The Changing Mission
The third Sunday in October is one of the most important non-liturgical days in the Catholic Church’s year: it is World Mission Sunday.

Members of the Missionaries of Charity cheer as Pope Francis arrives to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for an evening prayer service. (CNS photo/Tony Gentile, Reuters)
Traditionally, Mission Sunday is a day of prayer for the evangelising mission of the Church, especially in regions where the faith was yet to be heard.
At Masses throughout the world, a collection is held for the Pontifical Mission Society (PMS), which disburses funds to the Church’s mission territories, including Southern Africa.
These collections are held also in our region; more often than not, the local Church has received more from the PMS funds than it collected for it. As a Church that aims for financial self-sufficiency, our goal must be to reverse this.
In the past, regions such as Southern Africa benefited richly from the work of missionaries. Irish, English, German, Austrian, Dutch, French, Italian and American missionaries especially took the lead in building and sustaining our local Church — and not only in transmitting the faith but also in setting up a system of social services, particularly in the fields of education and health.
Missionaries from other places — including Africa, Asia and Latin America—have followed these pioneers.
The Southern African Church is grateful to those priests and religious who left their homes to serve the Lord in mission fields. Especially on Mission Sunday, we must offer our prayers of gratitude for these missionaries.
But the nature of the Church’s missionary activity is changing. The Church in countries which in the past generously sent so many of their priests and religious to missionary regions, and helped fund their activities, no longer has the human resources to do so.
In many European countries the Church no longer attracts enough vocations to sustain itself, never mind to send missionaries into the world. Indeed, the Church in Europe increasingly needs the influx of priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America to meet pastoral and sacramental needs.
Moreover, with religion being sidelined in public discourse in many European countries, and ignorance about the Catholic faith on the rise, the sources of missionaries in the past are slowly becoming missionary territories. The Good News will have to be brought again to the people who once spread it.
However, the Church in the developing world can barely spare priests. The Church in Europe used to have a surplus of priests and religious whose dreams of being missionaries could be fulfilled; the Church in the traditional mission territories has no such oversupply.
The missionary needs of the Church are changing and expanding. Besides bringing the faith of salvation through Christ to people who haven’t heard it, the Church has to make the Good News heard in a global marketplace in which the cases for no religion or other religions are aggressively pronounced.
The Church’s missionary efforts must adapt accordingly, in terms of the resources at its disposal and the messages it needs to convey in different contexts.
The Church calls on all of us to evangelise — the primary purpose of mission — but it also needs dedicated, trained missionaries.
One way can be found in the practices of Protestant and Evangelical churches which utilise dedicated lay missionaries, often with families, to build up their churches in foreign lands.
The Catholic Church, so used to consecrated men and women to do its missionary work, has no tradition of such a lay missionary ministry. A model of how it can work in the Catholic Church is provided by the Neocatechumenal Way which sends missionary families to foreign lands, including South Africa.
The local Church’s evangelising efforts, however, must retain at their foundation the work of religious congregations. Especially in this Year of Consecrated Life we must work and pray for vocations to the consecrated and clerical ministry.
Take the time to survey the advertisements placed in this issue (and in every edition of The Southern Cross) by various religious congregations which offer many options to young people with a call to the consecrated life.
The various charisms of these congregations give us a picture of why it is so important that they thrive, for without them and their dedicated members who till in the vineyard of the Lord, the mission of our local Church will be impoverished.
On Mission Sunday, we will do well to keep this in our minds and prayers.
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