(Editor’s Note: Father Bill Hoffman is a priest of the Archdiocese of Atlanta currently working as a Missionary of Saint James in Peru. He writes about a group of Missionary Sisters with whom he has become associated. Next week, Father Hoffman will tell of an unusual journey he made with the sisters to a remote area where people had not seen a priest in two years.)

The Missionaries of Jesus, Word and Victim is the name of a most interesting group of ladies dedicated to the missionary work of the Church. In Spanish the letters M.J.V.V. (Missionaries de Jesus Verbo y Victima) appear after their names.

Their story began when Bishop Frederick Kaiser found himself in the late 1950’s in the small prelature of Caraveli in the Peruvian mountains, with only a handful of aged priests and no seminarians.

Within a short time he had an inspiration: found a community of sisters to staff the parishes without priests - to do everything a priest does except for the Mass and confessions. These sisters would teach the Saving Word to overcome evil and live a life of penance to expiate the sins of mankind.

And so in 1961, Bishop Kaiser started the community with the help of a sister loaned from her order. Now, 18 years later, there are some 40 postulants, 70 novices and some 100 professed sisters. Soon the Sisters M.J.V.V. will open missions in Bolivia and Argentina, and one more mission in Peru. Their most serious problem is the lack of experienced sisters to head up the missions.

The sisters live in groups of about eight in the most abandoned areas of the mountains. They baptize, teach, officiate marriages, distribute Holy Communion, have Sunday services, assist the dying and at least half of the sisters have had training as nurses and so each house has a small clinic. Daily they are expected to study the Bible, follow a strict routine of prayer and household chores.

They want to serve, without complaint, the life of those who live where the life of the Church lacks the priestly ministry. They do all they can to get the people ready for the occasional visit of a priest, so he can devote his full time to that which alone he can do - confessions and Mass. They wear religious habits - in the countryside of the Sierra, all women dress traditionally.

One of the sisters is from the Mid-West of the US - Sister Josefa. In 1961, she was shown by a friend an article that had recently appeared describing the new order. So she wrote and was accepted. She spent a couple of months in Lima studying Spanish with some American sisters, then went to the motherhouse in Caraveli. If anyone would like to contact the group, write Sister Josefa, Covento Cenaculo, Caraveli via Chala, Peru.

God has certainly blessed the sisters M.J.V.V. in many ways, as is evident by their growth rate. Very few orders, in 1979, are blessed with such problems as a lack of experienced personnel slowing down the opening of new mission, and as a novitiate too small to accommodate the women who want to join.