Julieann Moran tells Rachel Beard about her lifelong enthusiasm for missionary work
Rachel Beard
“I don’t think I’m going to come into this space ever feeling like the day’s hard work because it’s just been an experience after experience so far,” newly appointed National Secretary of Missionary Children Julieann Moran says of her work at World Missions Ireland. Since she started her work at the Society of Missionary Children in mid-June, she’s found it to be very rewarding.
“I was as nourished yesterday as hopefully the children were,” she says. “I just felt that as much as they think that they had received, I felt I received so much more coming away. It’s great to come back and get in your car with a big smile on your face.”
The Society of Missionary Children is a children’s charity and a Pontifical Missions Society that focuses on giving children the opportunity to help other children in need.
Missionary work had always fascinated Julieann, and she was interested in the position as National Secretary as soon as she heard about it. “I was working for the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference since 2010 and then I saw this position advertised actually on Facebook and even the language that was in the advertisement just immediately attracted me to what was going on here in World Missions Ireland,” she says.
Her interest in missionary work was first sparked at a young age by missionaries from the Holy Family Sisters who visited Julieann’s parish and spoke about their work in Israel.
Interesting
“I remember going afterwards and saying I wanted to go help, and it’s funny now because I was really excited about it,” she says. “They were looking for people to join the order and I was like, ‘no, but I want to go help’ because it sounded it so interesting. But I thought ‘I don’t think I want to be a nun’. I suppose it’s always been there in me.”
Although new to the Society of Missionary Children, Julieann had an opportunity to explore her interest in missionary work before she encountered World Missions Ireland.
“I spent some time in The Gambia in West Africa back in 1993-94, and we went to Senegal as well,” she says. “I was very lucky to be with a couple of people who were very generous that were bringing hospital beds and even tables and chairs for classrooms and whatever they could get their hands on, basically, so I’ve had a small experience in that as well as to what it’s like to be out there, to see that.”
Julieann feels working at the Society of Missionary Children is “very different” and more “hands on” compared to her previous work at the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
“It’s a new and fun post that I’ve found myself in, because my previous annual reports have been very much just textual, very formal, and because this is going mostly to children, it’s got to be completely child-friendly,” she says. “It’s allowing me to become a little bit child-like again, definitely more creative because I’m back having to do all this drawing and getting the language back into a space that accessible to all.”
Julieann says she feels “blessed” that she got a job at the Society of Missionary Children.
“Because I can’t think of anything more exciting than encouraging our youngest Catholics to answer that call,” she says.
As National Secretary of Missionary Children, one of Julieann’s goals is to facilitate more participation in the Church in hopes that material donations to The Society of Missionary Children will follow from that participation.
“So I see that as my ongoing job will be to very much a communication role,” she says. “I speak about three words nearly all the time which is communication, reflect, enable, so I think the more that I can stay out in parishes, visiting schools, creating that awareness and communicating that provides an opportunity for children and adults to reflect on what it is that we’re communicating and then enable them to develop their own sense of mission in their missionary hearts to become more animated to pastorally act some of what they believe.”
One of the most “wonderful” aspects of Missionary Children, Julieann says, is that all the money donated by children in Ireland goes directly to helping children in need.
“My salary and other administrative aids are received from other benefactors,” she says. “So if a child in Ireland donates 10c, a child in Africa, Asia, the Americas or Oceania or even in Europe will get that 10c in whatever shape or form a material need is provided.
Working with children in Irish schools as the National Secretary has been “very exciting” for Julieann as she reconnects with her enthusiasm for missionary work. “I had to sing yesterday with the rest of the children and do all the actions, too, and I was just thinking, ‘this is great, this is breathing new life into me and everybody else around me’,” Julieann says. “What you give, you get back ten-fold.”
Julieann has been very moved by the seeing the way children in the Church react to The Society of Missionary Children, not just in Ireland, but in developing countries too.
“But the fascinating part for me with all of that is to see not only how thankful they are for getting something, just how happy they are anyway even before getting anything,” Julieann says. “And I know my predecessor would have said the same thing that to hear children in any other part of the world, they discover that children in Ireland pray for them and to hear them say that they’re also praying for children in Ireland is just amazing.”