This weekend, we join with the Church Universal in celebrating World Mission Sunday with its theme: “Missionaries of Hope Among All Peoples”. As we continue to celebrate this Jubilee Year, the late Pope Francis called everyone in his 2025 World Mission Day Message to prayer, reminding us that prayer is not only the “primary missionary activity,” but also the key to “keeping alive the spark of hope lit by God within us.”
Our Holy Father delivers his Mission Day Message in February in preparation for World Mission Sunday which is observed worldwide the following October. In his last Mission Day Message, Pope Francis began his message by recalling that this year’s World Mission Day has at its core “hope,” and reminding individual Christians and the entire Church “of our fundamental vocation to be, in the footsteps of Christ, messengers and builders of hope.” The late Holy Father next expressed his wish that World Mission Sunday be a time of special grace and then went on to reflect on three aspects of our Christian missionary identity.
Reflecting first on following the Lord’s footsteps, Pope Francis encouraged everyone with these words: “May we too feel inspired to set out in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus to become, with Him and in Him, signs and messengers of hope for all, in every place and circumstance that God has granted us to live.”
Next, the Pope spoke of “Christians, bearers and builders of hope among all peoples. In following Christ the Lord,” he urged, “Christians are called to hand on the Good News by sharing the concrete life situations of those whom they meet, and thus to be bearers and builders of hope.” Turning his attention specifically to missionary priests and religious sisters and brothers as well as lay missionaries, he went to say: “Following the Lord’s call, you have gone forth to other nations to make known the love of God in Christ. For this, I thank you most heartily! Your lives are a clear response to the command of the risen Christ, who sent His disciples to evangelize all peoples.” In this way, the Pope told them, they are signs of the “universal vocation” of all the baptized to become, by the power of the Spirit and daily effort, “missionaries among all peoples and witnesses to the great hope given us by the Lord Jesus.”
Compelled by this great hope, our late Holy Father said, Christian communities can be “harbingers of a new humanity in a world that, in the most ‘developed’ areas, shows serious symptoms of human crisis,” witnessed through “a widespread sense of bewilderment, loneliness and indifference to the needs of the elderly, and a reluctance to make an effort to assist our neighbors in need.” In the most technologically advanced nations, the Holy Father went on to observe, that “proximity” is disappearing. “We are all interconnected, but not related. Obsession with efficiency and an attachment to material things and ambitions are making us self-centered and incapable of altruism.” The Gospel, experienced in the life of a community, the Holy Father reassured, can restore us to “a whole, healthy, redeemed humanity.”
Finally, the Pope turned to the third aspect of “Renewing the mission of hope.” “Faced with the urgency of the mission of hope today,” Pope Francis said, “Christ’s disciples are called first to discover how to become ‘artisans’ of hope and restorers of an often distracted and unhappy humanity.” Missionaries of hope, the Holy Father reiterated, are “men and women of prayer, for ‘the person who hopes is a person who prays.’” “Let us not forget,” he insisted, “that prayer is the primary missionary activity and at the same time ‘the first strength of hope.’”
Keeping this in mind, the Pope urged missionaries to “renew the mission of hope, starting from prayer, especially prayer based on the word of God and particularly the Psalms, that great symphony of prayer whose composer is the Holy Spirit. By praying,” Pope Francis reminded them, “we keep alive the spark of hope lit by God within us, so that it can become a great fire, which enlightens and warms everyone around us, also by those concrete actions and gestures that prayer itself inspires.”
Evangelization, he stressed, is always a communitarian process, like Christian hope itself. “That process does not end with the initial preaching of the Gospel and with Baptism, but continues,” he explained, “with the building up of Christian communities through the accompaniment of each of the baptized along the path of the Gospel.” Missionary work, he underscored, requires praying and acting as a community.
The late Pope Frances concluded his message by urging “all of you, children, young people, adults and the elderly, to participate actively in the common evangelizing mission of the Church by your witness of life and prayer, by your sacrifices and by your generosity.”
This year, we are privileged to have Father Anayo Nna, C.Ss.R., speak to us at all the Sunday Masses about the missions. Fr. Anayo is a Redemptorist priest from Nigeria who is currently stationed at St. Athanasius Parish in Philadelphia as he promotes a missionary awareness throughout our country.
We can all support the missions for, as Pauline Jaricot, who was the inspiration for World Mission Sunday, once wrote, “some give to the missions by going; some go to the missions by giving.” Please be generous in your support of the missionary Church.