Mission Sunday
Today is mission Sunday throughout the Catholic world. It was the wish of Jesus that the gospel should have a universal outreach: "Go ye therefore, teach ye all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The unselfishness at the heart of the gospel lifts our eyes to a wider world.
This outreach expressed itself very eloquently through the Missionary Movement. Thousands upon thousands, generation after generation, left Ireland to spread the gospel abroad. Right through the 30s, 40s and 50s, Irish missionaries were spectacularly successful in their undertakings. And their activities were not confined to specific missionary activities like preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. In many African countries, for example, Missionary sisters put in place entire educational and health care systems which were efficient, effective and caring. The translated into reality that vision voiced by Jesus in today's gospel: "Anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant."
Professor Joe Lee, in his book Ireland 1912-1982, marvels at the achievements of the Irish missionaries in the 20th century. By the 1950s, Lee remarks, Ireland at home was a stagnant and failed entity. Yet these Irish people abroad were inventive and productive to an incredible degree.
They were of course a highly motivated group of people, many of whom achieved and experienced a freedom in Africa that they could never have expected to achieve at home. This was true in particular of women. The suffocating social restraints of the Ireland of the 1950s lifted under the bright African skies and great energy was released and creatively harnessed at the service of humanity. In fact missionaries themselves will be the first to admit that they received more from Africa and the missions than they ever gave.
Today, 100 years after the first missionaries went there, Africa is now perhaps the most vibrant section of the Catholic Church. The map of the Catholic Church has been redrawn. 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. In the words of the late John Paul, Europe needs to be re-evangelised. 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 beginning 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.
This has been another hobby horse of the late John Paul II also. Again he recognised that Europe was all but lost to Christianity. He has frequently quoted Paul 6th's famous phrase: "Each new generation is a new continent to be won for Christ." As the baptism ceremony puts it, the first preachers of the gospel will be the parents of every child. "They will be the first teachers of their child in the ways of faith; may they also be 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 stated. What we do rather than what we say will bear witness to the gospel working, or failing to work in our lives.
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. 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.
So, the major 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 so 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.