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MISSIONARY
ACTIVITY The Catholic
Church is missionary by nature. By his suffering and death on the cross
Jesus flung open the doors to heaven so that every human being may be
saved through “the knowledge of the truth” (CCC 851). Because in his
lifetime he could announce this salvation to only a few, he established
the Church in his Apostles, instructing them, “Go therefore and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have
commanded you” (Mt 28:19). Guided by the Holy Spirit, the Church has
gone her way over the centuries, sometimes with an uncertain step, but
never forgetting the great work she was established to complete: “As the
Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Jn 20:21; cf. CCC 857-858). Vatican
Council II’s Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad Gentes,
opens with these words: “Having been divinely sent to the nations that
she might be ‘the universal sacrament of salvation,’ the Church, in
obedience to the command of her founder (Mt 16:15) . . . strives
to preach the Gospel to all men” (quoted in CCC 849). Missionary work is
a particular form of evangelization, the preaching of the Good News, which
forms the Church’s essential task. The word “mission” derives from
the Latin mittere, which means “to send”; missionaries are messengers
whom the local or universal Church sends to those who do not know Jesus
Christ or have rejected him. Missionary work is the responsibility of the
whole People of God, of individual laity and lay associations as well as
missionary institutes. National
church agencies often support home missions, that is, dioceses that cannot
provide basic pastoral services without outside help. In the United
States, the Catholic Church Extension Society, the Black and Indian
Mission Bureau, and the American Board of Catholic Missions provide such
assistance, collecting funds in wealthier areas and distributing them
where the Church is weak in material resources. However, the classic
missionary is the man or woman (most often a priest or religious) who
makes a lifelong commitment and journeys “to the ends of the earth”
(Acts 1:8), as American Maryknollers went to China. This is the mission ad
gentes, “to the nations.” Nature of
Missionary Work • For many centuries the missionary’s task, though
difficult and dangerous, was clear. He was to preach the Gospel, to
improve the lives of the people (e.g., by establishing schools and
hospitals), and to found new Christian communities that, in time, would
take root and flourish. Since World War II, though, the concept of mission
has changed markedly. Local churches – dioceses and prefectures –
exist throughout the world. By and large, missionaries no longer go out
alone or in small groups to establish the Church among pagans. They go,
rather, as emissaries from one local church to another. Thus, an American
priest might volunteer to staff a parish in Guatemala, under the authority
of the Guatemalan diocesan bishop. In 1990, Pope
John Paul II published a lengthy encyclical, On the Permanent Validity of
the Church’s Missionary Mandate, Redemptoris Missio, to illuminate and
explain this new missionary situation. He notes the proliferation of local
churches but, as the title suggests, insists on the continuing need for
the traditional missionary’s services. The Holy Father stresses the
Church’s obligation to evangelize people in geographical and cultural
areas that “lack indigenous Christian communities” or have
“communities . . . so small as not to be a clear sign of a
Christian presence.” He singles out the young, the poor, urban dwellers,
migrants, and refugees for special attention, adding that the contemporary
mission ad gentes should be chiefly directed toward Asia (37). Somewhat
surprisingly, John Paul also speaks of reevangelizing countries with a
long Christian tradition “where entire groups of the baptized have lost
a living sense of the faith, or even no longer consider themselves members
of the Church, and live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel”
(33). The increasingly secular tone of American society, and its
disturbing fascination with sex, violence, and easy gratification, could
make the United States “mission territory” in the next century. A
misinterpretation of Vatican II’s call for greater Church involvement in
the world has fostered the spread of an incomplete notion of mission in
recent decades. Some theologians have argued that the goal of mission
should be the relief of poverty and the elimination of unjust social
structures, not conversion to the Catholic faith. The Pope bluntly
disavows this notion, saying: “The poor are hungry for God, not just for
bread and freedom. Missionary activity must first of all bear witness to
and proclaim salvation in Christ, and establish local Churches which then
become means of liberation in every sense” (83). The U.S. bishops had
made the same point a few years earlier in their own pastoral statement on
the missions, To the Ends of the Earth: “Often those who have not heard
the Gospel are doubly poor, doubly hungry, doubly oppressed. . . .
Their hunger is not only for bread and rice, but also for the Word that
gives meaning to their existence” (30). Continuing
Need for Missionary Work • The Holy Father has emphasized the importance
of ecumenism in preparing for the third millennium of Christianity. The
second millennium began with the Great Schism of East and West –
Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism – in 1054 and at midpoint saw the
Protestant Reformation. Surely a great and hope-filled drive for Christian
unity should mark the new age. But how can missionaries continue working
to bring groups and individuals into full union with the Church in this
atmosphere? Why must everyone be Catholic? Will not other Christian
churches find this zeal an insult? Can people not be saved as Orthodox, as
Anglicans, as Protestants, just as they can as Muslims, Buddhists, and
animists? Indeed they
can, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (819) and Redemptoris Missio
(55) explicitly state. Salvation is the work of the Spirit, who disposes
as he wills. Nevertheless, the Church has been sent to all of humanity to
extend Christ’s saving work, a task she can never ignore. Vatican II’s
Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, says without equivocation:
“For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the
universal help towards salvation, that the fullness of the means of
salvation can be obtained” (3). The Church must engage in dialogue with
all Christians in a most earnest search for unity (cf. CCC 813-822).
Moreover, “the Church proposes; she imposes nothing” (Redemptoris
Missio, 39); but she is the “seed, sign and instrument” (Redemptoris
Missio, 18) of the kingdom, which entails a solemn responsibility always
to evangelize. Sadly, the
Church in the United States has lost much of its missionary impetus in
recent years, despite the efforts of the Society for the Propagation of
the Faith, which administers the celebration of World Mission Sunday every
October, and the Holy Childhood Association, which links Catholic children
in a missionary spirit with the children of other lands. According to the
U.S. Catholic Mission Association, there were 9,447 American missionaries
in the field in 1968. By 1992 the number had shrunk to 5,441, a forty-two
percent drop. Despite a rapidly growing number of lay missionaries – 406
in 1992 – the U.S. effort seemed dispirited and confused as the third
millennium approached. The relativism that treats all Christian
denominations and all religions as equal instruments of salvation weighed
heavily on it. Faith and hope bid us repeat that the Church is missionary by nature. Therefore, the Church will enter into every culture, accepting what is good, purifying what is less so. If the United States no longer sends missionaries in the year 2050 or 2150, then Africa or China or South America will. In her first two thousand years, the Church has made disciples of only about twenty percent of humanity, and many are “cultural Catholics,” or Catholics in name only. There is still a universe to win for Christ. “Missionary activity is nothing else, and nothing less, than the manifestation of God’s plan, its epiphany and realization in the world and in history; that by which God, through mission, clearly brings to its conclusion the history of salvation” (Ad Gentes, 9).
See:
Church, Membership in; Church, Nature, Origin, and Structure of;
Ecumenism; Evangelization; Redemption. Suggested
Readings: CCC 813-822, 849-858. Vatican Council II, Decree on Ecumenism,
Unitatis Redintegratio; Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad
Gentes. John Paul II, On the Permanent Validity of the Church’s
Missionary Mandate, Redemptoris Missio. National Conference of Catholic
Bishops, To the Ends of the Earth. David
M. Byers Russell
Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright ©
1997, Our Sunday Visitor.
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