Not so long ago, the whole idea of missions and missionaries was associated with foreign lands, Africa, America and India. Missionaries were those who were sent abroad to preach the gospel to whose who had not yet heard of Christ. These men and women were seen to preach the gospel on our behalf. Today however the Church's understanding of Mission has broadened. The map of Christianity has been redrawn this century. Pope Paul the Sixth 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 never heard it. A more urgent challenge still is to preach the gospel to those millions who have now forgotten it. Europe, he said, needs to be re-evangelised.

Wherever you look on the map of Europe, you will see that the Church has seriously contracted in terms of active regular practice at any rate- in every country but our own over the last thirty years. And indeed here too, all arrows are pointing towards the exits. That may sound a bit of an overstatement in a country that still has 60%+ of its people attending Mass on a weekly basis. Yet thirty years ago, that figure stood at over 90%. So there has been a 30% decline in a mere 30 years. And, interestingly, this decline had established its own steady momentum long before contemporary scandals ever emerged. We could expect the scandals to have accelerated the decline. But the decline has its origins in factors and circumstances far wider and deeper than any set of scandals. We are witnessing the fairly rapid deChristianisation of a culture.

Last evening Des Kavanagh and Nollaigh Mac Congáil had a book launched in Kenny's across the road. The book is a record of the memoirs of one Charles McGlinchey, a craftsman from Clonmany in County Donegal. He was born in 1861 and died in 1954, a span of almost a century. Now that period witnessed Home Rule, 1916, Irish Independence, the Civil War, two world wars, the atomic bomb, and yet McGlinchey makes absolutely no reference to even one of these intensely significant events. Yet, as Brian Friel says in an introduction to the book, he does give an exact and lucid picture of a profound transition: a rural community in the process of shedding the last vestiges of a Gaelic past, and of an old Christianity that still cohabited with an older paganism, and of that community coming to an uneasy accommodation with the world of today, 'the buses, the cars, and the silk stockings', as Friel put it.

An equally profound transition is taking place in our own lifetime; perhaps an acceleration of the development McGlinchey observed over 100 years ago. But at its dept, the change involves a change in the ways the human being today feels about the world, about life, about death, about love, about sex, about the land, about God.

Now we can bemoan these changes. But that will serve not good. This changing world is the world to which the gospel must now be addressed. But, despite the changes, both outside ourselves and within the human soul and psyche, a fundamental element does not change: 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 start of the 21st 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. It will be done by ordinary men and women who are themselves convinced of the value of the gospel. Placing of the missionary responsibility of the shoulders of a special band is in fact an evasion of responsibility. Pope 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 preachers 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.

An obvious way of serving the gospel is to serve the Christian community through the ministries of that community. The six people about to be enrolled as Ministers of the Eucharist today will bring Christ to their brothers and sisters as surely as any of their missionary ancestors ever did. They will do it in a different way, but in a way that is no less authentic or no less valid for that. 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.

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