Since 1926, our Catholic Church has celebrated World Mission Day. This is a special date instituted by Pope Pius XI to promote universal missionary and evangelizing action, as well as to collect funds for its development.
World Mission Day is celebrated on the penultimate Sunday of the month of October, which this year corresponds to Sunday the 20th. In his message for this Day, His Holiness, Pope Francis proposes the motto: “Go and invite everyone to the banquet.” (Mt 22:1-14) taken from the parable of the wedding banquet, where the king, seeing that the guests did not come to the celebration, sends his servants to invite “all those they find.”
This is what the evangelizing mission of the Church is all about. Pope Francis explains it to us this way: it is about going out to meet everyone, regardless of who they are, and inviting them to the great banquet that is Jesus the Eucharist; inviting them to encounter His love. This mission is the same one that Jesus Christ assigned to us before His ascension to heaven: “Go to every corner of the world and proclaim the Good News to the whole creation.” (Mark 16:15). This is the Christian mission par excellence: Evangelization.
This evangelization understood as sharing, not forcing, is also what His Holiness clarifies. Because he who invites does not force, but shares, and what we seek to share as Christians is the very beauty of God’s love; His salvation and mercy. Thus we must go out to meet others to embrace them and invite them to meet God, to offer them, from the first moment, an intimate closeness with the Father that we can only experience if we have previously found ourselves united to Him in communion; a communion and a joy that only the Holy Spirit can provide us.
Something mystical happens when we go on a mission; anyone who has had the opportunity to go on a mission knows it.
