Cate Broadbent of Zanesville St. Thomas Aquinas Church said she first heard God’s call to serve as a missionary more than 25 years ago. Her response to that summons has taken her on a path that started in Ohio and has led to Mexico, back to Ohio, to Peru and back again to the United States.
Today she is serving as media and communications manager for the Family Missions Company (FMC), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and is the subject of a story elsewhere in this week’s Catholic Times. FMC is based in Abbeville, Louisiana, and she works for the organization remotely from Fort Collins, Colorado, where she lives with her husband, Mike.
Broadbent grew up in New Concord, graduated from John Glenn High School in that community and attended St. Thomas Aquinas Church because Zanesville was the closest community with a Catholic parish.
“When I was very young, I heard a missionary priest present a Mission Sunday homily at St. Thomas on his experiences in Africa. That stirred something in me that I eventually discerned to be a calling to serve God,” she said.
“I graduated from John Glenn in 2000 and went directly from there to work with the Apostolate for Family Consecration (AFC),” an association founded in 1975 by Servant of God Gwen Coniker and her husband, Jerry, and based at a former seminary in Bloomingdale, near Steubenville.
The AFC supports and challenges Catholic families to grow in holiness and truth together so that they can become fully alive in Christ. It offers Catholic family vacations and retreats at the former seminary, now known as Catholic Familyland. Broadbent was with the organization from 2000 to 2013, including four years in Mexico, where AFC had missionaries for several years but no longer has a presence
“I fell in love with the culture in Mexico and felt I would be doing missionary work again, but decided after 13 years with AFC that it was time to go back home to Zanesville, where I used the talents God gave me as a graphic designer and communicator and served as music minister at St. Thomas,” she said.
She remained in that position from 2014 to 2018. “During much of that time, I felt my work in the mission field was not finished,” she said. “A friend of mine who was with FMC persuaded me to visit an FMC mission in Mexico, where I saw Catholic families performing corporal and spiritual works of mercy, preaching and serving the poor.
“This reawakened my desire to be a missionary. I hated to leave Zanesville, but the call to the missions was that strong, and I knew I had the encouragement of Father Jan Sullivan, the pastor at St. Thomas, and the parishioners there,” Broadbent said.
She was with FMC in Peru from 2018 to 2020. “Missionary work there involved all age groups, everything from youth ministry to working with the elderly,” she said. “One of the most important things we did was serving as catechists in the absence of priests.
“The area I served had two priests covering about 100 miles. They couldn’t stop at every village each Sunday, so we had Scripture services and classes during the weeks they were absent. There’s a lot of poverty there, but family members have a great love for each other and for the Church,” Broadbent said.
“After two years in Peru, I felt God was calling me back to the United States so I could use my graphic communications skills,” so she returned to America in 2020. Soon after her return, she met her husband through a Catholic online dating site. They were married on Oct. 1, 2021.
“I’ve been to quite a few places in the last few years, so it would be nice to settle down for a while, but I’m always open to wherever God may be leading me through my love for mission, for community and now for my husband,” Broadbent said. “God is preparing me for something else, but for what, I do not know.”