October 2024: Points to Ponder
Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
6 October 2024
All of us, members of the Church, moved by the same Spirit, are consecrated, albeit in different ways, to be sent: by virtue of Baptism the Church’s own mission is entrusted to us. We are called and we are obliged to evangelise, and this fontal mission, which is the same for all Christians, must become our daily ‘care’, our constant and ever present concern.
How moving and encouraging it is to imagine the communities of early Christians, as they opened out to the world, which for the first time they looked on with new eyes: with the eyes of those who have come to understand that God’s love is to be expressed in the service for the good of our brothers and sisters. The memory of their experience moves me to repeat once again the main thought of the recent Encyclical: ‘For missionary activity renews the Church, revitalises faith and Christian identity and offers fresh enthusiasm and new incentive. Faith is strengthened when it is given to others!’ (n. 2). Yes, missionary activity offers us an extraordinary opportunity to rejuvenate and render more beautiful the Bride of Christ and, at the same time, it enables us to experience a faith that renews and strengthens our Christian life, precisely because it is given.
However, the faith which renews life and the mission that strengthens faith cannot remain as hidden treasures or as an exclusive experience of isolated Christians. Nothing is further from the mission than a Christian closed in on himself: if his faith is solid, it is sure to grow and must open out towards the mission.
Saint Pope John Paul II, Mission Sunday 1991
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Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
13 October 2024 • Prisoners’ Sunday
The People of God is a missionary people.
Christ could have asked his Father, and he would have immediately placed at his disposal ‘more than twelve legions of angels’ (Mt 26:53) to proclaim his redemption to the world. On purpose, in order to proclaim the Good News to humanity, He did not want to use any other voice than ours.
It is up to us, then, to proclaim the Gospel in this extraordinary period of human history, a truly unprecedented time, in which, with heights of progress never before reached, are associated with abysses of perplexity and despair that are also unprecedented. If ever there was a time when Christians, more than ever before, are called to be a light that illuminates the world, a city set on a mountain, salt that gives flavor to the lives of men (Mt 5:13-14), this, undoubtedly, is our time. We, in fact, possess the antidote to the pessimism, the dark omens, the discouragement and fear from which our time suffers.
The Good News is this: God loves us, he became man so that he could share our life and so that we could participate in his. He walks with us – every step of our way – making our distress his own, because he cares for us (1 Pt 5:7). Therefore, men are not alone, because God is present in all their history, that of peoples and that of individuals; and He will lead us, if we will allow Him, to an eternal happiness beyond all human hope.
Saint Pope Paul VI, Mission Sunday 1971
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Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
20 October 2024 • World Mission Sunday
Mission, we see, is a tireless going out to all men and women, in order to invite them to encounter God and enter into communion with him. Tireless! God, great in love and rich in mercy, constantly sets out to encounter all men and women, and to call them to the happiness of his kingdom, even in the face of their indifference or refusal. Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and messenger of the Father, went out in search of the lost sheep of the people of Israel and desired to go even further, in order to reach even the most distant sheep (cf. Jn 10:16). Both before and after his resurrection, he told his disciples, ‘Go!’, thus involving them in his own mission (cf. Lk 10:3; Mk 16:15). The Church, for her part, in fidelity to the mission she has received from the Lord, will continue to go to the ends of the earth, to set out over and over again, without ever growing weary or losing heart in the face of difficulties and obstacles.
Let us not forget that every Christian is called to take part in this universal mission by offering his or her own witness to the Gospel in every context, so that the whole Church can continually go forth with her Lord and Master to the ‘crossroads’ of today’s world. ‘Today’s drama in the Church is that Jesus keeps knocking on the door, but from within, so that we will let him out! Often we end up being an ‘imprisoning’ Church which does not let the Lord out, which keeps him as ‘its own’, whereas the Lord came for mission and wants us to be missionaries’
Pope Francis, Message for Mission Sunday 2024
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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
27 October 2024
Authentic missionary concern, the priority commitment of the Ecclesial Community, is linked to faithfulness to divine love, and this is true for every individual Christian, for every local community, for the particular Churches and for the entire People of God.
The generous readiness of disciples of Christ to undertake works of human and spiritual advancement draws vigour literally from the awareness of this common mission. These works, as the beloved John Paul II wrote in the Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, witness to ‘the soul of all missionary activity: love, which has been and remains the driving force of mission, and is also “the principle which must direct every action, and the end to which that action must be directed. When we act with a view to charity, or are inspired by charity, nothing is unseemly and everything is good”’ (n. 60).
Consequently, being missionaries means loving God with all one’s heart, even to the point, if necessary, of dying for him. How many priests, men and women Religious and lay people, have borne the supreme witness of love with martyrdom even in our times! Being missionaries means stooping down to the needs of all, like the Good Samaritan, especially those of the poorest and most destitute people, because those who love with Christ’s Heart do not seek their own interests but the glory of the Father and the good of their neighbour alone. Here lies the secret of the apostolic fruitfulness of missionary action that crosses frontiers and cultures, reaches peoples and spreads to the extreme boundaries of the world.
Pope Benedict XVI, Mission Sunday 2006