Fr. Roger J. Landry
National Director
National Conference of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA
San Juan, Puerto Rico
November 16, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of the keynote address to the Diocesan Directors of The Pontifical Mission Societies, please click below:
The following text guided the keynote:
Dear Diocesan Directors, Dear Fellow Missionaries,
It’s a joy for me to be with you during these days of the 2024 National Conference and to meet and to get to know some of you last night and earlier today. I thank you for all of your dedication and hard work. You are the essential link between the global mission of the Church, the 196 dioceses and the 17,000 parishes in the United States. You are the ones primarily responsible for advancing the holy work of promoting missionary identity, spirit, prayer and involvement among Catholics in your dioceses. I express my deep appreciation to you for this consequential work.
I also thank you for your patience and perseverance during this transitional period in the national office. I know it has been a challenging time for everyone involved in our common mission. I hope to be able to bring some long-term stability and to spur ongoing renewal, as together we continue to implement the Strategic Plan and the Task Force Recommendations that many of you had key roles in formulating. I would like to thank Father Anthony Andreassi, the interim National Director, for having a steady hand on the rudder during this time of transition as well as to the national staff, who have kept their hands to the plow looking ahead and laboring diligently through it all. One of my bedrock passages in Sacred Scripture is Romans 8:28, omnia in bonum, by which St. Paul reminds us that “all things work out for the good for those who love God.” I look forward to seeing how God will prove that truth once again. I look forward as well to earning your trust as the new national director, to strengthening and expanding the good we do, and to addressing together and systematically the various issues that to one degree or another get in the way of our common work.
I’m excited to begin full-time as national director in January. There’s obviously much work that awaits.
The Appointment As National Director
When I was approached last Spring by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the chairman of the TPMS board, and asked to consider becoming one of three candidates that the board might propose to the Vatican as new national director, I told him that I have long had a great love and passion for the Missions and am always open to do what the Church might ask of me. But I expressed a concern about what a possible appointment might mean for my work as Catholic chaplain at Columbia. I’m the founding chaplain of a bold new approach to campus ministry called the Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, just two years old. I told him that I thought that should I chosen, especially while I was leading the Seton Route of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, and asked to start in the Fall, it would be a shock to Columbia students already reeling from campus events whom I would not be able to care for adequately on the road. I told him that I thought it would likewise very difficult to begin a national search for a successor on short notice. I told him that my main concern, however, was missionary. I already had many students — there would eventually be 30 — signed up in the Fall for the intense four-month OCIA class I teach every semester and I told him I was troubled that they might fall through the cracks if an interim chaplain were appointed. Some of them were Jewish and had already gone through the difficult conversations with family members. Others were among the Protestant leaders on campus who had already suffered the loss of their positions when they announced their intention to become Catholic. Others had never formally practiced any religion but were already coming to daily Mass because their hunger to become Catholic was ravenous. Cardinal Dolan graciously understood and said that even though there would be an obvious desire for the new national director to start right away, he would convey to the board my request to begin in January should I be selected.
I thought that the request would probably have made my being chosen unlikely. But I was notified on June 19, when I was in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania during the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, that the Board had unanimously selected me and had forwarded my name to the Dicastery for Evangelization. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle personally informed me of my appointment in Indianapolis, at the beginning of the National Eucharistic Congress, and soon afterward I received the official Latin decree, appointing me the national director, beginning July 23. The date surprised me, as I anticipated that it would have been January 1. Since then, however, I have been working part-time, helping with various decisions, and, since the news of my appointment on September 5, doing a lot of media, as I get ready for the assumption of the piles of work to try to sanctify at the beginning of the new year.
The Intensely Missionary Dimension of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage
After I received word that I was being nominated to the Vatican, I had a privileged time to pray in anticipation of assuming the position. During the unprecedented two-month National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that led up to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in July, I was able to spend hours before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, carrying him in the monstrance a few inches from my face, holding him in my hands at the altar, giving him to tens of thousands in the packed Masses along the journey, lifting him in benediction over his beloved people, and adoring him in churches, chapels, and even in our specially outfit National Eucharistic Pilgrimage van.
The Eucharistic pilgrimage itself was intensely missionary, as we were, as Pope Francis asks us, taking Jesus out of our Churches into the world he redeemed and making it possible for many to encounter him who otherwise wouldn’t. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the patroness of our route from New Haven, Connecticut, to Indianapolis, converted to Catholicism because of a Eucharistic procession, and we were privileged to see several such conversions along our way. The Church is, as we pray in Eucharistic Prayer III, a “pilgrim Church on earth,” and the mission of the Church is, therefore, to help draw people to join us on that journey, walking together with the Eucharistic Jesus all the way, not to Indianapolis, but to the heavenly Jerusalem. The Gospel we proclaim is not principally done with words but with the Word-made-flesh. In the Great Commission, Jesus sends us to the whole world, to proclaim the Gospel to every nation and every creature, commanding us to bring them into sacramental communion (“Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”), to help them live moral communion (“Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you”), and to recognize that God-with-us is still very much with us until the end of time (“And know that I am with you always until the end of time”). Jesus keeps that promise most concretely in his Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the altar.
This point between the Eucharist and mission is something that Cardinal Tagle eloquently underlined in Indianapolis in his homily at the closing Mass of the Congress, to which he was Pope Francis’ legate. He said that “Jesus’ mission and his gift-of-self meet in the Eucharist,” as Jesus gives us his body and blood for the life of the world. In Jesus, he said, Eucharist and evangelization are united. The Church’s mission, therefore, is essentially Eucharistic. “A Eucharistic people,” the Filipino prelate emphasized, “is a missionary and evangelizing people.”
And so I was living out this Eucharistic dimension of the Church’s mission this summer, together with six young, intrepid, perpetual pilgrims, several Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, four religious sisters from the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Healing Love, and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pilgrims from the local churches who would join us each day. I was able to have long conversations with the great Missionary of God the Father I was clutching in my hands about the new call within a call, the new vocation within my Christian and priestly vocations, he was giving me.
Providential Preparation for the New Duties
That precious time with Jesus on the road was a beautiful opportunity to retrace how I believe God has been preparing me since I was a child for this new task. Insofar as one of the main purposes of this, my first address to you, is to introduce myself as the new director and, hopefully, help you to see that this is, for me, far more than just one more role or form of service in the Church, I would beg your indulgence as I share some of what the Lord and I discussed, as he helped me re-read my entire life in a missionary key, and to fill me with gratitude for all of his providential training.
When I spoke to the TPMS staff and solicited their suggestions for this address, many of them urged me that the top objective was to let you get to know me, and to hear from me my own love for the Missions and how it will influence my vision for our common work.
So that’s what I’ll try to do here.
My hope is that as I share some of these elements, it might raise up in you renewed appreciation for how the same Missionary of God the Father prepared and inspired you for your key roles in the promotion of the Church’s missionary identity and work.
A Missionary Home
I grew up in a faithful Catholic home, praying the Rosary each night as a family, occasionally attending daily Mass with my mom, and learning how to read by pouring through children’s books on various Bible scenes. I was always struck by my mother’s zeal to spread the faith. She was somehow — I don’t know how this was possible — the president of two different Legion of Mary praesidia, one each in two different nearby parishes. For those of you familiar with the Legion of Mary, in addition to committing themselves to prayer and meetings, they go door-to-door trying to share the faith, whether with practicing Catholics, fallen-away Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, those of other religions and even those of no religion. Sometimes they’re welcomed; sometimes they’re politely dismissed or no one comes to the door; sometimes they’re rejected with disdain and slammed doors. But with courage, faith and zeal, they valiantly go on out. When my mom would return from her various missionary visits to the houses in different neighborhoods in our part of the city, she would do her paperwork on our kitchen table and often would tell my dad and the four of us kids what she and her partner encountered. She is a great storyteller. For me, it was a localized version of the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, as mom regaled us with the successes and sufferings. The overall lesson was that our faith was a gift that we should never be ashamed to share. If mom could do it door-to-door to strangers, I could do it, too. I was raised, I see now, in a missionary home.
The Influence of Great Missionary Saints
As I grew, I developed a great love for the saints. One Christmas, when my parents asked what I would like for Christmas, I asked for Butler’s four-volume The Lives of the Saints, which at the time cost about $100, far more than my hard-working parents were accustomed to spend. Very generously they sacrificed to buy them for me and, pretty much every night in high school and college, I read the multiple entries for the saints whose feast day was the following day. These holy ones became for me what they’re meant to be for every Christian: my heroes and examples. What always fascinated me the most were the lives of missionaries and martyrs, those who were willing to sacrifice, it seemed to me at the time, the most out of love for Christ and others. That was my first exposure to the North American Martyrs, Saints Francis Xavier, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, Peter Claver, Francis Xavier Cabrini, Damien of Molokai, Rose Philippine Duchesne, Junipero Serra and others. Eventually I would read whole biographies on many of these figures and enter imaginatively and prayerfully into their missionary experiences.
The Clarification of My Missionary Vocation
As my own sense of priestly vocation was maturing, I thought about becoming a missionary. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran several parishes in my hometown and so I was aware of the work of St. Eugène de Mazenod and many of his spiritual sons in bringing the Gospel to impoverished places. Their vocation director reached out to me and invited me to apply. But something from the life of St. Philip Neri eventually convinced me to become a diocesan priest. Many of you will remember that after Philip had read the letters of St. Francis Xavier from India, he desired to leave Rome to join him. He brought the matter to his spiritual director, who famously told him, “Rome will be your Indies,” and Philip became just as zealous a missionary in Rome as Francis Xavier was in India, Indonesia and Japan. Moved by that advice, and looking at the many needs of the Church in the United States that had nurtured my faith, I discerned that God was calling me to make Boston, and eventually Fall River, my Indies.
That’s what I set myself to do even before seminary. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I sought to befriend as many as I could and tried to help them become friends of Jesus. By God’s grace, several became Catholic. I founded a magazine as well as a few clubs that had specific purposes, but behind them all was an attempt to evangelize a rather secular campus, in some ways rather hostile to the Gospel, using categories that those I was trying to persuade would find compelling. I also tried to give Jesus a greater opportunity to do the evangelizing, by helping to get started adoration on Fridays at a time in Church history in which adoration itself was weirdly controversial.
An Intense Experience of the Propagation of the Faith
When I graduated from college, I was accepted by now-Cardinal Sean O’Malley as a seminarian for the Diocese of Fall River. At the beginning of my time as a seminarian, I volunteered for a special summer program for the Diocese’s Society of the Propagation of the Faith Office, headed then and still by Msgr. John Oliveira, to evangelize the many housing projects in the see city. For 8-10 hours each day throughout an unseasonably hot summer, three other seminarians and I dressed in blacks went two by two twice to every door in each of the city’s low-income projects. It was tough, sometimes exhausting, work. Some fruit came from our labors under the perpetually noon-day sun, thanks be to God, but at the end of three months, we did not have much to show. I’ll never forget reflecting with the other missionary seminarians that we were doing this work for a summer, whereas some, far away from the comforts of home, commit to do it for a lifetime. That’s when my appreciation for the practical challenges of missionaries greatly expanded.
Years in the Hub and Heart of the Church’s Mission
When I was sent to Rome for my theological studies, I was able to experience the catholicity of the Church, studying alongside and befriending seminarians and religious sisters from all over the world, including many from missionary countries.
Being able to live a stone’s throw from St. John Paul II, the living rock on whom Christ was building his Church at the time, was a real school of missionary zeal. I had the privilege to get to know John Paul II personally, to chat with him one-on-one eleven times, to have a nickname by which he called me — “il gemello americano,” from the fact that the first time we spoke, I was with my identical twin Scot, who was at the time a fellow seminarian at the North America College — and to observe up close why he would name himself, not far from here in Santo Domingo in 1992, a “pilgrim pope of evangelization.” It was his identity as a successor of the fisherman from Galilee who not only put out into the deep and lowered his net for a catch but urged the whole Church repeatedly to do the same. It’s what led him to traverse three times the distance between the earth and the moon to share the faith and strengthen the brethren. I was likewise present many times as he beatified and canonized missionaries and urged us to emulate their apostolic love. It was impossible to be around him without being transformed by his infectious missionary spirit.
Missionary Experiences Early in the Priesthood
When I returned as a priest to the Diocese of Fall River, I had various assignments with a missionary flavor for which now I give ever greater thanks. For ten years, I served in parishes teeming with Portuguese-speaking immigrants, which helped me not only to come to know the Portuguese language but also Portuguese and Brazilian culture. I was often called upon, likewise, to help out with Spanish Masses and confessions and became acquainted with the Church in various Latin American countries. I was a Catholic high school chaplain in a school that needed a lot of patient work to repropose the Gospel to those who had been baptized but many of whom had given up the faith. For seven years I was the Diocesan newspaper editor, trying to proclaim the Gospel in print and doing a special apostolate with my secular counterparts. And through it all I traveled extensively to preach retreats for priests, religious, seminarians, college students, and lay men and women, to teach courses on St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the new evangelization, and controversial and often misunderstood teachings in Catholicism, to do media work in print, on radio and on television for EWTN, including for the conclave that elected Pope Francis. This was all, in one way or the other, a form of sharing the faith, sometimes in season, sometimes out of season.
Preaching To All Nations At The Same Time
On December 3, 2014, almost a decade ago, my life took a major turn. My bishop had called me the previous night after 9 pm and asked how early I could come to see him the following day. There was an urgency that convinced me that I was about to get a change of assignment. December 3, as you know, is the feast of St. Francis Xavier. Praying the Office of Readings that morning, I pondered the words of the patron saint of the missions, encouraging those at the University of Paris, simply to say, “Send me wherever you want Lord, even to India.” I braced myself for what I was going to be asked, wondering whether it might involve mosquito nets and exotic foodstuffs.
The bishop shocked me by saying that Archbishop Bernardito Auza, Pope Francis’ apostolic nuncio to the United Nations, had asked me to come to serve at the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN, which is where I would serve for the next seven years, and seek to help bring the light of Catholic Social Teaching to the problems and challenges faced by the international community.
There, of course, I would meet ambassadors and delegates from the 195 Member and Observer States, as well thousands of NGO representatives, leaders of international bodies and more. In his 1965 visit, Pope St. Paul VI said that the United Nations seeks to live out at a diplomatic and material level what the Catholic Church has always sought to do at a spiritual and fully human level: serve all people everywhere. Working for the Holy See was an eye-opening experience as I became exposed to the problems affecting the people across the world. But it was also a tremendous opportunity for us at the Holy See to bring to New York those on the front lines of the Church’s work in education, health care, peacemaking, human trafficking, care the poor and other issues — many of them missionaries or from missionary dioceses — to share the experience of the Catholic Church in confronting successfully many of the problems on the UN’s agenda. It was an incredible classroom that enlarged my vision to international proportions.
It was also a great forum for me, as I assisted on most of our texts, to help share, in terms accessible to everyone, the Church’s wisdom about human dignity, rights, anthropology, ethics and more. When Jesus instructed us to proclaim the Gospel to all nations, I never thought that it would be possible to do it all at the same time, but that is, something, to some degree, that we were able to do at the U.N.
The experience of working within the Holy See’s diplomatic corps, collaborating with various dicasteries of the Vatican curia, with heads in various religious orders with a UN presence, with Caritas Internationalis, Aid to the Church in Need, and many of the leaders in the Church’s renowned charitable arms, will, I hope, serve me and all of us very well in my new responsibilities.
Missionary of Mercy
During that time, in 2015, Pope Francis proclaimed a Jubilee of Mercy and appointed me one of 1,100 Missionaries of Mercy from across the globe, giving us a triple mandate to preach God’s mercy, to engage in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and to offer divine mercy in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, with the special faculties to remit certain punishments reserved to the Pope for particular grave sins. After the Jubilee of Mercy was completed, the Pope extended that mandate indefinitely. In the Church’s new Apostolic Constitution, fittingly named Praedicate Evangelium, it makes the Missionaries of Mercy part of the very structure of the Church, and in his Bull of Indiction for next year’s Jubilee of Hope, Spes Non Confundit, he said he is counting in a particular way on Missionaries of Mercy. From the beginning, I have loved this work as a Missionary of Mercy. It’s led me to travel and preach in many different countries about the mercy of God, to write scores of columns, and to work one-on-one trying to bring God’s mercy to those who need it. Every missionary is meant to bring to others not just the message of God’s merciful love, but the means of experiencing it, which is something I have sought to do over the last eight years. I have so identified with this Mission that I intend to have Missionarius Misericordiae one day on my tombstone.
Care for the Suffering and Persecuted Church
Likewise, while I was working for the Holy See, I was appointed by the Vatican to be Ecclesiastical Assistant, or national chaplain, to Aid to the Church in Need USA, helping through prayer and charity to support the needs of persecuted and suffering Christians across the globe. Sometimes we worked in explicit cooperation with The Pontifical Mission Societies on shared projects. I loved that work, as I got to know some of the most amazing and heroic Christians from the Church over the world, in Nigeria, Ukraine, Pakistan, Iraq and beyond. My labors there likewise acquainted me with the many spiritual and material needs of our brothers and sisters across the globe and I am very proud of the great work of ACN in meeting many of those needs. That experience was, I think, likewise a critical preparation for these new duties.
The Fruitfulness of the Blood of the Missionary Martyrs
During that same time period, I was asked to serve on the Board of the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, where the three great Jesuit missionaries, Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande, gave their lives in the 1640s to share the Gospel and where, a decade later, their martyrs’ blood became the seed of the Christian life of St. Kateri Tekakwitha. I have spent a lot of time in Auriesville, celebrating Masses for pilgrims, hearing confessions, making and preaching retreats, bringing large groups and even planning the New York State Eucharistic Congress last Fall. In all of it, I have become particularly close St. Isaac Jogues, the first priest ever to set foot in New York City, and have been using him as an intercessor for the past several years. I’m using him more now as I dedicate my priesthood to helping continue the work of the missions for which he gave all. I hope that the spiritual fecundity of his blood, together with that of Saints Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande, and the incessant prayers of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, will help all of us bear fruit continuing their mission.
The Mission Phase of the Revival
I’ve already mentioned the missionary dimensions of my work as a Catholic chaplain on the highly secular Columbia campus as well as a National Eucharistic preacher and National Eucharistic Pilgrimage leader for the U.S. Bishops’ Eucharistic Revival. It’s not lost on me that I begin my new responsibilities during the Missionary Phase of the Revival, when every Catholic in the United States is asked to pray for those we might bring to Christ, to invite, and to walk one-by-one with those who are willing. As I have written in my upcoming inaugural column for Mission Magazine, my hope is that this missionary phase in the Church in the United States will open us up even more to the Church’s and to each of our missionary identity, as we seek to prosper the work of the missions where so often our efforts and generosity can help not just one but thousands learn how to walk with Jesus in the pilgrim Church’s earthly and eschatological journey.
I thank you for your patience with that autobiographical excursus. The main takeaway is that I believe that the Lord has been providing me experiences from my childhood until today that have been preparing me for this work. He has given me a great appreciation for and love of the missions, for those who carry out the Church’s mission work, and for those who make it possible. I bring that half-century of preparation with me as I eagerly look forward to rolling up my sleeves in January.
My Vision
Some of the national team suggested that I share with you my vision and about how I envision my first year. In terms of the vision, I would say that it would be premature, and perhaps a little pretentious, for me to give too many specifics, since I really haven’t begun the work. Suffice it to say my approach to the missions has been deeply influence by the thoughts contained in Ad Gentes of the Second Vatican Council, St. John Paul II’s Redemptoris Missio, Pope Benedict’s Address to Catechists for the Great Jubilee of 2000 and his many other writings on the transmission of the faith, and especially by Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium. I’ve had the joy to study, write about and preach about these thoughts a great deal over the course of my priesthood, especially as they relate to the New Evangelization. That’s my theological framework.
At a more practical level, I’ve been influenced by the writings and work of two great American priest missionaries. The first is the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, a hero of mine from the time I was a boy, whom I’m now humbled to call a predecessor. The second is Father John Considine, a New Bedford, Massachusetts native who was born within the parish boundaries of the parish where I served as pastor for seven years. He was one of the great promoters of the Missions in the United States of the 20thCentury, working at the Propagation of the Faith in Rome where he founded the Fides news service, then helping to lead the Maryknolls as Vicar General, and finally establishing the Latin American missions bureau at the U.S. Bishops’ Conference. I’ve long admired both and am now profiting from their wise vision and thoughts, seeking to adapt them to present challenges. They’re both great teachers of how to build bridges of faith and accompany people over the waters.
My First Year
In terms of what my first year will look like, I will spend the first two months in our offices, in New York and St. Petersburg, getting to know each of our staff, their work, and how it fits into the whole. In order to lead effectively, I need to know in depth what we’re doing and why, who’s doing it, and how I might help them achieve and exceed their goals. After those two months, I intend to hit the road, attending the regional meetings of the Diocesan directors, meeting bishops and board members, as well as visiting donors to thank them for their support and invite them to help in new ways. In May, I’ll be in Rome for the international meetings as well as the course for new national directors. My hope would be to spend some of the summer visiting some of the missions we support.
Throughout it all, I intend to try to spend part of every week getting the word out about the work of the Missions through weekly columns in Catholic newspapers, podcasts, some TV on EWTN, a radio program on Sirius and more. One of the reasons why the Board told me that they chose me for the position of National Director is because they were hoping to marshal my three decades of experience in media, not to mention my working relationships with various media organizations, in order to get Christ’s and the Church’s message out, promote a missionary spirituality among Catholics in the U.S., helping expand their heart for the missions, and bringing the work of the universal Church to life for them.
Starting in September, I would hope to have an established and balanced rhythm and enough experience on our inner workings to be able to make some more informed decisions about present strengths and weaknesses, how we’re stewarding our resources, where we need to dedicate more energies, where we can save money without losing productivity, as well as how to ensure that we’re following through on all our commitments and plans.
I know that some of you have raised the legitimate question about why, at a time when there has been a trend of decreasing donations, we have been making several new hires at the national office, reducing further the amount that is able to be sent to the missions. The initial answer is that we have been making this investment in personnel, in alignment with the Strategic Plan, in order to help us increase substantially our donations and overall effectiveness. One of my major tasks during the first year will be to make sure that that promise is being actualized. I am very much aware that every dollar we spend internally is one dollar fewer that can be sent to the missions, and I am committed to ensuring that what we sow in the national office is truly leading to greater fruit for the missions.
During this first year, I would also like to meet with each of the Diocesan directors, either in person or via Zoom, for an in-depth conversation, so that we can get to know each other better and so that I can solicit your input and profit from your experiential wisdom.
The Jubilee of Hope
In 2025 as you know we will be celebrating the Jubilee of Hope, honoring the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, its proclamation of the divinity of Jesus Christ in response to the Arian heresy, and the formulation of the Nicene Creed. It’s an invitation for the whole Church to proclaim Jesus Christ to a world that needs him, that he’s not just a great man or a prophetic teacher, but who he claimed to be: the eternal Son of God, one with the Father, the Savior who will judge the living and the dead. It’s an opportunity for all Catholics to get to know the faith we profess better and commit ourselves to sharing it, in communion with the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church we proclaim.
The Church’s apostolic dimension means not only that she’s built on the foundation of the apostles but that she’s apostolic in terms of all of us being sent out by Christ to proclaim the faith. The Jubilee is, therefore, a chance for every believer to recognize what Pope Francis wrote in The Joy of the Gospel, that the Church does not “have” a mission, but “is” a mission and that each of us is called to say, “I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world” (273), and hence to grow in missionary identity, spirituality and action.
So the Jubilee of Hope is a precious opportunity for us to bring people to Christ Our Hope, and to give a reason for the hope we bear within (1 Pet 3:15). It’s a time for all of us in The Pontifical Mission Societies to deepen our faith and renew our commitment to be “Missionaries of Hope” in our particular mission fields and for the mission territories. The theme for World Mission Sunday, next October 19, is fittingly, “Missionaries of Hope Among the Peoples,” and hope to make it a fitting this exclamation point on the Jubilee Year. As part of the Jubilee, and in preparation for World Mission Sunday, the Pontifical Mission Societies will be leading a Jubilee Pilgrimage to Rome next October 2-9. If you know of people you would like to have that experience, please give their names to Father Andreassi or other members of our team.
Reasons for Hope in Our Work
Within the general theme of hope, I’d like briefly to bring up a handful things that have given me hope as I look forward to 2025.
The National Office is making a considerable investment in technology, tools, initiatives and partnerships to be able to assist us in various parts of our work of getting our message out as well as identifying those who might be able to help us in our work.
We’re already getting better data to inform our appeals, outreach, and thank yous, to retain our current donors, expand our direct mail house file, help us attract new and younger supporters, like the iGiveCatholic crowdfunding platform, and to provide older supporters with planned giving opportunities that do not impact their quality of life.
The National Office now has a full complement of diocesan impact team members to be able to enhance coordination in our common work and to support your offices with any questions you may have, for example, in using the Virtuous system, direct mail resources, planned giving tools, the MCP (Mission Cooperative Plan) app, easy-to-share resources for social media and diocesan websites, as well as comprehensive materials for World Mission Sunday that go beyond the posters and envelopes. Because we are well aware of diocesan directors’ essential role in missionary animation and growth, as well as of the fact that many of you wear multiple hats within your diocese, the diocesan impact team is also working on a series of personalized online training videos. These will help newly appointed diocesan directors get up to speed on the essential responsibilities of the role and the primacy and priority of the Pope’s missions and mandate in canon law vis-à-vis the various other collections for the work of the Church in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The videos will also assist staff in mastering the use of the new tools and technologies designed to make all our work easier. The diocesan impact team is a big investment meant to make sure we’re hearing you better and are doing more to help make your job easier and hopefully even more effective. They, and all of us, are at your service.
Bringing Fire Everywhere
I’d like to conclude these remarks by recalling what Pope Francis has written in his latest encyclical Dilexit Nos, which was published on October 24, in the days immediately after World Mission Sunday. In this encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he wrote extensively about the connection between devotion to the Sacred Heart and the missionary dimension of Christian life. He did so in a way that was hugely energizing to me and I hope will be a boost to all of us with regard to our missionary vocation and labors.
The Holy Father stated, “The enduring relevance of devotion to the heart of Christ is especially evident in the work of evangelization.” He cited the example of Saint Daniele Comboni, founder of the Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus, whom the Holy Father said “discovered in the mystery of the heart of Jesus the source of strength for his missionary commitment” (160).
Pope Francis added, “The flames of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus expand through the Church’s missionary outreach, which proclaims the message of God’s love revealed in Christ.” He quoted Saint Vincent de Paul, who taught that “the heart of our Lord … disposes us to go as he went…. He sends us, like [the apostles], to bring fire everywhere” (207).
Mission, Pope Francis eloquently continued in one of the most beautiful passages of the encyclical, is “a radiation of the love of the heart of Christ” and “requires missionaries who are themselves in love and who, enthralled by Christ, feel bound to share this love that has changed their lives” (209). “The greatest desire of every missionary of souls,” he added, is “to be able to speak of Christ, by witness or by word, in such a way that others seek to love him. For a heart that loves, this is not a duty but an irrepressible need” 210). We cannot help but make our own, he underlined, St. Paul’s words, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16) as well as Jeremiah’s “Within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones” (Jer 20:9).
The Holy Father concluded by reminding us, missionaries across the globe, as well as every Catholic, “Jesus is calling you and sending you forth to spread goodness in our world. … Wherever you may be, you can hear his call and realize that he is sending you forth to carry out that mission. He himself told us, ‘I am sending you out’ (Lk 10:3). It is part of our being friends with him. For this friendship to mature, however, it is up to you to let him send you forth on a mission in this world. … Never forget that Jesus is at your side at every step of the way. … He will always be there to encourage and accompany you. He has promised, … ‘For I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Mt 28:20) (215).
So let us all indeed take consolation in the love of the heart of Christ as we continue with the life-changing work of The Pontifical Mission Societies. And filled with the fire of that love, let us seek through all our work to bring that fire to the ends of the earth, beginning within our own dioceses and parishes, as we seek to become the “radiation of the love of the heart of Christ” in all we do.
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