A new vision: Everybody a missionary

How many of us remember those Catholic missionary magazines of days gone by, with their stirring stories of fearless Fathers and self-sacrificing Sisters bringing the faith and western civilisation to the unsaved “natives” of Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America?

Nuns are pictured working on an issue of The Field Afar in this undated photo. The publication was the predecessor to Maryknoll magazine, which is marking its 100th anniversary in 2007. Maryknoll magazine, with a circulation of 500,000, reports on the work of missionaries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. (CNS photo/courtesy of Maryknoll)

Pictures always abounded: a burly, often bearded Father in his white cassock somewhere on the savannah, possibly smoking a pipe (to keep away mosquitoes!) building yet another church; Sister in full, usually white, habit (but no anti-malarial pipe in sight) dosing out medicine to a sick woman in a mission hospital.

The names and places changed, but the theme was the same: conversion to Christianity and civilisation is never-ending and essential, so please good laypeople back home: donate money to your favourite missionary!

By the 1960s this was all changing. Fewer places had never encountered the Gospel. Colonialism was dying. The unfortunate, perhaps inevitable, cooperation between the Church and colonial powers was generating anti-Church hostility from the new (usually mission-educated) post-colonial elite. And Vatican II was about to change the way we all thought and did mission.

They say that sometimes things must change to stay the same.  Vatican II certainly did not abolish mission—if anything the Council expanded and adapted it to new circumstances and broadened the definition of who was a missionary to all Catholics. Ad Gentes (1965), the decree on mission activity, affirmed that mission was needed more than ever.

However, what the Council did was to link mission to a much bigger picture and draw in a much wider group of people as partners in evangelisation. As a serving church at the service of the whole of humanity, this historic dimension of mission was re-emphasised.

With a more open attitude to other Christians, to other religions and all people of good will, the Church encouraged cooperation between herself and these “others” in the service of human need. After all, did we not affirm that God’s grace and the risen presence of Christ touched all?

Missionaries themselves were charged with shifting their own style of direct evangelisation. Central to this was the need to inculturate the Gospel.

Where once conversion to Christianity was de facto identical to conversion to Western culture, Vatican II insisted that Christ should be proclaimed within all cultures. Adaptation, within reasonable limits and without watering down the essentials, was to become the norm. Liturgy in the vernacular and acceptably diversified forms of worship (including music, instruments and dance) expressed this most clearly.

Another theme that the Council stressed was respectful dialogue between Catholicism and other religions (even Protestantism!). Part of the mission of the Church was to promote areas of common ground between faith communities in areas such as human and social development, as well as the promotion of justice— a shift from colonialism to integral liberation.

And, on yet another level, the Council emphasised that mission was a task for all Catholics, not just missionary clergy and religious. Lay people were also by nature missionaries, because by baptism they shared in the common priesthood of all believers.

Some of them would take up the role directly, as lay missioners in foreign countries. Many of these laity would have better skills—in education, medical care or development work—than the Fathers, Brothers and Sisters who had courageously paved the way.

In the past the laity’s role, as they paged enthralled through the missionary magazines, was to pray for the missions, contribute to them if they could, and perhaps consider, if they were still single, a missionary vocation.

Now they too had their own mission, even if they could not go off to far-off places: bearing witness to Christ as laypeople in their own societies (often secular and increasingly in need of what John Paul II would call the “new evangelisation”) in the public realm (politics and business) and through their witness to Christian values in their private lives.

A challenge: If you were editor of a missionary magazine today, what stories would you feature and what pictures would you show?