Pope Francis releases Message for
World Mission Day 2019
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| Members of the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta (ANSA) |
The Vatican on Sunday released the message of Pope Francis
for this year’s World Mission Sunday, which falls on the penultimate Sunday of
October every year.
By Linda Bordoni
World Mission Sunday in 2019 falls on 20
October. Instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1926, the annual day encourages
prayers, cooperation and help for missions as well as reminding Christians
about the fundamental missionary character of the Church and of every baptized
person.
The theme of this year’s observance is “Baptized and
Sent: The Church of Christ on Mission in the World.”
Please find below the full text of the Pope’s Message:
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
For the month of October 2019, I have asked that the whole
Church revive her missionary awareness and commitment as we commemorate the
centenary of the Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud of Pope
Benedict XV (30 November 1919). Its farsighted and prophetic vision of
the apostolate has made me realize once again the importance of renewing the
Church’s missionary commitment and giving fresh evangelical impulse to her work
of preaching and bringing to the world the salvation of Jesus Christ, who died
and rose again.
The title
of the present Message is the same as that of October’s Missionary Month: Baptized
and Sent: The Church of Christ on Mission in the World. Celebrating
this month will help us first to rediscover the missionary dimension of our
faith in Jesus Christ, a faith graciously bestowed on us in baptism. Our
filial relationship with God is not something simply private, but always in
relation to the Church. Through our communion with God, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, we, together with so many of our other brothers and sisters, are
born to new life. This divine life is not a product for sale – we do not
practise proselytism – but a treasure to be given, communicated and proclaimed:
that is the meaning of mission. We received this gift freely and we share
it freely (cf. Mt 10:8), without excluding anyone. God
wills that all people be saved by coming to know the truth and experiencing his
mercy through the ministry of the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation
(cf. 1 Tim 2:4; Lumen Gentium, 48).
The Church
is on mission in the world. Faith in Jesus Christ enables us to see all
things in their proper perspective, as we view the world with God’s own eyes
and heart. Hope opens us up to the eternal horizons of the divine life
that we share. Charity, of which we have a foretaste in the sacraments
and in fraternal love, impels us to go forth to the ends of the earth
(cf. Mic5:4; Mt 28:19; Acts 1:8; Rom 10:18).
A Church that presses forward to the farthest frontiers requires a constant and
ongoing missionary conversion. How many saints, how many men and women of
faith, witness to the fact that this unlimited openness, this going forth in
mercy, is indeed possible and realistic, for it is driven by love and its
deepest meaning as gift, sacrifice and gratuitousness (cf. 2 Cor 5:14-21)!
The man who preaches God must be a man of God (cf. Maximum Illud).
This
missionary mandate touches us personally: I am a mission, always; you are a
mission, always; every baptized man and woman is a mission. People in
love never stand still: they are drawn out of themselves; they are attracted
and attract others in turn; they give themselves to others and build
relationships that are life-giving. As far as God’s love is concerned, no
one is useless or insignificant. Each of us is a mission to the world,
for each of us is the fruit of God’s love. Even if parents can betray
their love by lies, hatred and infidelity, God never takes back his gift of life.
From eternity he has destined each of his children to share in his divine and
eternal life (cf. Eph 1:3-6).
This life
is bestowed on us in baptism, which grants us the gift of faith in Jesus
Christ, the conqueror of sin and death. Baptism gives us rebirth in God’s
own image and likeness, and makes us members of the Body of Christ, which is
the Church. In this sense, baptism is truly necessary for salvation for
it ensures that we are always and everywhere sons and daughters in the house of
the Father, and never orphans, strangers or slaves. What in the Christian
is a sacramental reality – whose fulfillment is found in the Eucharist –
remains the vocation and destiny of every man and woman in search of conversion
and salvation. For baptism fulfils the promise of the gift of God that
makes everyone a son or daughter in the Son. We are children of our
natural parents, but in baptism we receive the origin of all fatherhood and
true motherhood: no one can have God for a Father who does not have the Church
for a mother (cf. Saint Cyprian, De Cath. Eccl., 6).
Our
mission, then, is rooted in the fatherhood of God and the motherhood of the
Church. The mandate given by the Risen Jesus at Easter is inherent in
Baptism: as the Father has sent me, so I send you, filled with the Holy Spirit,
for the reconciliation of the world (cf. Jn 20:19-23; Mt 28:16-20).
This mission is part of our identity as Christians; it makes us responsible for
enabling all men and women to realize their vocation to be adoptive children of
the Father, to recognize their personal dignity and to appreciate the intrinsic
worth of every human life, from conception until natural death. Today’s
rampant secularism, when it becomes an aggressive cultural rejection of God’s
active fatherhood in our history, is an obstacle to authentic human fraternity,
which finds expression in reciprocal respect for the life of each person.
Without the God of Jesus Christ, every difference is reduced to a baneful
threat, making impossible any real fraternal acceptance and fruitful unity
within the human race.
The
universality of the salvation offered by God in Jesus Christ led Benedict XV to
call for an end to all forms of nationalism and ethnocentrism, or the merging
of the preaching of the Gospel with the economic and military interests of the
colonial powers. In his Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud, the
Pope noted that the Church’s universal mission requires setting aside
exclusivist ideas of membership in one’s own country and ethnic group.
The opening of the culture and the community to the salvific newness of Jesus
Christ requires leaving behind every kind of undue ethnic and ecclesial
introversion. Today too, the Church needs men and women who, by virtue of
their baptism, respond generously to the call to leave behind home, family,
country, language and local Church, and to be sent forth to the nations, to a
world not yet transformed by the sacraments of Jesus Christ and his holy
Church. By proclaiming God’s word, bearing witness to the Gospel and
celebrating the life of the Spirit, they summon to conversion, baptize and
offer Christian salvation, with respect for the freedom of each person and in
dialogue with the cultures and religions of the peoples to whom they are
sent. The missio ad gentes, which is always necessary for the
Church, thus contributes in a fundamental way to the process of ongoing
conversion in all Christians. Faith in the Easter event of Jesus; the
ecclesial mission received in baptism; the geographic and cultural detachment
from oneself and one’s own home; the need for salvation from sin and liberation
from personal and social evil: all these demand the mission that reaches to the
very ends of the earth.
The
providential coincidence of this centenary year with the celebration of the
Special Synod on the Churches in the Amazon allows me to emphaze how the
mission entrusted to us by Jesus with the gift of his Spirit is also timely and
necessary for those lands and their peoples. A renewed Pentecost opens
wide the doors of the Church, in order that no culture remain closed in on
itself and no people cut off from the universal communion of the faith.
No one ought to remain closed in self-absorption, in the self-referentiality of
his or her own ethnic and religious affiliation. The Easter event of
Jesus breaks through the narrow limits of worlds, religions and cultures,
calling them to grow in respect for the dignity of men and women, and towards a
deeper conversion to the truth of the Risen Lord who gives authentic life to
all.
Here I am
reminded of the words of Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of the meeting of
Latin American Bishops at Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007. I would like to
repeat these words and make them my own: “Yet what did the acceptance of the
Christian faith mean for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean?
For them, it meant knowing and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom
their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious
traditions. Christ is the Saviour for whom they were silently longing.
It also meant that they received, in the waters of Baptism, the divine
life that made them children of God by adoption; moreover, they received the
Holy Spirit who came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them and
developing the numerous seeds that the incarnate Word had planted in them,
thereby guiding them along the paths of the Gospel… The Word of God, in
becoming flesh in Jesus Christ, also became history and culture. The
utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbian religions,
separating them from Christ and from the universal Church, would not be a step
forward: indeed, it would be a step back. In reality, it would be a
retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the past” (Address at the
Inaugural Session, 13 May 2007: InsegnamentiIII, 1 [2007],
855-856).
We entrust
the Church’s mission to Mary our Mother. In union with her Son, from the
moment of the Incarnation the Blessed Virgin set out on her pilgrim way.
She was fully involved in the mission of Jesus, a mission that became her own
at the foot of the Cross: the mission of cooperating, as Mother of the Church,
in bringing new sons and daughters of God to birth in the Spirit and in faith.
I would
like to conclude with a brief word about the Pontifical Mission Societies,
already proposed in Maximum Illud as a missionary resource.
The Pontifical Mission Societies serve the Church’s universality as a global
network of support for the Pope in his missionary commitment by prayer, the
soul of mission, and charitable offerings from Christians throughout the
world. Their donations assist the Pope in the evangelization efforts of
particular Churches (the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith),
in the formation of local clergy (the Pontifical Society of Saint Peter the
Apostle), in raising missionary awareness in children (Pontifical Society of
Missionary Childhood) and in encouraging the missionary dimension of Christian
faith (Pontifical Missionary Union). In renewing my support for these
Societies, I trust that the extraordinary Missionary Month of October 2019 will
contribute to the renewal of their missionary service to my ministry.
To men and
women missionaries, and to all those who, by virtue of their baptism, share in
any way in the mission of the Church, I send my heartfelt blessing.
From the Vatican, 9 June 2019, the Solemnity of Pentecost.
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