Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – “The Holy Father in the Message for World Mission Day of 2021, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, brings together the mission and the human experience of the mercy of Christ: he wants to tell us that there is no dichotomy nor separation between what we call spirituality and the work of the apostolate”: This is what Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, said in an interview with Agenzia Fides, commenting on the Message for Missionary World Day 2021, published today by the Holy See, entitled “We cannot but speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). “Spirituality – explains the Cardinal – means having a profound experience in one’s life of the merciful love of God, given to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, with his love for us, became one of us, our brother, the one who embraced our frailties, our labors and our dreams, our joys and hopes, as said in Gaudium et Spes. And, as Pope Francis recalls, when a person is loved, when he experiences being loved, as happened with the apostles, he cannot keep it for himself, but wants to share it: it is a beautiful and precious fact and thus becomes mission”.
The Prefect continues: “The mission is therefore intimately linked to the love of Christ. It is not a job, it is not a human work, sometimes even felt as a heavy task, like a burden, but it springs from gratitude. It is a response of gratitude for the love received from God.
Embraced and enveloped by the love of God, we want to share this love especially with those who do not feel loved, who feel abandoned, rejected, with those who live in the existential peripheries. We who have experienced God’s love, we who have listened and welcomed the Gospel of love, share it with our neighbor, with hearts overflowing with gratitude”.
Another aspect that Pope Francis touches on in the Message is that of compassion: “Compassion – remarks Cardinal Tagle – is one of the ways to show the wounded humanity today, in the difficult times we live in, the face of God’s love.
To proclaim the Gospel today, the language understood by humanity is that of charity and compassion: it is one of the aspects for sharing God’s love. Many people in the world were already fragile, marginalized, vulnerable before the pandemic. Today their situation has worsened: for this reason communicating, with our life, the presence and compassion of Christ will bring them consolation and new hope. The Pope calls us in the Message to be ‘missionaries of hope’, in a world that is so much in need of kindness, hospitality, mercy, fraternity. The mission is to carry out every action of life with the spirit of the Eucharist, it is to live a life of gratitude and thanksgiving to God. It is to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the greatest gift we have received, and that gift bears fruit: we ourselves are the fruit of his Spirit and of his presence, we are those who bring the priceless gift of his love to the world”.
Finally, the Prefect of Propaganda Fide wants to remember, in his conversation with Fides, the value of the missio ad gentes and of those who give their lives to carry it out: “Missionaries are those people who, to share the love of God, leave their security, the comfort of their life and go to the peripheries of the world, among the poorest and most disadvantaged people, among the suffering and the needy, witnessing with their life that God is love, and that he loves and gives himself to every creature. Missionaries are those who, like the apostles, cannot keep for themselves the love they have experienced: the Spirit pushes them to the ends of the earth to announce it and give it to those who need it most, to those who suffer and are desperate, to those who do not know him and have not experienced the immense love of Christ. Today, while the whole world is going through very difficult challenges such as that of the pandemic, Christ’s mission continues through each of us: where the mostneedy are, there are also missionaries, ready to console wounded hearts, in the name of Christ Jesus”. (PA) (Agenzia Fides)