The New Evangelization and World Mission Sunday

This Sunday, all the dioceses of the world will celebrate World Mission Sunday. This annual celebration tries to deepen Catholics’ understanding of the Church’s mission and gives an occasion for Catholics to pray for missionaries and to help support them financially. I hope all give generously to the world Mission collection on October 24.

It used to be clear who was a missionary. It was a priest or a sister or brother who left their native land to preach the Gospel and establish the Church in a part of the world where Christ was not yet known. Today, not only are there growing numbers of lay missionaries but the division between missionary lands and places where the pastoral structures of the Church are well established is less clear. The basic structures of the Church--dioceses and vicariates apostolic--now cover the globe, although Catholics are much “thicker on the ground” in some places than in others. But everywhere on the globe, whether the Church’s institutions are intact or not, ignorance of Jesus Christ or distorted ideas about him remain. The Church is missionary everywhere, and the papal call for a new evangelization recognizes the changed situation of mission in the world at the beginning of a new millennium.

This year, the Pope’s message for Mission Sunday is a meditation on the Our Father, the Lord’s prayer. He takes each of the phrases of this prayer and breaks it open. At Mass and throughout the week, each of us might pray this well known prayer more slowly, more thoughtfully, savoring each of the Our Father’s petitions and hearing in them our own call. The Pope concludes his message with a call to each of us: “The mission of salvation is universal; for every person and for the whole person. It is a task which involves the entire People of God, all the faithful. Mission must therefore be the passion of every Christian; a passion for the salvation of the world and ardent commitment to work for the coming of the Father’s Kingdom.”

The mission of the Church, like the Church herself, is catholic, reaching out to everyone. It is inclusive. But the Church is also apostolic and reaches out to all with the faith that tells us what God has revealed about himself and ourselves. This faith and its demands often seem exclusive. The relationship between catholicity and apostolicity defines the Church’s mission in this and every age; and sometimes the relationship is tense. In our age, the temptation is to reduce the tension by emphasizing catholicity and “inclusivity” at the expense of apostolicity and “exclusivity”. Sometimes this is done by setting compassion against truth. This is always a mistake, even when it is well intentioned. It isn’t compassionate to tell people lies, and it isn’t truthful to deprive anyone of the hope born of love.

This tension shapes the context of recent discussions about ministry to homosexuals. The Church’s mission is to reach out to offer them Christ’s gifts so that they can live according to the Gospel. Some people want the Church only to affirm homosexuals, who often are stigmatized and even physically threatened; others want the Church only to condemn the sin of sodomy and write off an entire group of people who are loved by God. The Church’s mission to homosexuals, as to all men and women, is to bring the power of God’s grace present in the preaching of the Gospel and the celebration of the sacraments so that lives can be strengthened and transformed. If the Church only laid down laws without also providing the grace to obey them, she would just be a source of moral instruction and not the living body of the risen Christ.

The tension between catholicity and apostolicity surfaces in the current discussions about Catholic universities, which are to welcome all people and all questions but are to see the people and study the questions in the light of the apostolic faith. The universities’ relation to the Church which is defined in the document Ex corde ecclesiae seems to some to limit the autonomy of the universities because it ties them juridically to the faith community which tells them what it means to be Catholic. But no one is Catholic on his or her own terms, not even universities. The tie, tense though it might be, is all the more important because universities have at the heart of their own identity the work of clarifying the truth, even the truths of faith. The implementation of Ex corde ecclesiae which will be voted on by the bishops next November will, if all goes well, strengthen a conversation which is necessary for both Church and Catholic university to fulfill their mission.

Catholic hospitals and health care institutions live this tension when health care is defined to include abortion. Abortion isn’t health care. Abortion is obviously never good for the health of the child killed and is, according to doctors I’ve spoken with, never necessary for the physical health of the mother. It isn’t health that is protected by abortion but a certain understanding of freedom. Catholic hospitals are to serve all people, and they do an excellent job of it; but they do so from an understanding of human life founded in faith. In a Catholic hospital no one will be deliberately killed; everyone is safe. Some people find this restrictive. They resent the Gospel of life, and they work to remove the Church from health care. The Church will remain in health care, however, because Jesus healed the sick and healing is part of the mission he left the Church.

How to react to the plans of the Southern Baptists to send a hundred thousand missionaries to Chicago next year also raises tensions around the meaning of Christian mission. Despite the dishonest tactics of some groups in targeting Hispanic Catholics, I wrote a few weeks ago that Catholics shouldn’t be intimidated by Baptist missionaries, some of whom don’t consider Catholics to be Christians. Rather, we should respect their sincerity and appreciate their love of the Lord but should also take the occasion of their coming to Chicago to invite them to embrace the fullness of apostolic faith in the Catholic Church. The invitation, however, should be offered only after listening to them. Proselytizers speak before listening; evangelizers listen before speaking, since the Gospel calls us to respect each man and woman and to listen first to their spiritual journey before engaging them in conversation about who Christ is. In writing about Catholic-Baptist similarities and differences, however, I didn’t take into account the reaction of many in the Jewish community to any project that would seem to target Jews as objects of Christian mission. The fear of creating a climate conducive to hate crimes brings another consideration to the discussion of the Baptist project, and the Chicago Council of Religious Leaders will be speaking about it in early November.

The Church is always missionary, but mission at the end of this millennium is as complex, or more complex, than ever. The complexity challenges us to think through carefully how we are to evangelize here, how this local Church can be missionary. The complexity of mission today is reason to pray hard and give generously this Mission Sunday.

God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago

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