Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - During Mass on Sundays and feast days the congregation prays the Creed and proclaims faith in “one holy, catholic and apostolic” Church, mentioning four traits of the Church as Tradition and doctrine have handed on in the history of the faith. There is no explicit mention of “missionary nature” nevertheless the Church is missionary by nature. Her missionary nature from the theological point of view is implied in each of those mentioned traits, particularly her Catholic and Apostolic nature. How can all peoples be reached, how can the announcement of the salvation brought by Christ be rendered truly universal, that is Catholic, if not through the missionary impulse of the Church and her living members? How can we fulfil faithfully the duty of being apostles, the Lord's faithful witnesses, announcers of the Word and humble and confident administrators of Grace, if not through missionary activity, understood as an authentic constitutive factor of being Church?
Mission is not first and foremost a series of initiatives to be undertaken, a human project to achieve independently from listening to the reality and will of the Lord. Nor does mission depend on the available resources, human and economic. The great Saints began extraordinary missions without any human means but with the sole “powerful weapon” of the faith, total and confident trust in divine Providence, the certainty that we are totally loved by the Lord and so called to love others.
Mission is a question of self awareness. Who is the Christian? The missionary, the priest, the apostle? What is his specific identity? It is not a question of establishing roles, “power sharing ” in the Church! Even less is it a matter of distinguishing between “missionary Church” and “Church”, as if within the One Body of Christ there could exit autonomous organs not totally dependent and connected with the whole Body.
It is a question of starting from the one truly essential thing: a personal relationship with Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ, centre of the cosmos and of History, and the only Saviour of mankind. On each one's personal relationship with the Lord Jesus depends the entire mission of the Church. Then mission, constitutive of being the Church, is nourished first of all with prayer, as Pope Benedict XVI recalled in Deus Caritas Est (37): “ It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work. Clearly, the Christian who prays does not claim to be able to change God's plans or correct what he has foreseen. Rather, he seeks an encounter with the Father of Jesus Christ, asking God to be present with the consolation of the Spirit to him and his work”.
Mission, we could say, is a question of identity and heart. Never forgetting that as in the early Christian times, only those who are able to defend the faith are able also to evangelise. Therefore “explaining the reasons” or, in more traditional terms, apologetics, is an essential moment of evangelisation and mission. (Agenzia Fides 20/9/2007; righe 36, parole 513)
