MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER PAUL VI
FOR WORLD MISSION DAY 1969

 

Our word today is this: let us try to make the missionary idea clear and strong in us and around us. We must pay attention to the new importance that this idea assumes for the People of God after the Council. It is an idea that invades all the faithful, the whole Church. It enters into the definition of the Christian: “Every disciple of Christ, says the Council, has the duty, insofar as it belongs to him, to spread the faith”. And again: «All the children of the Church must have a lively awareness of their responsibility towards the world, they must cultivate in themselves a truly Catholic spirit, they must spend their energies in the work of evangelization». It is a vocation for everyone, it is a duty of the whole Church: if she is Catholic, she must be missionary by nature. We’ve known this all along; since his time St. Augustine taught it: “If you want to love Christ, your charity must embrace the whole world”. But the Council highlighted this constitutional dynamism of the Church.

We are all under this pressure, this urgency of Christ’s charity, both as a community of believers and as an individual Faithful: no category of Christians can escape this apostolic vocation; it also reaches those who retire in contemplation; commits the laity: “The Lord in fact, says the Council again, wishes to expand his kingdom also through the faithful laity”. This is the novelty in the conscience of the Church: the pressing and universal demand of the apostolate.

What does this instance entail? Precisely that of coordinating all of us in the Church’s effort to spread the message of Christ. We repeat: indifference, apathy, spiritual self-centeredness are inadmissible today, as if the cause of the Gospel concerned only the Hierarchy, and the organizations specifically dedicated to the apostolate and missionary evangelization. It is necessary that every Christian, eager to be consistent with his call to the faith and to the profession which it entails, should open his soul to the wind of Pentecost; the prophetic breath of the Holy Spirit must invade every son and daughter of God, regenerated in the life of grace. It is therefore necessary to ignite in the whole Catholic community the persuasion of the need to spread the faith; it is necessary to revive in each and every one of the members of the Church the fervor of the apostolate, the zeal of the mission.

Apostolate and Mission

But it happens today that the etymological and essential kinship of the two terms: ” apostolate ” and ” mission often leads us to apply this word “mission” to any generic form of apostolic activity. We are now using the word “mission” in its specific and technical meaning of an international activity conceived and practically organized to evangelize peoples who are not yet Christian, through the work of people dedicated to this task, chosen, prepared and authoritatively sent, that is, qualified as “missionaries” who, following the path of the Apostles, preach the word of truth and generate new Churches. That is, let’s talk now about the missions in the proper sense. The attention of the faithful must be concentrated on the missionary ideal properly speaking; on the nature, purposes, people, institutions of the missions, as set out in the conciliar Decree Ad Gentes , on the missionary activity of the Church. We speak in a special way of the “Missionary Societies”, which belong to the Holy See, such as those which engage our primary pastoral responsibility; who have before them the whole panorama of the world to evangelise; which are connected to the network spread throughout the Church in favor of all Catholic missions: which have a sensitivity extended to the whole earth of missionary needs, and which are administered with a collegial method and with an equitable criterion of distributive justice and vigilant charity for every emergency and for every opportunity for rescue intervention.

And already by itself this official and central organization of the Church responds to a difficulty which is widespread in certain sectors of the modern mentality, and which threatens to make missionary activity stagnant; and it is that relating to the conciliar proclamation of religious freedom, almost as if it favors an agnostic irenism and authorizes indifference towards religious truth and the apostolic imperative, to which the plan of salvation is connected: that is: missionary effort would no longer be necessary. The existence of Pontifical Societies, expressly qualified to promote and support such an effort, still says the opposite today, since religious freedom, sponsored by the Council, intends to ensure the independence of religion from the incompetent interference of any profane power external to religion, and also from any abusive social or political exclusivism in the religious field; it does not weaken apostolic duty, but rather constitutes the civil condition for the exercise of missionary activity, while this itself obliges us to respect consciences in proclaiming the only true message of salvation deriving from religion.

New Ideas

This is a substantially ancient vision in the true tradition of the Church, but which the Council renewed and clarified. And this, dear Brothers and Sons, makes us think of our need to revive our missionary awareness on many other points with the new ideas which the present time offers for our consideration; and there are many, such as that of the progress of human solidarity, which multiplies relations between peoples with the development of civilization, and obliges citizens and governments of the better equipped countries to give spontaneous and disinterested assistance to developing countries: we spoke of this in our Encyclical Populorum Progressio ; now, even missionary activity has a loving priority in this design of human and Christian solidarity.

Likewise, the attitude of the missionary towards the countries to be evangelized is highly evolved: he is no longer the one who sees the diversity of cultures as an irreducible obstacle to his preaching, but the one who discovers indigenous values ​​worthy of respect and admiration, worthy of being understood, favored and adopted, and thereby “purified, corroborated and elevated”. The missionary is therefore not a foreigner, who with his faith imposes his civilization, but is his friend, his brother, who assimilates to the honest custom of the environment to instill in it the life-giving leaven of the Gospel. This “pluralistic” missionary attitude, with respect to the expressions of human genius, and always “unitary”, with respect to the unity of the faith and of the Church, if it has been a constant norm of evangelization from the beginning, Evangelii praecones , especially in our time, is particularly felt.

 

Logic of Charity

Dear Brothers and Sons, we would not like to “instrumentalise” these great ideas with the usual recommendation, with which the discourse on the missions concludes, that of the needs of the missions themselves and of the duty, of the honor of giving them generous assistance. But so it is; not for a utilitarian calculation, but for a functional necessity of the divine plan of evangelization, for a logic of charity: it needs you, this cause of the missions; it needs your offering: love, prayer, offering. Who would like to deny it, when it is the cause of Christ who opens his mysterious path to the ends of the earth, directs his steps in the present and future history of the world, raises the destinies of peoples, identifies himself with every man, without him derelict to himself, thus gathers his Church and guides it,

May 25, 1969, Feast of Pentecost.

PAUL VI

 

Credit: Dicastery for Communication, to the Holy See