10/22/00

World Mission Sunday 2000:
Who’s hearing the call?

A few weeks ago, Chicago hosted the largest Missionary Congress this country has seen in many years. The Catholic New World gave it insightful coverage by highlighting how Catholic lay people, men and women who do not belong to religious missionary institutes or religious orders, are taking up the Church’s mission to lands where Christians are few and far between, especially in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania.

This past week, Rome hosted a World Mission Congress, sponsored by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. This department of the Roman Curia used to be called the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. It was started in 1622, a century after the European discovery of this hemisphere, in order to make missionary work here and in Africa and Asia independent of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns and their colonizing enterprise. The Congress’ theme is: “Jesus, Source of Life for All.” It will be ecumenical in character and will bring into the celebration of the great jubilee the awareness of the Church as missionary.

Each year, the whole Church celebrates the third Sunday of October as World Mission Sunday. The collection for the missions, which is taken up in every parish, is given by the Holy Father to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples which distributes it to missionary dioceses around the world. Each year, the Catholics of the Archdiocese respond generously in support of the life of the Church in poor dioceses. Many of these dioceses are rich in vocations to consecrated life and ordained priesthood, but they are poor in the means to prepare and form native vocations. They are poor also in their ability to train and support catechists and other ministers of the Church. Church workers in dioceses considered “missionary” number over 600,000. They include 1,100 bishops, 126,000 religious, 51,000 priests, 83,000 seminarians and thousands of lay people, many of whom are volunteers, as is the case here as well. Our support of the mission of the Church throughout the world makes us Catholic in fact and not just in name.

Yet the Pope himself voices questions about mission today that are asked not only in mission congresses but also in living rooms and parish offices: has not missionary work among non-Christians been replaced by interreligious dialogue? Is not human development an adequate goal of the Church’s mission? Does not respect for conscience and for freedom exclude all efforts at conversion? Is it not possible to attain salvation in any religion? (See Redemptoris Mission. n. 4).

Each of these questions has an answer in fact and in theology, but each also has an answer in the heart of every believer. We speak of whom we love; we cannot not speak of Jesus Christ. Not to know Him is the greatest poverty; not to serve Him is to be less than free. The Gospel can never be imposed; but the Gospel demands to be presented and offered. Those who do so are missionaries, wherever they live and work. On World Mission Sunday, however, we support with prayer and money those missionaries who leave their own people and culture to speak of Christ in a land other than their own.

In his message for World Mission Sunday 2000, the Holy Father gives particular mention to the many missionaries who have shed their blood for the faith. A few weeks ago, he canonized missionaries who lost their lives in China at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Pope’s message for October 22 mentions as well the challenges of the new evangelization, and he reminds us of the particular difficulties of preaching the Gospel of Life in today’s cultural climate: “In proclaiming the truth that God has given men and women an inestimable dignity and inalienable rights from the moment of conception, you are helping to rebuild the moral foundations of a genuine culture of freedom, capable of sustaining institutions of self-governance that serve the common good.” True though that may be, those who regard any judgment on their own choices as insufferable will not welcome the Gospel of Jesus Christ here today anymore than it has been welcomed in other lands throughout this century.

The call to mission now heard by many lay people is a sign, it seems to me, that the Second Vatican Council’s teachings are beginning to be understood. The Council taught that the call to holiness is universal. Every man and every woman everywhere is called to intimacy with God. In the Church, bishops and ordained priests, along with other ministers, are to see that the means to attain holiness are available to everyone. Bishops govern the Church so that people have the sacraments and the teaching and the pastors they need to become holy. The world itself, however, is in the hands of lay people, holy men and women who work to make the world holy. Vatican II will begin to be effective when all the baptized use the Gospel as a means to change workplace and marketplace, home and office, streets and political assemblies. The bishops are not supposed to be directing political and economic life; lay people are to direct the world’s affairs, but they are to do so evangelically, in accordance with the Church’s moral vision and social teachings. No more than bishops and priests can govern the Church according to their own designs can lay people govern the world according to their own designs. All of us are in Christ and are to act according to his mind; all are called to holiness and to making others holy. We’re a long way, most days, from the implementation of Vatican II, both here and around the world.

World Mission Sunday will, I hope, not only be the occasion for all of us to support the Church’s mission elsewhere but also be a moment to ask how we’re doing with the Church’s mission in Cook and Lake counties. God bless you.

God bless you.
Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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