Guatemala Mission & Pilgrimage

Mission

For the past 25+ years, Kansas City Catholics have traveled to San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala to enter into daily life alongside with and in service to the poor. 

Description

Through manual work, missionaries provide homes, wood stoves, animal shelters and more to local families. Missionaries bring supplies to the sick and play with children at a school that serves kids with disabilities. The work itself is secondary to the relationships formed with the families that are served and the spiritual growth that occurs within the missionaries. We pray together, play with children, and become Christ's presence to His children and our "neighbor." As missionaries encounter the material poverty yet spiritual richness of the families served, we reflect on our own poverty and wealth and thus cultivate the soil of our hearts for our call to sainthood. Missionaries are inspired to consider how to incorporate our own encounter with Jesus in the poor back in our lives in Kansas City.

A priest accompanies our trip to offer daily Mass, adoration, and confession to the missionaries, religious sisters, and others at the convent where we stay. We also embark on a pilgrimage to the site where Blessed Stanley Rother, the first American priest to be beatified, was martyred for the faith in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. 

See past trip highlights here and blog posts from an alumna who documented each day of our trip in 2023!

For additional information, see or contact Lindsay Young at [email protected] or 816.453.3450 X 150