Editors’ Note: Pilgrims of Healing and Hope commemorates the centennial of the founding of CNEWA in 1926 as a papal initiative of healing and hope.
This series will profile the men and women whose time, treasure, talent — and faith — have brought to life this unique effort of the Holy See. For generations, their generosity in support of the works of the Eastern churches has empowered each community of faith as they strive to follow the lesson of the Good Samaritan to “go and do likewise,” helping to bind the wounds of a broken world.
Lisa Gilbert is a doctor in Wichita, Kansas, but much of her heart remains in Africa, where she grew up.
Dr. Gilbert’s parents were Pentecostal missionaries, who served in Kenya, Togo and South Africa. She became a Ukrainian Greek Catholic in 2014, after studying at St. Augustine College in Ottawa, Ontario.
She also is a monthly donor to Catholic Near East Welfare Association, which she says fulfills a need to serve “the persecuted church and areas that are suffering.”
“There’s such a need to support those who are in difficult places in the church … the forgotten ones,” she says. “I think that’s something that has always been near and dear to my heart.”
Dr. Gilbert currently serves on the faculty at a family medicine residency at Ascension Via Christi Hospitals in Wichita, but she often returns to Africa.
Last May, she spent a month teaching rural midwives in Uganda. She hopes to continue spending about one month a year volunteering in Africa, working with mothers in a program sponsored by Catholic World Mission.
She has spent nearly eight months in Niger, partly for an International Medicine Family Fellowship. She also has volunteered at a Catholic hospital in Cameroon with Mission Doctors and worked more than two months with Partners in Health in Liberia during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
Wichita does not have many Ukrainian Greek Catholics, although many Eastern Christian Lebanese and Syrians have moved there, and there is a strong Antiochene Orthodox community. Dr. Gilbert often prays with them and helps with the fledgling St. Anna Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Outreach. The Rev. John R.P. Russell, pastor of St. Luke Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church in Sugar Creek, Missouri, travels to St. Anna’s twice a month to celebrate Divine Liturgy. A deacon also visits once a month for a Typika service.
In addition to being a CNEWA donor, Dr. Gilbert prays for Christians in areas CNEWA serves. In the Melkite Greek Catholic prayer book, the morning prayers include those who are persecuted and, when she can, she prays for them by name.
“We are one in Christ, as Pope Leo XIV recently reminded us,” Dr. Gilbert says. “Whether in prayer, in giving or in service, we can all do something to support those persecuted for the sake of Christ.”