Today, the Catholic Church celebrates the 27th anniversary of the death and birth into eternal life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, the great foundress of the Missionaries of Charity.
She once said to her religious sisters, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. God still loves the world and sends you and me to be his love.”
That sums up not just the charism of the Missionaries of Charity but the great commission of the Church: to love others as Christ has loved us first. Christ sends us out not just with a message but a moral fire.
We witnessed that missionary blaze in St. Teresa of Calcutta, who powerfully proclaimed the challenging message of Christlike love at the United Nations, in Stockholm winning the Nobel Peace Prize, in front of presidents and prime ministers, before future leaders at Harvard and in countless prestigious and humble venues across the globe.
We also beheld her movingly put that kerygma, her reflection of Christ to the world, into body language, caring for the dying, lepers, AIDS patients, orphans, untouchables, victims of war and so many others.
Her feast is an opportunity for the whole Church to reflect on our call to be missionaries of divine and human love, to carry on the mission Christ first gave to his Mother, then to the 12, then 72, then 500, and finally the whole Church on Pentecost.
Her feast is also a fitting day to announce some beautiful news, that the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization has appointed me the new national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, which include the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, the Society of St. Peter the Apostle (for priests), the Missionary Childhood Association (for children) and the Missionary Union of Priests and Religious.
The four societies are a global network of prayer and charity at the service of the Holy Father in support of the 1,100 missionary territories throughout the world. We help build churches, form present and future priests and religious, sustain fledging missionary dioceses, and erect schools and catechetical centers and more.
I was approached to serve as the new national director as I was helping to lead the recent National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, the 65-day historic missionary effort to bring Jesus out of our churches into the streets to encounter those whom he does not regularly see within Catholic houses of worship.
From the Atlantic and the Pacific Coasts, the Canadian and Mexican borders, the other pilgrims and I were witnesses that the Church’s mission is not just to bring to the world the saving words of God but actually the Word made flesh himself.
I think it is quite fitting that I got confirmation of my appointment verbally from Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, at the beginning of the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, where he was Pope Francis’ legate to the congress and where he preached the closing Mass specifically on the connection between the Eucharist and mission.
To live a Catholic life, he emphasized, is to live a Eucharistic life, and a Eucharistic life is a missionary life. We’re called to imitate Jesus’ Eucharistic self-giving and make our life, in communion with his, a gift for others. There’s a connection between the “Amen” we give to Jesus when we receive him in Holy Communion and the “Amen” we say to God’s blessing at the end of Mass, as we are sent out to announce the Gospel of the Lord.
This connection between the Eucharist and mission is clearly seen in the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, who went from Mass and adoration out on a mission of love, convinced that the same Jesus who said, “This is my Body, given for you” tells us, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”
This connection is likewise seen in the life of perhaps the most famous American missionary of all time, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who was the national director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith for 16 years (1950-1966). Through his vast media apostolate, he did more than anyone to form U.S. Catholics in Catholic missionary identity and, with their help, support the Church’s efforts to spread the faith throughout the globe. It’s an indescribable honor to become a successor and, in a sense, an heir to his immense evangelizing legacy.
And this connection between Eucharist and mission has been emphasized by Pope Francis since the very beginning of his pontificate. In the speech to the College of Cardinals that was decisive in getting him elected, the-then Archbishop of Buenos Aires said that the “next pope” had to be a “man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out of herself to the existential peripheries, who helps her to be a fruitful mother living off the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”
When he published his programmatic apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” he expressed his “dream of a … missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures, can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world.” Everything is supposed to be part of the mission. That’s because, he emphasized, preaching the Gospel is the “first task of the Church.”
He felt compelled, however, to ask, “What would happen if we were to take these words seriously? We would realize that missionary outreach is paradigmatic for all the Church’s activity.” That’s how central mission is for the Church universal, and Pope Francis wants every Catholic to take it seriously.
To be a disciple of Jesus at all, he wrote in the exhortation, is to be a “missionary disciple.” He hoped each believer would be able to say with him, “I am a mission on this earth; this is the reason why I am here.”
He beautifully reminded us that the primary reason for evangelizing is the love and salvation of Jesus that we have received. “What kind of love,” he asked, “would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?” He added, “We have a treasure of life and love that cannot deceive and a message that cannot mislead or disappoint.”
We want to share the gift of the faith, he stated, because we are “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. … We know well that with Jesus, life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize.”
We are living at a time in which, 2,000 years after Christ’s ascension, only three of 10 people in the world are Christian and just three of 20 are Catholic. While churches, seminaries, convents and schools cannot be built fast enough in various countries of Africa and parts of Asia, multitudes in Europe and the Americas have lost their conviction that life is indeed richer with Jesus. The whole world has become again what it was in the first days of the Church: a vast missionary territory. There’s a need for diligent laborers to take in that harvest — for everyone to take seriously and act on Jesus’ command, “Go, make disciples.”
I’m honored to have been called to do that work full time. I hope to count on you as a willing collaborator, as, following the example and with the intercession of St. Teresa of Calcutta, we seek from our encounter with Jesus’ infinite love in the Holy Eucharist to become, like her and her sisters, his love in the world.
