ROME — Pope Francis said Thursday that “every Christian is called to be a missionary and witness to Christ” because evangelization is “the very identity of the Church.”
“This is the central point, the heart of Jesus’ teaching to the disciples, in view of their being sent forth into the world,” the pontiff said in his message for World Mission Day 2022, released today by the Vatican.
“The disciples are to be witnesses of Jesus, thanks to the grace of the Holy Spirit that they will receive. Wherever they go and in whatever place they find themselves,” Francis declared, and “every Christian is called to be a missionary and witness to Christ.”
“And the Church, the community of Christ’s disciples, has no other mission than that of bringing the Gospel to the entire world by bearing witness to Christ,” he added. “To evangelize is the very identity of the Church.”
“Each baptized person is called to mission, in the Church and by the mandate of the Church,” he said, and consequently, “mission is carried out together, not individually, in communion with the ecclesial community, and not on one’s own initiative.”
A nun from Missionaries of Charity carries a chair inside a hall after taking part in a special prayer on the occasion of Peace Day to mark the death anniversary of Mother Teresa at the Mother House in Kolkata on September 5, 2021. (DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images)
The disciples “are urged to live their personal lives in a missionary key: they are sent by Jesus to the world not only to carry out, but also and above all to live the mission entrusted to them; not only to bear witness, but also and above all to be witnesses of Christ,” he declared.
“In the final analysis, then, the true witness is the ‘martyr,’ the one who gives his or her life for Christ, reciprocating the gift that he has made to us of himself,” he added.
As he has done on numerous occasions, the pope drew a distinction between evangelization and proselytism, insisting that the former is good and the latter bad.
Jesus sent his disciples to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” Francis said, but they are sent “not to proselytize, but to proclaim; the Christian does not proselytize.”
“Persecuted in Jerusalem and then spread throughout Judea and Samaria, the first Christians bore witness to Jesus everywhere,” he noted.
The pope also tied missionary work to immigration, asserting that a multiethnic proclamation of the gospel is more effective than the witness of a single group.
Observing that “many Christians are forced to flee from their homelands to other countries,” Francis argued that “the presence of faithful of various nationalities enriches the face of parishes and makes them more universal, more Catholic.”
Christians carry out missionary work around an Olympics advertisement on July 25, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. (Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images)
“Consequently, the pastoral care of migrants should be valued as an important missionary activity that can also help the local faithful to rediscover the joy of the Christian faith they have received,” he contended.
In conclusion, the pope said he continues “to dream of a completely missionary Church, and a new era of missionary activity among Christian communities.”
“Indeed, would that all of us in the Church were what we already are by virtue of baptism: prophets, witnesses, missionaries of the Lord, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth!” he said.
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