Faith

Sts. Jean de Lalande, Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil, who were among the 17th-century French Jesuit missionaries martyred in North America, are depicted in a stained-glass window at the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame of Quebec in Quebec City. CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz

Becoming priests with a mind and heart for the missions

Wednesday, October 22, 2025Faith

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. . . The mission to the nations is meant to be the paradigm, the model, for everything that takes place in the Church universal, in a diocese, and in a parish.

Msgr. Roger J.
Landry

October is World Mission Month, which has at its culmination World Mission Sunday and since 1927 has taken place on the penultimate Sunday of October.

World Mission Sunday this year takes place on Oct. 19, the normal feast day of the North American Martyrs, whose evangelical endeavors helped to plant the seed of the Gospel in northeastern United States and Canada. This year marks the centenary of the beatification of St. Isaac Jogues, St. Jean de Brébeuf and their six Jesuit companions and provides priests not only with powerful homiletic material but an example of the missionary dimension of every priestly vocation.

St. John Paul II, in his 1990 exhortation on the "Mission of the Redeemer," emphasized this priestly missionary dimension.

"All priests," he said, "must have the mind and the heart of missionaries" (RM 67). That's because the Sacrament of Holy Orders "prepares them not for any narrow and limited mission but for the most universal and all-embracing mission of salvation 'to the ends of the earth.' For every priestly ministry shares in the universal scope of the mission that Christ entrusted to his apostles" (67).

Lacking such a missionary mind and heart, the priest's spiritual life and pastoral effectiveness will suffer, because, John Paul wrote, preaching the Gospel to every creature "is the first task of the Church, which has been sent forth to all peoples and to the very ends of the earth. Without the mission ad gentes, the Church's very missionary dimension would be deprived of its essential meaning and of the very activity that exemplifies it" (RM 34).

The Church's priority
The point that St. John Paul II makes is essential for a proper understanding of the Church and of the priesthood. The mission to the nations -- to those who don't yet know Jesus Christ, 5.5 out of 8.0 billion alive today -- is not just one among many important duties. It's the "first task" of the Church.

That missionary zeal is what is meant to fuel our efforts to go out for the lost sheep, the baptized who have given up the practice of the faith, what is technically called the "new evangelization."

It's also what is meant to characterize our pastoral care of the faithful, since everything we give those who do practice the faith is supposed to form them to become evangelized evangelizers, of missionary disciples in communion.

If we're not on fire to help everyone come to a saving friendship with Jesus Christ -- in our prayer and personal sacrifices, but also in our pastoral priorities -- then that relative lukewarmness may fail to inspire our people to take up their role in the Great Commission, too.

Pope Francis was pointing to this zeal in his inaugural exhortation on "The Joy of the Gospel" when he outwardly dreamed of a "missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church's customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures, can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today's world rather than for her self-preservation" (EG 27).

Everything the Church does, he was suggesting, is meant to be understood in a missionary key. He poignantly asks, "What would happen if we were to take these words seriously?," implying that we haven't yet taken them seriously enough. Then he answers his own question: "We would realize that missionary outreach is paradigmatic for all the Church's activity" (15).

So the mission to the nations is meant to be the paradigm, the model, for everything that takes place in the Church universal, in a diocese, and in a parish. It's supposed to be a guiding principle for the curriculum of a Catholic university, primary or secondary school, and religious education program. It should be what inspires Catholic charitable outreaches and hospitals, youth and young adult programs, sacramental preparation, and ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. "Everything" and "all of the Church's activity" are meant, Pope Francis suggest, to be taken literally.

Challenges to the Church's mission today
We know that at most of the 17,000 parishes in the United States, this missionary impulse has not yet leavened everything.

As a result of secularism, family sizes, diminishing priestly vocations, deficient catechesis, priestly numbers, the continued fall out from scandals, money, and other reasons, many parishes are just struggling to survive. In those places where the Church is contracting and schools and parishes are merging and closing, enthusiasm to support the Church in the 1,124 missionary dioceses and territories where she's too young, poor or persecuted to be self-sustaining takes a practical backseat to keeping the doors open, finding a priest for Mass and confessions, and getting someone to teach sixth grade CCD.

In other parishes where the Church is growing, the focus is often precisely on that growth, with time and attention often being given to raising money or paying off the debts for a bigger Church, new pastoral center or school, caring for the dozens enrolled in OCIA, and launching new ministries to solve local pastoral needs. The focus is on helping the Church grow and thrive locally, with the needs of the Church universal a real but relatively remote concern. These trends are understandable. Spiritual and pastoral myopia are normal. We certainly don't want a circumstance in which people think loving their neighbor means caring first for those thousands of miles away while neglecting those who are their actual neighbors.

But what Popes John Paul II and Francis are driving at is that when we take the mission to the nations seriously, rather than forsaking the needs of our family, parish, diocese, city or country, we will address them in a more properly Catholic way. Just as loving God more helps us to love our neighbor more, and taking the kingdom of heaven more seriously, rather than withdrawing us from the world, helps us to commit more to the transformation of the world, so prioritizing the bringing of the Gospel to every creature helps us to commit even more to sharing the Gospel in its fullness with those people with whom the world has surrounded us.

- Father Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River who is national chaplain to Aid to the Church in Need USA, a Papal Missionary of Mercy and a Missionary of the Eucharist for the US Bishops.