The secret of missionary action

Being missionaries means loving God with all one's heart, even to the point, if necessary, of dying for him. How many priests, men and women Religious and lay people, have borne the supreme witness of love with martyrdom even in our times!


Being missionaries means stooping down to the needs of all, like the Good Samaritan, especially to those of the poorest and most destitute people. Those who love with Christ's Heart do not seek their own interests but the glory of the Father and the good of their neighbour alone.


Here lies the secret of the apostolic fruitfulness of missionary action that crosses frontiers and cultures, reaches peoples and spreads to the extreme boundaries of the world.

World Mission Sunday Message 2006

 

Missionary by nature

‘The Church is missionary by her very nature’, John Paul II wrote in his Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, ‘for Christ's mandate is not something contingent or external, but reaches the very heart of the Church. It follows that the universal Church and each individual Church is sent forth to the nations.... It is highly appropriate that young Churches ‘should share as soon as possible in the universal missionary work of the Church. They should themselves send missionaries to proclaim the Gospel all over the world. ‘

World Mission Sunday Message 2007

 

Life-changing hope

Creation is suffering. Creation is suffering and waiting for real freedom; it is waiting for a different, better world; it is waiting for ‘redemption’. And deep down it knows that this new world that is awaited supposes a new man; it supposes ‘children of God’.


... Poverty oppresses millions of inhabitants. Discrimination and sometimes even persecution for racial, cultural and religious reasons drive many people to flee from their own countries in order to seek refuge and protection elsewhere.

 

Technological progress... runs the risk... of increasing already existing imbalances and injustices. There is, moreover, a constant threat regarding the man-environment relation due to the indiscriminate use of resources, with repercussions on the physical and mental health of human beings. Humanity's future is also put at risk by the attempts on his life, which take on various forms and means.


The answer to these questions comes to those of us who believe from the Gospel. Christ is our future, and his Gospel is a ‘life-changing’ communication that gives hope, throws open the dark door of time and illuminates the future of humanity and the university.

World Mission Sunday Message 2008

 

Illumine all peoples

The goal of the Church's mission is to illumine all peoples with the light of the Gospel as they journey through history towards God, so that in Him they may reach their full potential and fulfilment. We should have a longing and a passion to illumine all peoples with the light of Christ that shines on the face of the Church, so that all may be gathered into the one human family, under God's loving fatherhood.

World Mission Sunday Message 2009

 

Make Jesus seen

The people of our time, even perhaps unbeknown to them, ask believers not only to ‘speak’ of Jesus, but to ‘make Jesus seen’, to make the face of the Redeemer shine out in every corner of the earth before the generations of the new millennium and especially before the young people of every continent, the privileged ones to whom the Gospel proclamation is intended. They must perceive that Christians bring Christ's word because he is the truth, because they have found in him the meaning and the truth for their own lives.

World Mission Sunday Message 2010