Mr. John Maddex: All right, this is John Maddex, and today we have a special treat. It’s not often that we get to talk to someone from New Zealand, but today we’re going to learn about a mission in New Zealand for the Orthodox Church that is part of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center, because we’re talking today with Fr. Paul Patitsas. We met you first, Fr. Paul, in northern Ohio, right?

Fr. Paul Patitsas: Yes, that’s right. You came into our parish at St. Demetrios in Rocky River.

Mr. Maddex: That was really fun, and I can remember meeting your family at that time, but never guessing that you would end up in New Zealand! You probably didn’t either.

Fr. Paul: [Laughter] We didn’t either.

Mr. Maddex: Yes, so we want to hear that story, but tell us a little bit about yourself and your family first.

Fr. Paul: Well, I’m blessed. I have a beautiful presvytera who loves the Lord deeply, and she’s been a big help to me in my ministry over the years, but now especially as we’re serving in New Zealand, we don’t have the same infrastructure that you might have in a parish in the United States. So she’s often my chanter, baking the holy breads; she’s helping me in other ways, too, with Bible studies and talking with parishioners, comforting them. So we have my presvytera.

We have my two daughters. One has gone on to be a nun since we started our work here, so she’s helping us. She’s not formally a missionary, but she’s part of the team because she prays for us deeply, and her name is Sister Philothei. And then we have our oldest daughter, Nicholia, who just got married with her husband Gregory, and they’re going to be coming hopefully soon back to New Zealand and living in Auckland with us and starting their new life as newlyweds. And then we have our son, Georgios. He’s just 16 years old, and he’s a beautiful young man and very devout himself. All of the children, thank God, love the Lord, and we’re hoping to see their lives, in some ways, to benefit the Church, whatever they decide to do. I’m sure can all be good, but as their daddy, I want to make sure they serve the Church! [Laughter]

Mr. Maddex: The last time we saw your family was in the Chicago area when you and your family visited us, and we went downtown, and I think we enjoyed a stuffed Chicago pizza together.

Fr. Paul: Absolutely! I can’t believe we haven’t had one yet, but I’m looking forward to that. That was lovely. Who knows?

Mr. Maddex: Who knows? There’s time, yes. Well, so let’s get to the story of how you ended up in New Zealand. I’m not surprised, first of all, that you—because I knew early on of your evangelistic zeal and your mind for reaching out to people, so it doesn’t surprise me that you’re a missionary now, but how did that come about?

Fr. Paul: Very kind of you to say. Well, I think my presvytera had a big part in it. We knew a very holy man by the name of Amphilochios Tsoukos. He was an archimandrite when we met him; in other words, he was called Fr. Amphilochios. And he was known as a geronta, which is a rare title that’s given to people who have certain spiritual gifts. It’s not a title that is acquired easily, but anyway he had that title. And he had started two monasteries in Rhodes, in the island of Rhodes: a men’s monastery called Tharri, dedicated to the Archangel Michael, and another, women’s monastery called Ypsani, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos. So this beautiful man had a wonderful outreach—he is an evangelist, really. When the war was going on in Bosnia, he was bringing Serbian young boys to come and have a summer camp experience at his monastery. So they built a whole wing just so the boys could have a place to stay, and they brought in staff from Serbia.

Anyway, my daughters and my wife stayed with him for one week one summer, and now the one daughter is still living in that same area; she became a nun there, at the women’s monastery. And my wife had a sense of his spiritual blessings, his spiritual charismata, as we say in Greek, his graces that come to him. So when she had a chance to visit the Australian, New Zealand area back in 2008 or 2009, she said, “I’d like to stop on my way to visit this archbishop. Do I have time to make it work?” So I said, “Of course!” So she went and she saw what he was doing. Now he had been made Metropolitan of New Zealand; in 2005 he became the Metropolitan of New Zealand. So he left behind the monasteries he started in Rhodes and he left them for other people to care for, and he came to New Zealand to start his ministry.

When she got there, they had just bought land for a monastery in Levin, New Zealand. So she was there just at the beginning. They had just bought the property; it had just come into their hands. So they were clearing weeds, and my wife got bitten by so many sandflies—she scratched for weeks! But after that she said, “We have to go and help him once a year for at least a month.” And she knew that I had a love for missions, and so it was sort of like she gave me an anniversary gift. She said, “We’re going to go do missions,” and I was like: “Wow! That’s great! My wife wants to do missions!” So I was excited by the opportunity, because to get my wife and my children to go to Africa or to go to some other place that maybe the conditions of life are a little harder wasn’t going to be a very easy sell, but New Zealand is a very modern country; it’s a first-world country, I guess you’d say. But nonetheless, there’s plenty of work to do there, so I jumped at the opportunity.

We went for one month. Two weeks we were in Auckland and Wellington, two weeks we were in Fiji with the archbishop. The first two weeks were the weeks in Fiji, and when I saw the archbishop after these many years—I hadn’t seen him in years—he was wearing a straw hat, and his collar was open, and he looked like he was being beaten up by the weather there, but he greeted me with a beautiful Fijian expression: “Boula!” And I greeted him back, “Boula!” which just means “hello,” but it’s a very happy greeting of hello. And I thought, “Who is this man who has so much love in him it just beams out of him?”

So that experience, that same time we were there, many different things happened, but I can’t tell all of them. But what happened at one point is he said to me, “I’ve got it. You’re going to come here and serve the parish in Auckland and be my priest there,” because the priest who was there in Auckland at the time was leaving to go back to the United States.

Mr. Maddex: What was your first reaction when he told you that? I mean, deep inside, what were you thinking?

Fr. Paul: Well, he had somehow prepped me. That’s the part I haven’t told you. So when I first saw him in Fiji, he was planting little seeds, I guess spiritual seeds. So when he got to the point of saying that to me, I was like: “Yes, I’ve got to do this.” And I did really feel, from the time I saw him in Fiji, that God was calling me. It was hard for my parish back— We were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the time, and they weren’t very happy with me that I left, and I can only apologize to them, because they offered me every good thing. I had no reason to leave them; they were excellent, and they are an excellent parish. But you don’t go to do missionary work because you’re going to go to a better situation! [Laughter]

So I accepted to go, and I haven’t regretted it. There have been some difficult challenges, but really it was seeing the charismatic presence of the archbishop, I think, that was the biggest drive.

Mr. Maddex: What year was this that you went?

Fr. Paul: We went for our first visit in 2009, and then we went to stay in 2010. We arrived November 30, St. Andrew Day, the feast of the holy Apostle Andrew, who is the patron saint of our metropolis in New Zealand, so it was kind of a nice gift from God that we could arrive on that day in New Zealand.

Mr. Maddex: And how did you hook up with OCMC in order to make this one of their missions?

Fr. Paul: Well, you have to imagine, it was a growing edge for them as it was for us. They didn’t originally think of New Zealand as a mission field, because it is a first-world country, and their pattern up to that time had been serving places that are more remote. I don’t know if the right word is “exotic,” but anyway, not first-world countries generally.

So the thought was, well, are you really doing a mission there, or are you a parish priest for a little church that couldn’t afford a church? But I think over time they started to see that something real was happening there. And then the clincher was when Fr. Martin himself came out, and he saw—Fr. Martin Ritsi, God bless him and grant him many years—he came out to meet our archbishop, to see our work in New Zealand, and then he was able to take that message back to the people of OCMC and say, “Yes, indeed, it is a mission.” And I think really it was a little bit of them courting us and us courting them, and finally there was a common mind, and we said, “We can do this. We’ll be a missionary supported by OCMC.” Because up until that time, we had been supported by— Anyway, we’re always supported by God’s grace, certainly, but not by any organization, but just by individuals who cared enough to help.

Mr. Maddex: So the region of the world we’re talking about is referred to as Oceania. I’m just learning this today, so help our listeners understand the geography there a little bit.

Fr. Paul: You said that very well: Oceania. You have to imagine that the Pacific Ocean is huge, of course, but Oceania refers to that area. Some people call it the Pacific Nations, but we don’t generally include Australia in that, but that’s because Australia is so large it doesn’t need a special name. [Laughter] But New Zealand is kind of small in comparison to Australia, and there are other islands that are much, much smaller still.

One of the reasons—the other reason they had linked them is because they share a common Pacific culture. The Maori of New Zealand and the Fijians, as well as the Tongans and the Samoans, have similar cultures—not similar languages; they have different languages. And they have different cultural practices as well, but they have many things that they share in common. Some of them are linked just by food, for instance. They have similar… They all eat the taro plant, as an example, which is, when it’s prepared well, a very tasty starch, dissimilar from a potato, but like a potato in terms of being starchy. And they have a similar dress that they’ll wear and similar dances, so there are a lot of commonalities among them, and they call that area Oceania, of those Pacific Islanders, and they include in that New Zealand.

There were some Maori that lived in Australia, but I think the predominant culture there is the Aboriginal, which is not a Pacific Island culture. So, again, Oceania generally refers to New Zealand and Vanuatu and New Caledonia, of course, but we don’t have parishes in those places, but Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, those are where our archbishop has planted churches.

Mr. Maddex: So when you went down there—this was 2009—how many Orthodox missions or parishes were going?

Fr. Paul: Oh, well, when we arrived in 2009 it was the summer of 2009, July. The archbishop had— When we got there, we were two days late. He had already served the first two liturgies ever, in Fiji, Greek Orthodox liturgies. You know what I’m talking about. There was no Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox; there was no other Orthodox presence whatsoever. So he did the first liturgies of St. John Chrysostom two days before we got there: the first, the second, and then he asked me to do the third. And we didn’t have a church then; we just had a mission building, so we did the Liturgy on a dining room table. Of course, you have to be even more careful when you’re not serving on an actual altar table, but it all went well, and I gave Communion to a man by the name of Bartholomew, who is now Fr. Bartholomew, and to his wife Lythia, or Lydia, and she’s now Presvytera Lydia. So that’s how basic things were in 2009.

So in 2010, he had built a little chapel to St. Paraskevi, and then he kept stretching out. That was in a place called Sabeto, and then he moved on to Saweni, and he established New Ypsani, a monastery reminiscent of his monastery in Greece, of Rhodes, dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, of course, where my daughter is staying now. So he established a little convent there. So he built a parish—like a parish—of the Dormition of the Theotokos. And then later he built grounds for the nuns to stay, and then later a whole new church of Holy Trinity, a very large—I guess you could say a cathedral, but it hasn’t been formally declared a cathedral yet, but a very large church for the local Fijian people, whoever would be becoming Orthodox.

By that time, in just a few short years, they had several hundred Orthodox in Fiji, but we hadn’t yet gotten to Tonga, and we hadn’t yet gotten to Samoa. And His Eminence, when he first came to New Zealand, he traveled to all those islands, and he just looked to see: Where would God open a door? And the first door was opened to him in Fiji.

And then some of the first people he met—I mean, there are so many stories to tell. I don’t know how much time we have on the radio. But some of the first people he met, one of the first people he met was a woman by the name of Regina. And she was [of] Indian background, Hindu background. There are the Indo-Fijians in Fiji and also the native Fijians. So this woman was working just at a tourist shop, and she saw the archbishop, and she had the compulsion: she wanted to offer him a glass of water. She just felt a need to care for him, as she tells it. So she somehow left her workstation, and she brought him a glass of water, which in Fiji is very dangerous. The jobs market is very competitive, and if you leave your post for any reason, they can easily fire you and put somebody else in that. It’s very easy to find someone else to take that job. So she did that knowing that she was putting her job at risk, but she just felt this compulsion to help him.

She became one of our first catechumens. She’s now the nun Melani.

Mr. Maddex: Wow.

Fr. Paul: And one of her dear friends also became a nun, Anissa. So the two are indigenous nuns. So we have all indigenous clergy, two indigenous nuns in Fiji. In Tonga we don’t get have an indigenous Tongan priest, but we have an Indo-Fijian priest; Fr. George is doing a fine job in Tonga, but we are looking for a Tongan to be a first priest for us there. And then in Samoa we have been blessed to ordain a man who lives some of the year in Auckland, which is how I met him, in Auckland, and some of the year in Samoa, and he is our first Samoan Orthodox priest, and his name is Fr. Ioane. That means John, of course, but they pronounce it their language, in Samoan language, ee-oh-AH-ne.

Mr. Maddex: Okay. So you’ve talked about missions and parishes and monasteries, but I understand there’s also an orphanage?

Fr. Paul: Yes! One of the first things the archbishop wanted to do in Fiji was to build an orphanage there, because he saw that there are many, many poor children. These are issues that people can debate and argue. There are very few abortions that happen in Fiji, and someone might say, “Well, that’s why you have so many orphans.” I’m not going to tell you that’s right or wrong, but I think of course our Church is against abortion, so we’re not unhappy that they don’t have abortions; we’re happy about that. But nonetheless, there are many orphans, and they need a place to be cared for. So the archbishop felt heart for them. He built a lot of things there, but he built the orphanage with the most excellent materials. He put more money into the orphanage… He wanted to make sure that they had marble floor! And there’s no building, except for the hotels, that have marble floors in Fiji, but he wanted the kids to have the best, and that’s just his nature. He didn’t want them to be treated like second-rate in any way; he wanted to give them the very best he could give them.

I’ll tell you a little story. One of the boys—he’s not an orphan by any means, but one of the boys who was helped, his family was helped by our archbishop, he’s from a family of ten children, a beautiful young man. I don’t want to say his name, because he’s still a minor. But he said—he wrote a letter to the archbishop… I don’t think he told the archbishop through a letter, but somehow it came to the archbishop in a letter, and he said, “I want to be a bishop when I grow up,” and they asked him, “Well, why do you want to be a bishop?” He says, “Because I want to build homes for the poor like our bishop does.”

Mr. Maddex: He’s seen that model, hasn’t he?

Fr. Paul: Yeah. So he didn’t care about the hat and the vestments and whatever, the beard—which are all beautiful things; I love them and I don’t want him to give them up—but he saw something more. And he may be! He’s a very good young man, and he’s continuing his studies. Actually, two young men are going to go to Greece now, to a religious school in Greece, and to start to prepare themselves to serve the Church. He’s old enough now that he can do that. And we’re excited.

There are some really wonderful things happening there, and many people have helped over the years. One is now—he started out as a layman, and now he’s a monk, Fr. Petros. He’s done excellent work. And Fr. Petros is a married man, so his wife also hopes to become a nun; her name is Andriana. And they have a daughter who’s a nun at the same monastery where my daughter is a nun, whose name is Theoctiste. So it’s a very devoted to the Church family. They have served the archbishop for many, many years, not just in New Zealand but also in Greece. But they are kind of paradigmatic of many of the families who serve our archdiocese. People are very selfless. We don’t have a lot of support. It’s a very secular country that we live in, so not a lot of people make a priority of the Church, but those who have come to our aid are so sweet and kind and helpful. I just think they’re just wonderful people, and they should all hopefully get crowns in heaven for all that they’ve done for the Church.

Mr. Maddex: We’re talking with Fr. Paul Patitsas. Fr. Paul is an OCMC missionary in the regions or the islands of Oceania. We don’t often hear about mission work in that part of the world, but that’s just as much needed as anyplace else. It’s been very exciting to hear about the work that you’re doing, but I’d like to hear more about your specific work that you are doing there. Is it primarily as a parish priest or are you traveling or…?

Fr. Paul: Yes, well, I guess I do a little bit of everything, but my primary role is as a parish priest. But the archbishop, of course, he doesn’t speak English, although he does speak some words of English, and I think he understands more than he always lets on. But he needs people to be able to translate for him, and he needs people to not only translate the spoken word but to translate the written word. I do a part of that role, and then also another priest-monk, who’s a Serbian—when the bishop was bringing over those boys from Serbia, he came over as an unbaptized person, and now he’s a monk of our Church, and his name is Fr. Meletios. He came over to be a camp counselor, and now he’s a monk, and he’s an archimandrite. He’s a very talented man, and he speaks English fluently, too.

So together we assist him in those kinds of ways, and also in interacting with the governmental agencies. I have even had to author legal documents, which is not exactly my forte, but when needed, God sends help, and I’ve had help even from people in Denver, Colorado; I have a dear koumbaro who has helped us with some of those legal things. And then I had to play lawyer and make a fit for Samoa when I was writing their documents. So it’s one of those things that you do things because you have to, not necessarily because you’re so good at it, but because there’s nobody else to do it. So I’ve done that kind of work, and visiting with the archbishop these islands as they are just starting out, to be the translator, to help keep an eye on the funds or to help establish bank accounts or help to register our church with the government, to meet the governmental authorities.

Like when we had to meet to establish the orphanage, we had to have a sit-down with the very high authorities of the government in Fiji. I think one of them was a cabinet-level authority, and to meet with them, and somehow, hopefully, to make a positive impression on them, that we have good intentions and we will follow good practices when it comes to their children, that the children will be safe and well cared for and that we’re not going to use our time with them as a proselytism per se; we’re not going to force them to become Orthodox Christians.

So that’s part of my work, and then we also have a radio program. It’s not a very big one, but it’s a little program on a public radio station called Planet Audio, planetaudio.org.n-zed, as they say over there, which is n-z in American English. And then the program is called “In the Narthex,” and we’re on Fridays there in Auckland, which is Thursday for you here in the States, at 3:15 p.m. for half an hour each week. Presvytera’s been helping me with that. So that’s a fun aspect of what we do. Just by being a parish priest, you’re always interacting with your flock and trying to encourage them in any way you can to help build up their spiritual life.

How successful we are, I guess the Lord will tell us at the Judgment Day, but we do our best, and we hope that God does the rest. Forgive me if it sounds like a slogan!

Mr. Maddex: [Laughter] Well, anyone listening to AFR knows that we are often encouraging our listeners to support missionary work, to support outreach, evangelism, to support the work of FOCUS North America or IOCC, the work of OCMC. There are so many worthy ministries, and we need to be aware. We need to know what’s being done; we need to know what the need is. And then we need to act; we need to do something. So I’d like for you to hone in on the need in terms of: What kind of support do you need? How do people find out more information about what you are doing? And then if they wanted to participate, how would they go about doing that?

Fr. Paul: Because we have now an orphanage and we have also a battered women’s shelter in Fiji, and we’re also building churches in Tonga and Samoa—in Tonga to St. George, in Samoa to St. John the Theologian—and of course, even in Fiji we’re hoping to build a church to St. Barnabas, so we need financial support, but we’re talking about a lot of money. I mean, to build a church in Tonga is going to cost us about $250,000, of which I think about $150,000 has already been raised. But if you look to see what we’ve done so far, we’re not finished; the building is undone.

So I guess if someone wants to help, through OCMC is the best and easiest way in the United States to help. Monies can be sent directly to our archdiocese in New Zealand, but I wouldn’t recommend that. Much easier just to write to OCMC or contact them by phone or by email, and say, “I want to support the work in Oceania. I want to help that work, and here’s how I want to help. I want this to go to the orphanage, I want this to go to the battered women’s shelter, I want this to go to build the church of St. George, this to build the church of St. John the Theologian. Or I just want this to help generally the missionaries who are serving there.” And anything you give is going to be a help to us.

We do believe that God is going to bless the work. The archbishop has always stepped out in faith. He didn’t ever know where the money was going to come from. Even when he was laying the foundation of a building, he doesn’t know where the money is going to come from to build it. But he steps out in faith and trusts the Lord, and the Lord hasn’t let him down. Sometimes we, his helpers, let him down, and I apologize to him for that, but he hasn’t let us down and the Lord has not let us down. So that’s the kind of thing. If you feel called in your heart to really help the planting of a church in a place that hasn’t received the full Gospel of Christ before, we need your help.

And if you don’t want to help financially or you can’t help financially, certainly, prayerfully, address the Lord and pray for us. It doesn’t have to be a complicated prayer, but just: “Lord, please bless those people who are serving Oceania, and give them your strength and your courage and your assistance in every way. Send angels to watch over them,” or whatever other words the Lord gives you.

And then, some of you out there listening, I’m hoping, are hearing my words today, and you know that I’m speaking to you, and you’re saying, “Does he really want me to come and help?” Yes. Yes, we do. If you feel the call, this little ministry of speech we’re giving here, through Ancient Faith Radio, we would be happy to have you help. You need to be a person of maturity, and you need to be a person of sobriety—and I don’t just mean in the terms of not-drinking; the deepest meaning of the word “sobriety,” of self-control, not only of your body but even of your mind—those kinds of people are needed, because it’s a tough work. Any time you go to do the mission of the Lord, you have to know that the evil one is also going to fight against you. But we don’t have to acknowledge that or we don’t have to meditate on it; we just need to move forward in faith and know that God will help.

Mr. Maddex: What kinds of skills are needed? If someone’s listening and might say, “Well, maybe that is me?”

Fr. Paul: Certainly we need help with the orphanage, so if you’re good with kids, we’d love to have you. If you’re a good administrator, you know how to handle a budget very well, we need you. Again, you have to like people. If you’re good with books and you don’t know how to like people, then don’t come. [Laughter] But if you have a skill that you want to teach the children who are at the orphanage, and you think, “I could teach them to do some handcraft or woodworking, or even wood carving,” or something, but you’d probably have to help even to provide some of the tools that would be needed in order for that class to take place. Or you’d want to teach the young ladies to make things with cloth, to be seamstresses or some other… Again, this is a very primitive culture there, so the skill level isn’t going to be teaching them to build a webpage necessarily, but anything you can teach them. And there are kids who are bright, so I suppose if you are good at webpages and you want to teach that, there’ll be somebody there who can receive that—but they would never have put their hand to a computer, so you’d have to start at the very basic level.

And then, of course, in New Zealand we have our monastery there. So we need people who have the skillset of being a monk! and who really want to serve Christ in a life of prayer. We need that. But we also need people who maybe don’t want to be a monk, but they’re good at taking care of the chickens or they’re good at taking care of the sheep, or they’re good at farming or they know how to build a good garden or a good orchard, or even somebody who might have the gift of beekeeping; we have a need for that. And a little bit of construction right now at our monastery, so we need people who can do finishing work, putting up plaster board or GIB board they call it over there, and finishing off the interior of the building that we’ve constructed, as an archontariki or a reception building for guests.

And then, in the parishes— Again, if somebody said, “Look, I can’t come for very long, but I can…” And you have to be financed. Again, we don’t have any money to pay you anything, but, “I want to come and chant for a year at the parish,” or “I want to come and chant for Holy Week,” we need you. We have some wonderful chanters who have come through Wellington, but they’re all in their 90s now, and they’ve done a beautiful job, and they’re schooled in the Byzantine music and they know what they’re doing, but their strength is ebbing, and we need someone to come and even to teach other children how to sing; how do you chant the beautiful Byzantine music for our Church tradition, whether in Greek or English, we’re not particular. We want people, though, to know how to chant. And even to learn iconography or to teach iconography.

So anything that a church needs to do, we need you. We’re at that basic level. We don’t have any of that. We’re just now, by God’s grace, developing our very first Orthodox New Zealand iconographer, just now, and he happens to be in my parish, and I’m very thankful for him. Anton, if you’re listening, thank you for all you’re doing. And there’s no one to even teach you how to make a prayer rope. I mean, we’re just—everything, very, very basic. We don’t have much to offer, but we do have plenty of need. So if you have a sense of calling and you want to come, we’ll try to find a place to put you.

Mr. Maddex: Maybe there are some young people listening who—this would be an ideal vocation to consider, just starting off. The Mormons, they send people out right after they’re of age, and they have to do missionary work. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had that same kind of mentality that, you know what? we need our young people to do a term, go out and serve!

Fr. Paul: You know, we have had some young people come, and, again because the conditions are a little difficult, so I’ve said, we can’t do this, but if you know up front that the conditions are difficult and you’re not expecting to find America when you go there, I think you can be helpful. But we have to, of course—those kind of things, if someone’s going to come who’s young, we really need to be careful that we have the people to support them when they come so that they’re not on their own and wondering what to do. But we have some room there in our convent in Fiji for the young ladies, and some room in our monastery in Levin for young men. And if someone has a desire to learn or has already learned to be a chanter and is a young person, we have some room in our parishes to have a young person come and stay for a while and offer their service. And there’s plenty of nice things to see. If you ever saw Lord of the Rings, everybody knows about New Zealand. It’s a lovely, lovely country.

Mr. Maddex: Oh, yes! Well, you’ve given us a lot to think about, and I hope our listeners as well. I’m sure they would like to know where they could find more information on the web.

Fr. Paul: Well, OCMC has a very large presence on the internet, so if you just type in OCMC and do an internet search, you’ll find them.

Mr. Maddex: I believe that’s ocmc.org.

Fr. Paul: Is it? Okay, ocmc.org, and it’s at St. Augustine, Florida, something Manatee Road. I’m not sure of the full address, but you will find them, and they have a very good website, so they will give you a place to click if you want to donate online. If you want to donate specifically to our family, then you have to pick the “Support a Missionary” page and scroll down to find the name “Patitsas,” and of course if you don’t want to support our family, any family you support will be very thankful to have that help.

And then if you want to help the mission, again there’s a way to designate there specific, a specific work, and you can ask: I want this to go to Oceania. And we will certainly appreciate it.

Mr. Maddex: Great. So that’s ocmc.org, and you can scroll down to see “Support a Missionary.” You can see the list of missionaries, and you’ll see the Patitsas family and find out more about their work there in Oceania, and you can designate your gift, either a one-time gift or a monthly gift, to their important work in that region of the world.

Fr. Paul, it’s a delight to catch up with you again.

Fr. Paul: Thank you so much.

Mr. Maddex: I wish it wasn’t so long in between, but we’re so glad that you stopped by, right here in our new studios.

Fr. Paul: I can’t believe it!

Mr. Maddex: You’re one of our first visitors here to our new studios, so it’s so fun.

Fr. Paul: Well, you haven’t aged at all, John.

Mr. Maddex: Good, good. Well, neither have you. But then we know we’re both lying. [Laughter] Fr. Paul Patitsas, thank you, and blessings on your important work, and we’ll look forward to getting updates from time to time.

Fr. Paul: Thank you. Thank you for having me, John.