Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The feast of the patron saint of the Missions Saint Therese of Lisieux, on October 1st , opens the missionary month which will culminate with the celebration of World Mission Sunday, the last by one Sunday of the month, this year 21 October. Some countries celebrate the day on a different date. The title of Pope Benedict's Message for the 81st World Mission Sunday is “All the Churches for all the World”. October was chosen as the month of mission to recall the discovery of the continent of America, which began a new page in the history of evangelisation.
This year there is another special recurrence, the 80th anniversary of the decree proclaiming St Therese Patron Saint of the missions. On 14 December 1927 at the request of Pope Pius XI the Congregation of Rites issued a decree declaring “St. Therese the special patron saint of men and women missionaries all over the world”. She was given this title “as it was conferred on Saint Francis Xavier, with all the rights and privileges of the title”, with regard to liturgical devotion.
This morning in the chapel of Propaganda Fide, the secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples Archbishop Robert Sarah, presided a concelebration of Mass attended by the staff of the congregation and the international secretariats of the Pontifical Mission Societies. “Today we have the joy of celebrating the feast of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, Patron Saint of the missions and a missionary herself even as an enclosed nun in a convent” said Archbishop in his homily. “The whole life of St Therese di Lisieux was filled with God and His Love, and draws us to appreciate the beauty of intimate union with God, with Christ, lived in a life of contemplative prayer and love. With Saint Therese we learn not only to walk the path of personal conversion in order to become like children, we learn above all to give first place to God's Love and to the necessity of our personal and generous response in daily prayer and total consecration to God of our whole being”.
The Secretary of the Missions Congregation recalled that Saint Therese longed to be ever closer to the Crucified Lord, where she came to understamd God's immense love for mankind, and her life was then marked by a desire to “love Love”, to “love Jesus as no one had ever loved Him”. The led her to discover her vocation in the Church: “at the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be Love, and in this way I will be everything”. In the Church, Saint Therese was a missionary by praying and loving. “We cannot be missionaries unless we love - said Archbishop Sarah -, unless we learn what it means to truly love, because to evangelise is to carry God's Love to all men and women”. The missionary vocation, as Vatican II underlined, is expressed and is authentic in a dimension of radical and total self-giving: everything must belong to God, our whole life for everyone everywhere. “Let us pray that we may reach a better understanding of our missionary vocation-Archbishop Sarah said in the homily - that we may imitate Saint Therese the Little Flower in our daily life as we walk towards the fullness of life and our vocation to holiness”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 1/10/2007 - Righe 38 ; Parole 555)
