Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Priest Magazine
October 1, 2025
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 October 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.
Thinking About and Loving the Missions
The missionary metamorphosis of the parish begins with the priest’s having a missionary mind and heart. He’s got to think about the missions. He’s got to love the missions.
Every December 3, we have a chance to ponder whether we have a missionary mind and heart when in the Office of Readings the Church gives the appeal of St. Francis Xavier, the great 16th-century patron of the Church’s mission work.
After describing the great number of conversions and baptisms he was doing himself and the enormous need for collaborators to baptize thousands more and help those who have come to faith grow, he implored, “Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians. Again and again I have thought of going round the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: ‘What a tragedy: how many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!’ I wish they would work as hard at this as they do at their books and so settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them. This thought would certainly stir most of them to meditate on spiritual realities, to listen actively to what God is saying to them. They would forget their own desires, their human affairs, and give themselves over entirely to God’s will and his choice. They would cry out with all their heart: ‘Lord, I am here! What do you want me to do? Send me anywhere you like—even to India.’”
When the future St. Philip Neri, a contemporary, heard those words, he immediately wanted to leave Rome and join Francis Xavier in the East. His spiritual director helped him to discern that Rome was to be his Indies and Philip set out to re-evangelize Rome with the same missionary zeal with which his contemporary, Francis Xavier, would evangelize India, the islands of southeast Asia and Japan. Together with the Holy Spirit, that’s what Philip ended up accomplishing. At a minimum, God wants the parish to which we’re assigned to be our “Indies.”
Just like their mutual friend St. Ignatius of Loyola, while convalescing after having his leg shattered on the battlefield and reading the lives of the saints, was provoked to ask why he couldn’t do what Francis of Assisi and Dominic did, so we need to ask why we can’t serve our parishioners with the zeal, with the virtues, with the heroism of the Church’s great missionary priests.
How would St. Francis Xavier or St. Philip Neri serve our parish? How would the Saints Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf, Junipero Serra, John Neumann, and Damian, or Blesseds Francis Xavier Seelos and Stanley Rother? What advice would Saints Frances Xavier Cabrini, Rose Philippine Duschesne, Mother Teodore Guerin, Katherine Drexel or Teresa of Calcutta give us with regard to maximizing the opportunities given to us?
The Jubilee of Hope and Christian Mission
I’d like to explore various practical ways we can help build a missionary culture in our parishes.
The first is through a focus on the substance of our hope.
This year World Mission Month is taking place within the Jubilee of Hope and the theme for World Mission Sunday is taken from the Jubilee: “Missionaries of Hope Among All Peoples.” The Jubilee of Hope makes plain that the Church’s mission is to bring “Christ, our Hope” (1 Tim 1:1) to the world. The Gospel we proclaim is the “explanation for the reason of our hope” that St. Peter calls us to be always ready to give (1 Pet 3:15).
Hope means ultimately living with God in the world (Eph 2:14). The Church’s mission work is to help everyone come to realize that God himself entered the world in the incarnation, taking on our human nature in order to redeem it through his passion, death and resurrection. He remains with us in the world, most especially by means of the Holy Eucharist. We want everyone to experience this hope. That’s what drives the Church’s mission. This is the Gospel that we feel burning our bones and filling us with holy woe unless we share it (Jer 20:9; 1 Cor 9:16).
The Catechism of the Church gives us another helpful tip for the Church’s mission in its definition of hope. Hope is “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). The Church’s missionary work involves proclaiming that God not only wants to be with us in this world but have us with him forever in the next.
One of the reasons why the Church’s mission to the nations has lost some momentum from the time of Saints Francis Xavier, Philip Neri, the North American Martyrs, Therese Lisieux, Frances Xavier Cabrini and other great missionary saints even of the first half of the 20th century is because of defective ecclesiology.
If we believe that basically everyone goes to heaven — whether they know and love Jesus, are baptized and live a sacramental life, keep or break the commandments, praise or curse God, welcome or reject strangers, feed or stiff the poor, are faithful to or cheat on their spouses, receive or kill their babies, frequent or refuse God’s mercy — then the stakes as to whether we share the Gospel goes way down. But if Jesus is right that there are many more on the broad road that leads to perdition than the narrow way that leads to life (Mt 7:13-14), then we have every reason, like he had, like the apostles had, like the missionaries had, to invite people to repent and believe in the Gospel, because the stakes are eternal.
The Jubilee of Hope — based on the real theological virtue — is meant to be a remedy for this soft universalism. We are called to be missionaries of hope among all the peoples because the fulfillment of Christian hope matters. Many, including some Christians, have lost a sense of the “great hope” that is eternal life. Priests first and foremost are supposed to be emissaries of this good news and leaders as “pilgrims of hope” in the pilgrim Church on earth, following Christ all the way to the place he ascended to prepare for us in the Father’s house.
Missionary Opportunities in the Parish
The second opportunity is given by the multiple opportunities every year to help bring about a missionary transformation in the parish.
World Mission Month, and World Mission Sunday, are meant to help the whole Church to think about the Missions, to pray for Missionaries and those whom they’re trying to evangelize, and to sacrifice to support them. Materials are provided by The Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA — posters, bulletin blurbs, homiletic helps, prayers of the faithful, videos for parish websites and social media accounts and more — to help World Mission Sunday not just be “another second collection” but something that helps every Catholic to focus on the Church’s, and his or her, baptismal missionary identity.
The best way to take World Mission Sunday seriously is to take World Mission Month seriously and then try to plan activities throughout the parish that can focus on the missions. Those in Catholic schools and religious education programs, for example, can use some of the activities from the Missionary Childhood Association (one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies). Since October is also the month of the Holy Rosary, the World Mission Rosary, designed and promoted by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, former national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, can be used, to pray to the Queen of Apostles for the fruits of the Church’s missionary work in each of the five continents.
Similarly, there’s the Missionary Cooperative Program that most dioceses participate in, when once a year a priest or religious from the missions comes to preach or speak at all parish Masses about the missionary work they are involved in. The more parish priests are able to communicate before and after the missionary’s visit the importance of the missions, the greater the impact will be, for the missions and for the parish. The more they help the missionaries craft their message, print their thank yous, and keep the parish in touch, the easier it is to augment the fruits of the missionary appeal.
Some parishes try to adopt a missionary parish or diocese that is struggling in situations of tremendous poverty. Some dioceses across the world are so poor that a thriving American parish’s annual budget dwarfs the missionary diocese’s. The typical subsidy mission dioceses receive from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization is $30,000-$50,000, which is most of the budget of the Diocese! Imagine how many lives could be impacted if an American parish were to adopt such a Diocese?
Some parishes are able to plan trips to visit the missions and help out for several days with one or more projects. While the long-term impact on the missionary community can vary, invariably those who go on the missions return far strengthened in missionary identity, as they experience not just the poverty of those living in missions, but the joy of the faith that radiates despite those hardships.
The biggest impact on the missionary culture of a parish would likely come through a parish priest’s overall advocacy for the missions in his regular preaching, bulletin columns, adult education classes, catechetical talks and more. If a priest’s mind and heart are in the missions, so will be the minds and hearts of many of his parishioners.
Saint John Vianney and Blessed Pauline Jaricot
The patron saint of parish priests, St. John Vianney, shows all parish priests what a great love for the missions looks like.
He was spiritual director to Blessed Pauline Jaricot, the foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. He knew her from the time he was a young parochial vicar in Dardilly and she and her family lived in the parish. He shared with her a great love for St. Philomena, through whose intercession Vianney worked many miracles and from whose intercession Jaricot received one. But more than anything they shared a love for Jesus Christ that led both to give their lives to trying to bring his love to others. Vianney helped to form her in her missionary zeal and stir it into a flame.
That’s what parish priests are meant to do, foster the missionary vocation of every parishioner, some who will hear a calling to dedicate their lives as missionaries, others who will be helped to recognize their sacred summons to pray for and support the missions.
That’s supposed to happen 365 days a year, but just like the Church’s liturgical calendar, as well as holy years, give us opportunity to focus more attentively to certain perennial aspects of Catholic faith and life, so October is the time that priests can themselves grow, and help our people to grow, in a missionary mind and heart.
So this October, let us respond to the graces of the Jubilee to help the whole Church — in mind, heart, prayer, sacrifice and action — become missionaries of hope to all the peoples.
Monsignor Roger Landry is National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States.
Sidebar #1:
The North American Martyrs
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World Mission Sunday, Oct. 19 this year, coincides with the annual memorial of the North American Martyrs, the priests Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemont, Anthony Daniel, Charles Garnier, and Noel Chabanel, together with religious brothers Rene Goupil and Jean Lalande. They show us the missionary zeal that’s meant to characterize the Christian’s baptismal identity and the priest’s missionary vocation.
They left their native France intending to be gone for life, canoeing among the Hurons along the St. Lawrence River in Canada, dragging their canoes over icy mountains, striving to learn native languages, existing far from the comforts of Europe. Brébeuf arrived in 1626 and labored for three years among the Hurons without even making a single convert. The missionaries were briefly booted when England took over the territory for four years, but as soon as France had reacquired the land, he was on his way back.
Similarly, Jogues’ first missionary attempt resulted in his eventually being captured by the Mohawks, tortured, having four of his fingers bit off, basically living imprisoned and without the ability to celebrate Mass or receive communion or absolution. When he was eventually freed and returned to France, he was celebrated as a hero. Like with Jogues after his first tour of duty, it would have been easy to stay in France and leave the missions to someone else. But he eagerly returned, giving his life for the Mohawks by whom he would eventually be martyred, together with Goupil and Lalande, in New York. The other five were tortured and killed in present day Ontario.
All eight show us that the mission of sharing the faith is so important as to justify not just leaving the comforts of home for the rest of one’s days but even giving one’s own life for those for whom Christ gave his.
St. Paul VI’s Exhortation
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This December marks the fiftieth anniversary of St. Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi, which Pope Francis has called “the greatest pastoral document” ever written. His thoughts on the missionary dimension of the priesthood (EN 68) nourish our prayer during World Mission Month:
“Associated with the bishops in the ministry of evangelization … are those who through priestly ordination ‘act in the person of Christ.’ … What identifies our priestly service, gives a profound unity to the thousand and one tasks which claim our attention day by day and throughout our lives, and confers a distinct character on our activities, is this aim, ever present in all our action: to proclaim the Gospel of God. … as pastors, we have been chosen by the mercy of the Supreme Pastor, in spite of our inadequacy, to proclaim with authority the Word of God, to assemble the scattered People of God, to feed this People with the signs of the action of Christ which are the sacraments, to set this People on the road to salvation, to maintain it in that unity of which we are, at different levels, active and living instruments, and unceasingly to keep this community gathered around Christ faithful to its deepest vocation. And when we do all these things, within our human limits and by the grace of God, it is a work of evangelization that we are carrying out.”