All over the world, this Sunday, Catholic communities will meet around the Eucharistic table to pray for the missions and, in essence, to pray for Church. For the eightieth time the Church will mark World Mission Sunday. The observance is significant.

Sixteen years ago, John Paul II, in Redemptoris Missio (RM), sought to rouse the Church to fulfill its “missionary mandate”. In an encyclical notable for its animation, the Pope stressed the right and need of the Church to be missionary—to serve humanity by revealing to all the love of God made visible and present in Jesus Christ.

 To hesitate to preach the Gospel because it might offend some is to misunderstand what the Church’s preaching is all about. “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel,” (1 Corinthians 9:16) says St Paul.

In its missionary activity, the Church gives first place to proclaiming the Gospel to the vast multitude of people who do not know Christ—the Redeemer of humanity. Its desire is that all nations will come to see the salvation promised by Jesus.

When John Paul wrote Redemptoris Missio, however, he was cognisant of the growing alienation of men and women from God and from the Church in the formerly Christianised world. He did consider whether there was not a “single missionary situation” (RM 32).

While the mission to the peoples of the world cannot but remain paramount, it is evident that 16 years after the encyclical, the need for the Gospel to be proclaimed in our midst has grown even greater. The “far ends of the earth” can be as close as outside our doors.

Earlier this month Pope Benedict XVI addressing 350 young people, who had participated in a “Jesus in the Centre” mission that saw them proclaiming the Gospel on the streets of Rome, called them young “missionaries”.

He told them: “I rejoice over your joyful commitment to proclaim the Gospel on the streets and squares, in schools and hospitals, as well as in young Romans’ places of recreation.”

Laventille Devotions

The Jesus Explosion, the Laventille Devotions which this year were preceded by a procession through the streets of the Laventille area and which ended last Sunday with a crusade at St Barb’s Basketball Court, the Praise and Worship Conference of the People of Praise are all no less missionary. Mission Sunday offers the local Church an opportunity to thank God also for the missionary spirit that exists among us.

The situation in Trinidad and Tobago cannot be far different from that in Australia where a recently published study of Generation Y (persons born between 1976 and 1990) indicated that this group “is the first in the last 100 years in which the majority have no memory of frequent church attendance”.

The study identified the social forces of secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism as having greater impact on young people than traditional religion. At the same time that this report was published the findings of a US survey prompted the news wire headline: “For the first time, unmarried households reign in US”.

All the signs are there in today’s permissive culture of a growing distancing of contemporary society from the good news of the Gospel—the good news which enables men and women to know who they are and what is right and wrong.

The problems are not always outside of the Church, of course: sometimes indifference among its members and a poorly honed faith are obstacles in themselves to passing on the Christian faith.

In the present situation the Church must find ever new creative ways of proclaiming the Gospel.