Michael Petro ’13 Shares Jesuit Mission and Refugee Work

On Monday, September 22, Michael Petro ’13, a Jesuit in formation and Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Beirut, Lebanon, shared his journey with the St. Sebastian’s community during Corporate Chapel and classroom visits. He spoke about his ministry and mission to accompany, serve, and advocate for displaced people, including those in the shelter he currently oversees. It was truly a blessing to welcome Mike back to campus.

Below are the remarks Michael delivered during Corporate Chapel:

Good morning. First thing I'll say is it's very good to be home. So thanks for inviting me back to the home that we share. A year ago today—this is kind of crazy to me—I was in a community meeting in my Jesuit house in Beirut, and I got a call from someone who usually doesn't call me. She's a member of our parish. And the week prior, the war in southern Lebanon had been really escalating. She called me and said, “Brother, if something bad happens, can we come and stay in the church?” I said yes. I was thinking, sure, you could stay in the church. She was living in a neighborhood that if a war really were to escalate, was going to get pretty hard.

And she said, “Good, we're here.” So I looked out the window and there she was with her five kids and she was getting out of a taxi to come into the church. I thought she'll stay the night and then we'll figure out what to do. Well, the next morning, the place was packed. The social worker called me. I was a little late to work, and she said, “Brother, you got to get down here in the parking lot.” There were 50, 60, 70 refugees who were coming in from southern Lebanon looking for a place to stay. We realized very quickly that they had nowhere to go and that the church became a shelter. By the end of the week, we'd open another shelter, and over the course of four months, we were hosting 250 people, providing thousands of meals, providing folks with shelter from the bombs that were very close.

Our closest airstrikes were about two or three hundred meters from us, drones overhead all the time. It was a very hard experience for me. I was the director of those shelters. I like school. This is a good place for me. I'm a researcher and an administrator. I did not run shelters. And so it was a very, very difficult experience. I remember one day I was doing something that is a very good thing to do and you don't know what to do. And I called my mom just to talk about what was going on. And she told me about when I was a child. I was born very premature, although it doesn't look like it now. She was telling me how during her first few weeks with me, she had a rule. If by the end of the day, baby was clean, fed and still alive, she had completed her mission.

When I heard that this year's theme was mission, I was pretty happy because Jesuits are men who are sent. That is an image that we have of ourselves: men who are sent or men on mission. And during those days in the shelter, it became very clear to me, listening to my mom, what my mission was. It was to get to the end of the day with every person in the shelter, safe, clean, fed in a place that was secure and to get through to the next day. So mission cut through the crap. It helped me know what it was that I needed to do and helped me figure out what I didn't need to do.

But that mission didn't come from nowhere. It came from the relationships that I had with the people in that church. My mother's mission came from the relationship she had with me. And so the question I kept asking myself is, how the heck did I get here? How did I wind up as the guy who is running this shelter in Beirut? And the answer comes from my relationship with God. Something that started for me here at St. Sebastian’s. Fr. Boyle's predecessor, Fr. Arens, showed me what it meant to be a good priest. He showed me that the things I thought were holding me back from God, God did not think was holding me back from him, took me to Brown where the world opened up very much to me. And I got to explore all over the world, learn many languages, and study all sorts of crazy things.

And that propelled me into my discernment with the Jesuits, trying to see what was God asking of me. I spent a year teaching here at St. Sebastian's, coming home really to think in a place that I knew would both take me and let me go when it was time to go. And then I entered the Jesuits in 2018. So it's been seven years now of my training as a priest. And they've been wonderful, wonderful years and taken me all over the world, exposed me to all sorts of difficulties and also blessings. But they've been clarifying my mission for me, which is to grow close to God. Jesuit life is about being close to God and freeing ourselves of everything that prevents us from answering that call. So it's been a growth in knowledge and in freedom, knowledge of what the mission is and the freedom to carry it out.

I'm really glad to be here with you today. I'm home for a wedding of one of my classmates. So, the brotherhood stays together. I'm grateful for your hospitality, so first I would say first, thank you. Second, know your mission. And third, keep going. Gentlemen, it's good to see you. Thank you for having me.