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Message of the Holy Father Francis for World
Missionary Day, 29.01.2021
The following is the message of the Holy Father
Francis for the 95 th World Missionary Day, to
be held on Sunday 17 October 2021:
Message of the Holy Father
“We cannot but speak about what we have seen and
heard” (Acts 4:20)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Once we experience the power of God’s love, and
recognize his fatherly presence in our personal
and community life, we cannot help but proclaim
and share what we have seen and heard. Jesus’
relationship with his disciples and his
humanity, as revealed to us in the mystery of
his Incarnation, Gospel and Paschal Mystery,
shows us the extent to which God loves our
humanity and makes his own our joys and
sufferings, our hopes and our concerns (cf.
Gaudium et Spes, 22). Everything about Christ
reminds us that he knows well our world and its
need for redemption, and calls us to become
actively engaged in this mission: “Go therefore
to the highways and byways, and invite everyone
you find” (Mt 22:9). No one is excluded, no one
need feel distant or removed from this
compassionate love.
The experience of the Apostles
The history of evangelization began with the
Lord’s own passionate desire to call and enter
into friendly dialogue with everyone, just as
they are (cf. Jn 15:12-17). The Apostles are the
first to tell us this; they remembered even the
day and the hour when they first met him: “It
was about four o’clock in the afternoon” (Jn
1:39). Experiencing the Lord’s friendship,
watching him cure the sick, dine with sinners,
feed the hungry, draw near to the outcast, touch
the unclean, identify with the needy, propose
the Beatitudes and teach in a new and
authoritative way, left an indelible mark on
them, awakening amazement, expansive joy and a
profound sense of gratitude. The prophet
Jeremiah describes this experience as one of a
consuming awareness of the Lord’s active
presence in our heart, impelling us to mission,
regardless of the sacrifices and
misunderstandings it may entail (cf. 20:7-9).
Love is always on the move, and inspires us to
share a wonderful and hope-filled message: “We
have found the Messiah” (Jn 1:41).
With Jesus, we too have seen, heard and
experienced that things can be different. Even
now, he has inaugurated future times, reminding
us of an often forgotten dimension of our
humanity, namely, that “we were created for a
fulfilment that can only be found in love”
(Fratelli Tutti, 68). A future that awakens a
faith capable of inspiring new initiatives and
shaping communities of men and women who, by
learning to accept their own frailty and that of
others, promote fraternity and social friendship
(cf. ibid., 67). The ecclesial community reveals
its splendour whenever it recalls with gratitude
that the Lord loved us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19).
“The loving predilection of the Lord surprises
us, and surprise by its very nature cannot be
owned or imposed by us… Only in this way can the
miracle of gratuitousness, the gratuitous gift
of self, blossom. Nor can missionary fervour
ever be obtained as a result of reasoning or
calculation. To be ‘in a state of mission’ is a
reflection of gratitude” (Message to the
Pontifical Mission Societies, 21 May 2020).
Even so, things were not always easy. The first
Christians began the life of faith amid
hostility and hardship. Experiences of
marginalization and imprisonment combined with
internal and external struggles that seemed to
contradict and even negate what they had seen
and heard. Yet, rather than a difficulty or an
obstacle leading them to step back or close in
on themselves, those experiences impelled them
to turn problems, conflicts and difficulties
into opportunities for mission. Limitations and
obstacles became a privileged occasion for
anointing everything and everyone with the
Spirit of the Lord. Nothing and no one was to be
excluded from the message of liberation.
We have a vivid testimony to all this in the
Acts of the Apostles, a book which missionary
disciples always have within easy reach. There
we read how the fragrance of the Gospel spread
as it was preached, awakening the joy that the
Spirit alone can bestow. The Book of Acts
teaches us to endure hardship by clinging firmly
to Christ, in order to grow in the “conviction
that God is able to act in any circumstance,
even amid apparent setbacks” and in the
certainty that “all those who entrust themselves
to God will bear good fruit” (Evangelii Gaudium,
279).
The same holds true for us: our own times are
not easy. The pandemic has brought to the fore
and amplified the pain, the solitude, the
poverty and the injustices experienced by so
many people. It has unmasked our false sense of
security and revealed the brokenness and
polarization quietly growing in our midst. Those
who are most frail and vulnerable have come to
feel even more so. We have experienced
discouragement, disillusionment and fatigue; nor
have we been immune from a growing negativity
that stifles hope. For our part, however, “we do
not proclaim ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord
and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2
Cor 4:5). As a result, in our communities and in
our families, we can hear the powerful message
of life that echoes in our hearts and proclaims:
“He is not here, but has risen (Lk 24:6)! This
message of hope shatters every form of
determinism and, to those who let themselves be
touched by it, bestows the freedom and boldness
needed to rise up and seek with creativity every
possible way to show compassion, the
“sacramental” of God’s closeness to us, a
closeness that abandons no one along the side of
the road.
In these days of pandemic, when there is a
temptation to disguise and justify indifference
and apathy in the name of healthy social
distancing, there is urgent need for the mission
of compassion, which can make that necessary
distancing an opportunity for encounter, care
and promotion. “What we have seen and heard”
(Acts 4:20), the mercy we have experienced, can
thus become a point of reference and a source of
credibility, enabling us to recover a shared
passion for building “a community of belonging
and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy
and our resources (Fratelli Tutti, 36). The
Lord’s word daily rescues and saves us from the
excuses that can plunge us into the worst kind
of skepticism: “Nothing changes, everything
stays the same”. To those who wonder why they
should give up their security, comforts and
pleasures if they can see no important result,
our answer will always remain the same: “Jesus
Christ has triumphed over sin and death and is
now almighty. Jesus Christ is truly alive”
(Evangelii Gaudium, 275) and wants us to be
alive, fraternal, and capable of cherishing and
sharing this message of hope. In our present
circumstances, there is an urgent need for
missionaries of hope who, anointed by the Lord,
can provide a prophetic reminder that no one is
saved by himself.
Like the Apostles and the first Christians, we
too can say with complete conviction: “We cannot
but speak about what we have seen and heard”
(Acts 4:20). Everything we have received from
the Lord is meant to be put to good use and
freely shared with others. Just as the Apostles
saw, heard and touched the saving power of Jesus
(cf. 1 Jn 1:1-4), we too can daily touch the
sorrowful and glorious flesh of Christ. There we
can find the courage to share with everyone we
meet a destiny of hope, the sure knowledge that
the Lord is ever at our side. As Christians, we
cannot keep the Lord to ourselves: the Church’s
evangelizing mission finds outward fulfilment in
the transformation of our world and in the care
of creation.
An invitation to each of us
The theme of this year’s World Mission Day – “We
cannot but speak about what we have seen and
heard” (Acts 4:20), is a summons to each of us
to “own” and to bring to others what we bear in
our hearts. This mission has always been the
hallmark of the Church, for “she exists to
evangelize” (SAINT PAUL VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi,
14). Our life of faith grows weak, loses its
prophetic power and its ability to awaken
amazement and gratitude when we become isolated
and withdraw into little groups. By its very
nature, the life of faith calls for a growing
openness to embracing everyone, everywhere. The
first Christians, far from yielding to the
temptation to become an elite group, were
inspired by the Lord and his offer of new life
to go out among the nations and to bear witness
to what they had seen and heard: the good news
that the Kingdom of God is at hand. They did so
with the generosity, gratitude and nobility
typical of those who sow seeds in the knowledge
that others will enjoy the fruit of their
efforts and sacrifice. I like to think that
“even those who are most frail, limited and
troubled can be missionaries in their own way,
for goodness can always be shared, even if it
exists alongside many limitations” (Christus
Vivit, 239).
On World Mission Day, which we celebrate each
year on the third Sunday of October, we recall
with gratitude all those men and women who by
their testimony of life help us to renew our
baptismal commitment to be generous and joyful
apostles of the Gospel. Let us remember
especially all those who resolutely set out,
leaving home and family behind, to bring the
Gospel to all those places and people athirst
for its saving message.
Contemplating their missionary witness, we are
inspired to be courageous ourselves and to beg
“the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers
into his harvest” (Lk 10:2). We know that the
call to mission is not a thing of the past, or a
romantic leftover from earlier times. Today too
Jesus needs hearts capable of experiencing
vocation as a true love story that urges them to
go forth to the peripheries of our world as
messengers and agents of compassion. He
addresses this call to everyone, and in
different ways. We can think of the peripheries
all around us, in the heart of our cities or our
own families. Universal openness to love has a
dimension that is not geographical but
existential. Always, but especially in these
times of pandemic, it is important to grow in
our daily ability to widen our circle, to reach
out to others who, albeit physically close to
us, are not immediately part of our “circle of
interests” (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 97). To be on
mission is to be willing to think as Christ
does, to believe with him that those around us
are also my brothers and sisters. May his
compassionate love touch our hearts and make us
all true missionary disciples.
May Mary, the first missionary disciple,
increase in all the baptized the desire to be
salt and light in our lands (cf. Mt 5:13-14).
Rome, Saint John Lateran, 6 January 2021,
Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord.
FRANCIS
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