located in our neighborhood, seven of our girls received their First Holy Communion.
In Bolivia, children who have reached the age of nine can generally receive their First Holy Communion. In the orphanage, however, this age varies greatly. As a rule, our children receive this sacrament when they are in the sixth grade of elementary school or the first grade of high school, which means that not all of them are the same age on this special day.
Sometimes a girl we welcome into the orphanage has already lost one or two years of schooling, and when she reaches sixth grade, she is much older than the other children. Often, new children do not speak Spanish but Quechua* and need more time to first learn the language and then everything related to the Catholic faith and the sacrament of First Holy Communion.
The children also come to us with a deeply rooted faith in the traditions and customs of their own culture. Here, too, it takes time for a child to understand and grow enough to recognize the differences between the rituals of the Quechua or Aymara cultures and the Holy Mass and the richness of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Everything takes time.
It also often happens that a little girl who comes to us has not even been baptized, and the family tells us - untruthfully - that “the child has been baptized and that they will bring the document later.” Only during the preparation for First Holy Communion, at the last minute, do they tell the truth - that the child was never baptized and they cannot provide any document. That is exactly what happened this year: two of the seven girls in the photo were first baptized, and only afterward, on October 26, did they receive their First Holy Communion.
We wholeheartedly ask for your prayers for our First Communion children, that they may deepen their faith and their love for Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament.
Sister Anna Kurysz SSCJ
director of an orphanage in Cochabamba
*Quechua is the language and name of the indigenous people of South America living in the Andes. Quechua was once the official language of the Inca Empire, and today there are many dialects of the language.
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