Church – Pontifical Mission Societies

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCISTO THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE PONTIFICAL MISSION SOCIETIES

June 2, 2024 by Mission Societies in Church / Home Page Slider

Consistory Hall
Saturday, 25 May 2024

[Multimedia]

Your Eminence, Your Excellencies,
Dear National Directors of the Pontifical Mission Societies.
Dear co-workers of the Dicastery for Evangelization, Brothers and sisters, good morning!

I warmly welcome all of you who have travelled from more than one hundred and twenty countries across five Continents for the Annual General Assembly of the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS). I extend my greetings to Cardinal Tagle, to the Secretary, Archbishop Nwachukwu, and to Archbishop Nappa, Adjunct Secretary and President of the PMS, together with the four General Secretaries.

On the eve of the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, we are invited to contemplate the mystery of God: a mystery of love that offers itself, gives itself, and spends itself completely for the salvation of all. Reflecting upon this work of salvation, we discover three fundamental characteristics of the divine mission that have been present from the beginning: communion, creativity and tenacity. Let us consider these essential words, which are relevant for the Church in its permanent state of mission, and especially for our Missionary Societies called to renewal in order to be ever more effective in service.

First, communion. When we contemplate the Trinity, we see that God is a communion of persons, a mystery of love. The love with which God comes to seek and save us, rooted in his being One and Triune, is also the basis of the missionary nature of the pilgrim Church on earth (cf. Redemptoris Missio, 1; Ad Gentes, 2). In this perspective, we are called to live a spirituality of communion with God and with our brothers and sisters. Christian mission is not about transmitting some abstract truth or religious conviction, but, first and foremost, is for enabling those we meet to have a fundamental experience of God’s love. Indeed, if we are shining witnesses reflecting a ray of the Trinitarian mystery, they will be able to discover God’s love in our lives and in the life of the Church.

Therefore, I urge everyone to grow in this spirituality of missionary communion, which is the foundation of the Church’s current synodal journey. I emphasized this in the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium and I reiterate it now, especially as you work on renewing your Statutes. Since a journey of missionary conversion is necessary for everyone, it is essential that opportunities for personal and communal formation be provided in order to grow in the dimension of “communal” missionary spirituality. The purpose of the Church’s mission is “making everyone know and live the ‘new’ communion that the Son of God made man has introduced into the history of the world” ( Praedicate Evangelium, I, 4). [1] Let us not forget that the call to communion implies a synodal style: walking together, listening to each other, engaging in dialogue. This expands our hearts, and fosters that increasingly universal outlook which was emphasized at the founding of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith: “We must not think only of this or that mission in particular, but of all the missions and missionary initiatives throughout the world” (cf. MONS. CHRISTIANI AND J. SERVEL, Marie-Pauline Jaricot, 39).

The second word I would propose is creativity. Rooted in the communion of the Trinity, we are involved in the creative work of God, who makes all things new (cf. Rev 21:5). We also participate in that creativity. I would like to say two things about this. The first is that creativity is linked to God’s own freedom, which he gives to us in Christ and in the Spirit. Indeed, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). We must not allow ourselves to stifle missionary creative freedom! Second, as Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe, the Franciscan missionary in Japan and martyr of charity, said: “only love creates”. Let us remember that evangelical creativity stems from divine love, and that all missionary activity is creative to the extent that Christ’s charity is its origin, form and end. Thus, with inexhaustible imagination, such charity inspires new ways of evangelizing and serving others, especially the poorest, and include the customary collections taken for the universal funds of solidarity with the missions. To this end, we must promote these collections and explore new ways of encouraging the participation of individuals, groups and institutions who wish to support the Church’s missionary endeavours as an expression of their gratitude for the graces received from the Lord.

The third and final word is tenacity, that is, steadfastness and perseverance in purpose and action. Let us also contemplate this characteristic of the love of the Triune God who, in order to fulfil his plan of salvation, with constant faithfulness has sent his servants throughout history and, in the fullness of time, gave himself in Christ Jesus. The divine mission “is a tireless going out to all men and women, in order to invite them to encounter God and enter into communion with him. Tireless! The Church, for her part, in fidelity to the mission she has received from the Lord, will continue to go to the ends of the earth, to set out over and over again, without ever growing weary or losing heart in the face of difficulties and obstacles” (Message for World Mission Day 2024).

We are called, then, to persevere and be tenacious in purpose and action. Those of you in the Pontifical Mission Societies encounter a great variety of situations and events that are part of the great ebb and flow of the Church’s life across the globe. Thus, although you may come across many challenges, complex situations, burdens and weariness that accompany ecclesial life, do not be discouraged! Have the eyes, hearts and, allow me to say, the “flair”, in order that, even amid numerous difficulties, you may recognize God’s work, the gifts of consolation and healing he bestows, and the sometimes invisible yet fruitful sowing of hidden holiness. By focusing on the positive aspects and the joy that comes from contemplating God’s work, we will know how to face even problematic situations with patience, avoiding inactivity and the spirit of defeatism. With tenacity and perseverance, go forth in the Lord!

Dear brothers and sisters, I thank you once again, together with your co-workers, for your generosity and dedication in promoting the missionary responsibility of the faithful, especially in caring for the children of the Pontifical Society of the Holy Childhood. May Our Lady intercede for you. I impart to you my heartfelt blessing. Please do not forget to pray for me. Thank you.

[1] SAINT JOHN PAUL II, Christifideles Laici (30 December 1988), 32.

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Holy Week Message from the HCA general secretary to children

March 28, 2024 by Mission Societies in Archive / Church

22nd March 2024

Dear missionary children, a warm greeting from La Verna, the place where saint Francis of Assisi received the signs of love by Jesus Crucified.

Lent is coming to an end and next Sunday, Palm Sunday, the Holy week will start; it is the most important week along the year for the Catholic Church.

God is the faithful friend that made a covenant with us and He won’t betray us.

Jesus, the son of God, is the faithful friend, the most excellent friend in our lives and he must hold the first place in our hearts, because we are in God’s heart and we have a privileged place in it, as if each of us is one and only. So just starting with this big love and from this faithful friendship, our prayers are born. Our prayer is a praise and thanks to the Lord, to Jesus for his faithfulness to us. God, Jesus never abandons us; He never leaves us alone and through our prayers we thank and praise the Lord for His constant presence in our life. And in your meeting and daily commitment as members of the Missionary Childhood, every day you seek to deepen your friendship with Jesus and bring his love to all.

We are sure: we want to be Jesus’ friends!

So because of this, during the Holy week we engage ourselves to stay with Him, to keep Him company. When Jesus entered in Jerusalem “Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields, crying out “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! (Mark 11: 8-10)

A few days later Jesus shared the last supper with his apostles.

Then Jesus lived and experienced alone the sorrow of the Passion.

But today we, as his disciples, as his missionary disciples, we commit ourselves to stay with Him, in unity with God and with Mary.

During this Holy week our prayer, our simple daily prayer will be in Jesus’ heart.

Dear missionary children, we commit ourselves to answer our calling, to answer God’s friendship and faithfulness with our prayer, to be with Jesus.

Listening and reading the Word of God, the Gospel, we can experience the amazing love that God has for us; we can experience his care for us.

Therefore, we reply through our prayers to Jesus’ heart, accompanying Him through the passion and thus reaching with Him the joy of resurrection, to share with everyone that He has conquered death.

I invite you to stay vigilant and courageous with Jesus, with eyes and heart open to the events of the Passion, to his words, to his actions and to his silence.

Always be ready to give witness of our faith in Him.

Without fear of not succeeding, he loves us even if we are afraid, even if we are not able to do what we want. Let us stay with Jesus, without disappointment for what happen, but always confident in his promise. Let us be with the suffering Jesus until the end.

Let us remember that during his mission, Jesus always welcomed children and now it is our turn to welcome Him.

Let us pray with Jesus to be strong against the evil.

Let us look at Crucified and Risen Jesus to know Him and to become his witness.

Dear missionary children, I wish to all of you, to your parents and animators, to the priests and sisters a fruitful Holy week and a joyful Easter.

Se Robena Tomarell
Sr. Roberta Tremarelli,
AMSS Secretary General

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Easter Message from the National Director

March 28, 2024 by Mission Societies in Archive / Church

Alleluia! He is risen!

Happy Easter from the missions.

After all of our Lenten preparations, the joy of Easter may seem like the end of a journey. But of course, the Resurrection of our Lord is only the beginning.

In the time between the Resurrection and the Ascension, Christ was further preparing his disciples for what was to come — the work of the Great Commission and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The words of Christ throughout the Gospel readings of the Easter season prepare us to go out and share the Good News just as his words prepared the Apostles in the first days of the Church.

This preparation mirrors Pope Francis’s call for the Church to anticipate the coming Jubilee year with a rededication to prayer. As Pope Francis leads us further in this Year of Prayer, he reminds us: “Prayer is the breath of faith, it is its most proper expression. Like a silent cry that comes forth from the heart of those who believe and entrust themselves to God.”

As always, I ask that you remember the missions in your prayers. The missionaries who bring the Gospel to the young Church in some of the most remote and unstable communities in the world are carrying on the work of the Apostles. When you unite yourself to their work in prayer, you live out Christ’s call to make disciples of all nations.

Fr. Alex Osei, C.S.Sp.
National Director

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Message from Pope Francis for World Mission Sunday 2021

October 24, 2017 by Mission Societies in Church

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS FOR WORLD MISSION SUNDAY 2021

“We cannot but speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20)

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Once we experience the power of God’s love, and recognize his fatherly presence in our personal and community life, we cannot help but proclaim and share what we have seen and heard. Jesus’ relationship with his disciples and his humanity, as revealed to us in the mystery of his Incarnation, Gospel and Paschal Mystery, shows us the extent to which God loves our humanity and makes his own our joys and sufferings, our hopes and our concerns (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22). Everything about Christ reminds us that he knows well our world and its need for redemption, and calls us to become actively engaged in this mission: “Go therefore to the highways and byways, and invite everyone you find” (Mt 22:9). No one is excluded, no one need feel distant or removed from this compassionate love.

The experience of the Apostles

The history of evangelization began with the Lord’s own passionate desire to call and enter into friendly dialogue with everyone, just as they are (cf. Jn 15:12-17). The Apostles are the first to tell us this; they remembered even the day and the hour when they first met him: “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon” (Jn 1:39). Experiencing the Lord’s friendship, watching him cure the sick, dine with sinners, feed the hungry, draw near to the outcast, touch the unclean, identify with the needy, propose the Beatitudes and teach in a new and authoritative way, left an indelible mark on them, awakening amazement, expansive joy and a profound sense of gratitude. The prophet Jeremiah describes this experience as one of a consuming awareness of the Lord’s active presence in our heart, impelling us to mission, regardless of the sacrifices and misunderstandings it may entail (cf. 20:7-9). Love is always on the move, and inspires us to share a wonderful and hope-filled message: “We have found the Messiah” (Jn 1:41).

With Jesus, we too have seen, heard and experienced that things can be different. Even now, he has inaugurated future times, reminding us of an often forgotten dimension of our humanity, namely, that “we were created for a fulfilment that can only be found in love” (Fratelli Tutti, 68). A future that awakens a faith capable of inspiring new initiatives and shaping communities of men and women who, by learning to accept their own frailty and that of others, promote fraternity and social friendship (cf. ibid., 67). The ecclesial community reveals its splendor whenever it recalls with gratitude that the Lord loved us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19). “The loving predilection of the Lord surprises us, and surprise by its very nature cannot be owned or imposed by us… Only in this way can the miracle of gratuitousness, the gratuitous gift of self, blossom. Nor can missionary fervor ever be obtained as a result of reasoning or calculation. To be ‘in a state of mission’ is a reflection of gratitude” (Message to the Pontifical Mission Societies, 21 May 2020).

Even so, things were not always easy. The first Christians began the life of faith amid hostility and hardship. Experiences of marginalization and imprisonment combined with internal and external struggles that seemed to contradict and even negate what they had seen and heard. Yet, rather than a difficulty or an obstacle leading them to step back or close in on themselves, those experiences impelled them to turn problems, conflicts and difficulties into opportunities for mission. Limitations and obstacles became a privileged occasion for anointing everything and everyone with the Spirit of the Lord. Nothing and no one was to be excluded from the message of liberation.

We have a vivid testimony to all this in the Acts of the Apostles, a book which missionary disciples always have within easy reach. There we read how the fragrance of the Gospel spread as it was preached, awakening the joy that the Spirit alone can bestow. The Book of Acts teaches us to endure hardship by clinging firmly to Christ, in order to grow in the “conviction that God is able to act in any circumstance, even amid apparent setbacks” and in the certainty that “all those who entrust themselves to God will bear good fruit” (Evangelii Gaudium, 279).

The same holds true for us: our own times are not easy. The pandemic has brought to the fore and amplified the pain, the solitude, the poverty and the injustices experienced by so many people. It has unmasked our false sense of security and revealed the brokenness and polarization quietly growing in our midst. Those who are most frail and vulnerable have come to feel even more so. We have experienced discouragement, disillusionment and fatigue; nor have we been immune from a growing negativity that stifles hope. For our part, however, “we do not proclaim ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:5). As a result, in our communities and in our families, we can hear the powerful message of life that echoes in our hearts and proclaims: “He is not here, but has risen (Lk 24:6)! This message of hope shatters every form of determinism and, to those who let themselves be touched by it, bestows the freedom and boldness needed to rise up and seek with creativity every possible way to show compassion, the “sacramental” of God’s closeness to us, a closeness that abandons no one along the side of the road.

In these days of pandemic, when there is a temptation to disguise and justify indifference and apathy in the name of healthy social distancing, there is urgent need for the mission of compassion, which can make that necessary distancing an opportunity for encounter, care and promotion. “What we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20), the mercy we have experienced, can thus become a point of reference and a source of credibility, enabling us to recover a shared passion for building “a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources (Fratelli Tutti, 36). The Lord’s word daily rescues and saves us from the excuses that can plunge us into the worst kind of skepticism: “Nothing changes, everything stays the same”. To those who wonder why they should give up their security, comforts and pleasures if they can see no important result, our answer will always remain the same: “Jesus Christ has triumphed over sin and death and is now almighty. Jesus Christ is truly alive” (Evangelii Gaudium, 275) and wants us to be alive, fraternal, and capable of cherishing and sharing this message of hope. In our present circumstances, there is an urgent need for missionaries of hope who, anointed by the Lord, can provide a prophetic reminder that no one is saved by himself.

Like the Apostles and the first Christians, we too can say with complete conviction: “We cannot but speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). Everything we have received from the Lord is meant to be put to good use and freely shared with others. Just as the Apostles saw, heard and touched the saving power of Jesus (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-4), we too can daily touch the sorrowful and glorious flesh of Christ. There we can find the courage to share with everyone we meet a destiny of hope, the sure knowledge that the Lord is ever at our side. As Christians, we cannot keep the Lord to ourselves: the Church’s evangelizing mission finds outward fulfilment in the transformation of our world and in the care of creation.

An invitation to each of us

The theme of this year’s World Mission Day – “We cannot but speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20), is a summons to each of us to “own” and to bring to others what we bear in our hearts. This mission has always been the hallmark of the Church, for “she exists to evangelize” (SAINT PAUL VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14). Our life of faith grows weak, loses its prophetic power and its ability to awaken amazement and gratitude when we become isolated and withdraw into little groups. By its very nature, the life of faith calls for a growing openness to embracing everyone, everywhere. The first Christians, far from yielding to the temptation to become an elite group, were inspired by the Lord and his offer of new life to go out among the nations and to bear witness to what they had seen and heard: the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand. They did so with the generosity, gratitude and nobility typical of those who sow seeds in the knowledge that others will enjoy the fruit of their efforts and sacrifice. I like to think that “even those who are most frail, limited and troubled can be missionaries in their own way, for goodness can always be shared, even if it exists alongside many limitations” (Christus Vivit, 239).

On World Mission Day, which we celebrate each year on the penultimate Sunday of October, we recall with gratitude all those men and women who by their testimony of life help us to renew our baptismal commitment to be generous and joyful apostles of the Gospel. Let us remember especially all those who resolutely set out, leaving home and family behind, to bring the Gospel to all those places and people athirst for its saving message.

Contemplating their missionary witness, we are inspired to be courageous ourselves and to beg “the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Lk 10:2). We know that the call to mission is not a thing of the past, or a romantic leftover from earlier times. Today too Jesus needs hearts capable of experiencing vocation as a true love story that urges them to go forth to the peripheries of our world as messengers and agents of compassion. He addresses this call to everyone, and in different ways. We can think of the peripheries all around us, in the heart of our cities or our own families. Universal openness to love has a dimension that is not geographical but existential. Always, but especially in these times of pandemic, it is important to grow in our daily ability to widen our circle, to reach out to others who, albeit physically close to us, are not immediately part of our “circle of interests” (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 97). To be on mission is to be willing to think as Christ does, to believe with him that those around us are also my brothers and sisters. May his compassionate love touch our hearts and make us all true missionary disciples.

May Mary, the first missionary disciple, increase in all the baptized the desire to be salt and light in our lands (cf. Mt 5:13-14).

Rome, Saint John Lateran, 6 January 2021, Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord.