Today is mission Sunday in the Catholic Church throughout the world. Christians are asked today to be aware of the fact that the gospel is still capable of firing the imagination of men and women, and prompting them to leave all for the gospel's sake. We are asked to support these men and women today through our prayers and through our contribution at the special collection held at all Masses.

However, at this time in the life of our Church, we must be conscious too of the need for evangilisation or mission at home. We can no longer confine our notion of missionary activity exclusively to foreign countries, as we call them. The average age of priests in Europe in now 70 years; 50 per cent of the priest in Tuam diocese are over 62. The average age of the priests in this diocese is 54. 72 per cent of the Catholic population in France never attend Mass. 67 per cent in Britain; 53 per cent in Germany. Our own attendance has dropped from 92% to 65% in 17 years. While our Mass attendance remains extraordinarily high by European standards, we are moving fairly rapidly towards the European pattern. Now there is a danger here of equating Church attendance with faith. We must recognise that one can be a good and sincere Christian without ever seeing the inside of a Church.

Nevertheless, we can safely take the statistics on churchgoing as some sort of barometer for measuring the condition of the Christian faith in Europe. And these statistics would seem to indicate that Christianity is receding rapidly throughout Europe, including Ireland, if less dramatically here. While Europe remains culturally Christian, it seems to be spiritually dead. By culturally Christian, I mean for example, that when people think of birth, marriage or death, they still automatically think of a Church, whether they are Christian in any meaningful sense or not. The Church still provides the stage and the social backdrop for the key events of our lives. But it functions as a convenient prop rather than a motivating force. And all indications would seem to suggest that Ireland is heading in the same direction. In Europe, however, while the Church survives as a cultural vessel, it has been largely emptied of its spiritual contents.

Today however the Church's understanding of Mission has broadened. As I have said, the map of Europe has been redrawn, as far as Christianity is concerned. Pope Paul VI was the first Christian leader to recognise this 20 years ago. The need today is not just to preach the gospel to those who have not heard it. A more urgent need is to preach the gospel to those who have forgotten it. Europe he said needs to be re-evangilised. The human being is born with a hunger for god. That is our nature. This hunger is part of what we are. That hunger is not being satisfied today. The challenge to the Church at the end of the 20th century is to seek out ways of satisfying that hunger, to seek out new ways of preaching the gospel. This will not be done by traditional missionaries.

John Paul II took up the same theme when he assumed office. Again he recognised that Europe was all but lost to Christianity. "Each new generation is a new continent to be won for Christ." he stated. As the baptism ceremony puts it, the first preachers of the gospel will be the parents of every child. "They will be the best of preachers if they bear witness to that faith by what they say and do." the ceremony concludes. This fits in too with Paul the sixths understanding of the present day mission: "People today are not looking for preacher but witnesses" he held. What we do rather than what we say will bear witness to the gospel working, or failing to work in our lives.

So we could be accused of adopting the behaviour of the ostrich if we focused exclusively today on Foreign Missions, at a time when the tide was going out at home before our own eyes. However, there is a value in lifting our eyes to other cultures and other lands, since the gospel was explicitly preached as a universal gospel from the very beginning. It was explicitly intended for the whole world. Simply because 'God loved the world so much that he sent his only son, not to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him.' So the gospel is an agent of salvation, saving the human race from its own selfishness and its inbuilt instinct for self-destruction. Today the gospel asks us to elevate our eyes from our own parochial difficulties and to share in the universal vision of God for human happiness.

And we are strengthened for our mission by the example of the first disciples. By our standards today, the first disciples were an ill-prepared lot. They were uneducated fishermen, by and large, lacking all the sophisticated techniques that we have at our disposal today, obviously. But their humanity, their flesh and blood, rather than any agent external to them, would be the agent of God's message. We have inherited that same humanity. Jesus had confidence in his message and in humanity. Jesus was dependant upon his first disciples. The gospel would have remained but a good idea were it not for them. Now we can readily understand that and we can admire and acknowledge the central role of the first disciples. But that is not the challenge facing us now. The challenge facing us today is to recognise that we are as central today to the spread of the good news as the disciples were in their day. God is as dependant upon us in our own day as he was upon the early disciples at the birth of the church. In fact the new missionary challenge facing the Church is far more daunting that ever faced the missionaries in Africa or South America. It will be a much slower and less rewarding task this time. The results will not be as instantaneous or as visible. But the same hunger is being addressed, a hunger that will only be satisfied by the bread of life, Jesus himself.