Courtney McGrailThe Extraordinary Year of Mercy is a fitting backdrop for this year’s World Mission Sunday, Pope Francis said in his message for the day, explaining how the Jubilee year invites us to consider the Church’s mission to non-Christians as a vast work of mercy.
He explained how we are all called to “go out” as missionary disciples, offering our talents, creativity, wisdom and experience to “bring the message of God’s tenderness and compassion to the entire human family”, and said that through our missionary call, the Church cares for those who do not know the Gospel, because she wants everyone to experience the Lord’s love and be saved.
Citing the bull with which he launched the Jubilee year, he recalled how the Church “is commissioned to announce the mercy of God, the beating heart of the Gospel” and to proclaim God’s mercy to everyone throughout the world.
Vulnerable
God has always turned in love towards the most vulnerable, he said, with his capacity to identify with the young, the marginalised, the poor and the oppressed showing his greatness and power most clearly. When speaking of the womb, he added, the Bible uses a word that signifies mercy, showing God’s love not merely as that of a father, but as something somehow maternal too: even when faced with his children’s weaknesses and infidelity, God’s heart is overcome with compassion.
God’s mercy is of course most completely expressed in its incarnation in the person of Jesus himself, the Pope said. Describing the Church as the community that “lives by the mercy of Christ”, he said that it is through Christ’s love that “the Church discovers its mandate, lives it and makes it known to all peoples through a respectful dialogue with every culture and religious belief”.
This merciful love, he said, is witnessed to today, as since the Church’s earliest days, by all manner of people, noting how great numbers of missionary women testify to that love’s maternal quality. Women and families, he said, often complement the evangelising and sacramental work of missions by expressing God’s mercy through fresh ways of helping individuals, families and communities, and especially through care for the poor.
Education, too, is key to missionary work, with evangelisation often beginning there, helping bring forth a new people who can evangelise others in turn, Pope Francis said, recalling that “Faith is God’s gift and not the result of proselytising; rather it grows thanks to the faith and charity of evangelisers who witness to Christ.”
All people have the right to receive the mercy of God that leads to salvation, he stressed, with this being all the more necessary in a world where so many injustices, wars, and humanitarian crises are in need of resolution. As such, the Pontiff said, the Gospel’s mandate to make disciples of all nations has not ceased, and we are committed to a renewed missionary impulse that calls us to go beyond our own comfort zones to reach the peripheries in need of the Gospel’s light.