Pope Francis’s Effort to Revitalize Catholic Mission

Mission clarification

If Catholics are not engaged in mission to the extent that they should be, one reason might be that they just do not understand well enough what they are called to do. In response, Francis has tried to help Catholics understand, and he has done so in a number of ways.

First, in his own actions, Francis has demonstrated to the church what mission is. Most of what I will share in these pages are Francis’s words—his statements in speeches, homilies, and other addresses. But we cannot overlook his actions. He has visited prisons and refugee camps, promoted peace and interreligious cooperation, advocated for refugees and the environment, and every one of those other typical missionary activities just noted. He has done all these things and more, publically, as leader of the church. This points to something important about Francis’s understanding of the teaching office of the church. He says:

The Church conducts herself like Jesus. She does not teach theoretical lessons on love, on mercy. She does not spread to the world a philosophy, a way of wisdom. . . . Of course, Christianity is also all of this, but as an effect, by reflex. Mother Church, like Jesus, teaches by example, and the words serve to illuminate the meaning of her actions. Mother Church teaches us to give food and drink to those who are hungry and thirsty, to clothe those who are naked . . . to be close to those who are sick . . . to be close to those who are in prison . . . to be close to those who are neglected and die alone. ²

As pope, Francis has taught the church to carry out all of the different activities of mission by his own example; by doing so, he has helped the church see what mission is.

He has also helped the church understand what mission is by clarifying its essence. What is mission? Ultimately, it is a matter of communicating God’s love:

The Church’s first truth is the love of Christ. The Church makes herself a servant of this love and mediates it to all people. . . . Her primary task . . . is to introduce everyone to the great mystery of God’s mercy. ³

What is this people’s mission? It is to bring the hope and salvation of God to the world: to be a sign of the love of God who calls everyone to friendship with Him. ⁴

We are called to share with everyone his love, his tenderness, his goodness and his mercy. ⁵

My life, my attitude, the way of going through life, must really be a concrete sign of the fact that God is close to us. ⁶

The essence of mission is love, kindness, goodness, and commitment to the good of others—communicating these qualities in any one of an infinite number of ways, and doing so precisely through actions, that is, witness.

Talking about mission in these terms makes it easy to understand. It is something that any Christian, even a child, can latch on to. And Francis believes that “mission work . . . is also the task of children!” ⁷ because they too are part of the church. So maybe one’s particular calling is not interreligious dialogue or catechesis or directly promoting some form of the common good. “Well, then, ask yourself,” Francis in effect is saying, “what can you do to share better with others something of the light and warmth of God’s love? Find that thing, and you have found your mission.”

To make the idea of mission even more accessible, Francis emphasizes another basic characteristic of mission. Mission involves love, and love always involves closeness to other people. To engage in mission means “going forth,” coming out of ourselves and drawing near to others. It means closeness or encounter. “One cannot evangelize without closeness.” ⁸ This was his point when he famously told pastors to be shepherds with the smell of the sheep. ⁹ They need to be close to people. But his message on this point is really for everyone. What can each of us do to be closer to others? To those in our families, our neighborhoods, our work places, and those around the world? Too many of us, Francis observes—even the church’s pastoral workers ¹⁰ —keep to ourselves. We do not extend ourselves outward to others in a significant way. We play it too safe and comfortable. We need to step out and encounter others.

Francis clarifies the meaning of mission in another important way as well. He performs something of a “chiropractic adjustment” on the overall goal of mission as advanced by Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict’s effort at missionary renewal in the church was the project of “the New Evangelization,” which emphasized conversion of others and transmission of the faith above all—bringing others to faith in Christ and to belonging in the church. He emphasized conversion because, in his view, lack of faith—specifically, lack of a relationship with God in Christ—is the ultimate source of all of the problems in the world. It is what opens up the Pandora’s box of sin and evil. We Christians therefore need to convince others of the faith and aim at their conversion so that they too may know the fullness of God’s salvation. This is the greatest treasure we can offer the world. ¹¹ And since people do not convert without first hearing the Gospel, Benedict also emphasized proclamation—speaking the Gospel and getting the message out there. In fact, he emphasized conversion, in part, by de-emphasizing all of the other missionary activities, because in his view they do not directly serve the goal of conversion and transmitting the faith to others, whereas proclamation does. ¹²

In figure 1, which summarizes Benedict’s view of mission, we can see that there is “top priority mission,” namely, proclamation, and then there is everything else, which amounts to second-class mission. This emphasis makes mission into a potentially intimidating activity for many ordinary Catholics, who are typically not trained to share the Christian message very well in words, or who perhaps find opportunities for doing so not easy to come by. As a result, under Benedict, the concept of mission was beginning to get tied up into something of a proclamation-conversion knot.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

For Pope Benedict XVI, the goal of conversion and transmitting the faith creates a hierarchy among the different missionary activities.

In contrast, when Francis became pope, he quickly worked to untie this knot and to open up the concept of mission. He did so, as already noted, by emphasizing that mission is fundamentally about love and closeness to others—and it is obvious to most people that there are a tremendous variety of ways of expressing God’s love and closeness to others. In Evangelii gaudium 176–258, additionally, he explicitly insisted upon the centrality of the social dimension of evangelization. Efforts in pursuit of the just ordering of society, universal friendship and peace, and the dignity of every human being are a fully valid and nonnegotiable parts of mission. These aspects of mission are so important to the concept of mission as a whole that if they are lacking in one’s understanding, then one has a defective and reduced view. All of this, combined with Francis’s continuous and powerful acts of teaching by example, had the effect of rehabilitating the full breadth of missionary activities to the status of first-class mission. As figure 2 illustrates, all missionary activities, in his view, are on the same level as proclamation because all of them involve love and closeness to others. There are not two classes of missionary activity.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

For Pope Francis, the goal of following and obeying Jesus mandates all missionary activities equally.

Simultaneously, the overall goal of mission for Francis (the upper part of figure 2) is also different. As important as transmitting the faith to others is, the conversion of others cannot serve as the overall goal of mission. It cannot provide the governing framework. This is in part because conversion happens within the realm of another person’s freedom, not our own. Francis’s model avoids this problem. He frames the overall goal of mission simply in terms of following Jesus, which is doing all the things that Jesus taught us to do. To be clear, in Francis’s view, we Christians are called to proclaim, to share the Gospel in words and to seek to awaken faith in others because this is one of the things Jesus asked us to do. But this is not all that Jesus asked us to do. We are asked, most fundamentally, to be faithful disciples: to imitate Jesus in all of his actions and to extend his presence out into the world.

To press forward in faith . . . is nothing other than to follow Jesus; to listen to him and be guided by his words; to see how he acts and to follow in his footsteps. ¹³

It is not enough to look, we must follow! . . . Jesus did not come into the world to be in a parade . . . to be seen! He did not come for this. Jesus is the path and a path is for walking and following! ¹⁴

Do we think that Jesus’ incarnation is simply a past event which has nothing to do with us personally? Believing in Jesus means giving him our flesh . . . so that he can continue to dwell in our midst. It means giving him our hands, to caress the little ones and the poor; our feet, to go forth and meet our brothers and sisters; our arms, to hold up the weak and to work in the Lord’s vineyard; our minds, to think and act in the light of the Gospel; and especially to offer our hearts to love and to make choices in accordance with God’s will. . . . And in this way we become instruments in God’s hands, so that Jesus can act in the world through us. ¹⁵

If we do this, in Francis’s view, we are faithful disciples, and we truly proclaim the Gospel.

But is not proclamation paramount? In Redemptoris missio (1990), John Paul II stated that “proclamation is the permanent priority of mission. . . . All forms of missionary activity are directed to this proclamation” (44). Francis reinterprets this teaching by broadening the meaning of the word “proclamation.” He says:

You are called, first of all, to proclaim, with your life even before . . . words, the reality of God: to speak God. ¹⁶

Speaking about God, bringing the message of God’s love and salvation in Jesus Christ to men is the duty of all the baptized. And this duty involves, not only speaking with words, but in all one’s actions and way of doing things. Our whole being should speak of God, even in the ordinary things. ¹⁷

For Francis, proclamation is living out the faith in a full, incarnational way. Proclamation is witness because actions always speak louder than words.

So we see this “chiropractic adjustment” of Benedict’s understanding of mission, this replacement of conversion with following Jesus. And if we do follow Jesus, in Francis’s view, that will resolve the problem that Benedict was most concerned about, namely, the decline of Christianity in the West.

What attracts is our witness . . . being consistent in our personal life. This is not easy! We help, we lead others to Jesus with our words and our lives, with our witness. . . . Words come . . . but witness comes first: people should see the Gospel, read the Gospel, in our lives. ¹⁸

This is the way to attract to Christ all those who do not yet know him, by showing them the power of his loving capacity to transform and illuminate the lives of men and women. ¹⁹

The church grows by attraction, not by proselytizing efforts to convert others. It has declined in the West, in Francis’s view, because our witness has been poor. But if our witness is attractive, we can trust that the church will thrive again.

To sum up, Francis has sought to give the church a broad, flexible, and accessible view of mission, and so—in word and deed—he has emphasized love, closeness, following Jesus, and the full range of possible missionary activities. This has been his effort at mission clarification.

I turn now to a second way Francis has sought to revitalize Catholic mission: the area of mission motivation.

Mission motivation

The factor of mission motivation addresses a different kind of obstacle to mission—not the obstacle of not knowing what to do in mission, but the obstacle of not being motivated to do what we already know we are called to do. I think this problem is more serious than the former because, regardless of how well we have or have not identified our specific missionary calling, we all suffer from the sin that makes us resistant to doing God’s will on some level—resistant to facing our cross. Francis recognizes this resistance and pushes against it with a whole body of teaching aimed at exposing the most common spiritual ailments behind a lack of missionary commitment. He has worked like a thoughtful, compassionate doctor providing treatments, and over the last five years he has repeatedly emphasized four important spiritual qualities of an active missionary church. These are four signs of spiritual health each of us can reflect upon to gauge our individual missionary condition.

The first of these is very familiar—the quality of mercy or compassion. Francis continually calls the church’s attention to those who suffer most in the world: to those wounded by physical affliction, torn relationships, lack of opportunity, violence, injustice, loneliness, immorality, and every other form of pain and desolation. In his view, a vital missionary church heals the wounded of the world. It goes out to all those living on the peripheries or margins of human misery. His famous “field hospital” image of the church best captures this quality of mercy. ²⁰ By repeatedly calling our attention to human suffering, Francis asks the church to prioritize in mission those who suffer most and to reach out to them first and foremost. But I think, just as significantly, he is attempting to motivate the church. He wants to transform how each of us imagines ourselves in the world, to force those of us who perhaps are not so wounded or who are doing relatively well to think about ourselves living in a world in which mission is an absolute moral imperative so that we are not left with the option of imagining ourselves living in any other world. He points out to us that the road we are all on in life is the road to Jericho, as in the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). None of us is on any other road, for the wounded are everywhere. By emphasizing the need for mercy in this way, Francis exposes one of our core antimissionary ailments, which is indifference:

We all know from experience how easy it is for some to ignore other people’s suffering. ²¹

We pass by situations of dramatic poverty and it seems that they do not touch us; everything continues as if it were nothing. ²²

We become accustomed to violence, as though it were a predictable part of the daily news. We become accustomed to brothers and sisters sleeping on the streets, who have no roof to shelter them. We become accustomed to refugees seeking freedom and dignity, who are not received as they ought to be. We become accustomed to living in a society which thinks it can do without God, in which parents no longer teach their children to pray or to make the sign of the Cross. ²³

Like the priest and the Levite on the road to Jericho, how many of us, Francis asks, pass by the wounded of the world, indifferent to their fate and unresponsive to their cries for help? “We feel annoyed when we see many people on the street—people in need, sick, hungry. . . . It is a temptation we all have. All of us; me too!” ²⁴ We all know, though, that this is not how followers of Jesus are meant to live. We are meant to have mercy and to extend God’s mercy to all.

A second spiritual ailment that undermines missionary motivation is despair or lack of hope. Francis has regularly addressed this theme throughout his pontificate and particularly did so in an extended way in his 2017 General Audiences. Hope matters because in mission we seek to change peoples’ lives for the better—to awaken faith, to improve society, and to spread the light of God’s love everywhere. But change rarely comes easily. We encounter difficulties and challenges, which can erode or break the resolve that is needed to stay with a task and make progress. We need hope to weather on, and looking at the church, Francis sees a good deal of the pessimism that, mixed with indifference, can easily lead us to say, “The world won’t change, so what’s the use of trying?” Sometimes this pessimism can pass itself off as a kind of hard-nosed realism, which only the naive fail to see. But Francis insists that Jesus’s resurrection truly gives Christians hope that every evil can be overcome in history. He calls us to live out this hope—to fight, act, and struggle forward. “Jesus is not one who adapts to the world, tolerating in it the persistence of death, sadness, hatred, the moral destruction of people. . . . Our God is not inert, but our God . . . is a dreamer: he dreams of the transformation of the world.” ²⁵ And that truly is our mission for Francis: to transform the world. ²⁶

We need to be saved! Saved from what? From evil. Evil is at work, it does its job. However, evil is not invincible and a Christian does not give up when confronted by evil. . . . Our secret is that God is greater than evil. . . . God is infinite love, boundless mercy, and that Love has conquered evil at its root through the death and Resurrection of Christ. ²⁷

There must be no family without a home, no refugee without a welcome, no person without dignity, no wounded person without care, no child without a childhood, no young man or woman without a future, no elderly person without a dignified old age. ²⁸

It is possible to change. Poverty, hunger, diseases and oppression are not inevitable; they cannot represent permanent situations. With trust in the power of the Gospel, we can make a real contribution to changing things, or at least to making them better. ²⁹

The God who created the universe out of nothing can also intervene in this world and overcome every form of evil. Injustice is not invincible. A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. ³⁰

For Francis, the presence or absence of just this kind of world-transforming hope often indicates the presence or absence of missionary vitality in a Christian’s life.

A third spiritual ailment of the church that Francis seeks to treat is pride or self-satisfaction. ³¹ To move from a less missionary way of life to a more missionary way of life necessarily requires conversion and change. But we can easily tell ourselves that we are already good enough and so we do not need to grow or change our ways. In pride, we blind ourselves to our faults and refuse to budge. Pride is the great obstacle to mission because it is the great obstacle to conversion of any kind. It leaves us in varying degrees distant from God, even while sometimes thinking of ourselves as close to God.

To treat this ailment, Francis the spiritual doctor prescribes humility. We need the humility that recognizes that we are always sinners in need of God’s mercy; that we are never spiritually self-sufficient; that we never possess salvation all on our own, through our own efforts; that we always need God. And if we recognize all this, we are always open to change and to receiving the grace of God, which prompts us to love others more. In humility we allow the Divine Physician to melt our hard hearts, and we discover that there is a “wonderful interplay between mercy and mission. Experiencing God’s mercy renders us missionaries of mercy.” ³² In other words, we “pass from the recognition that we have received mercy to a desire to show mercy to others.” ³³ We are then able to walk the humble path of Jesus, who did not put himself above others but made himself a servant and slave to all.

So to sum up: humility, hope, and mercy—the church needs these qualities, and the more it has them the less will pride, pessimism, and indifference sap its missionary motivation. At bottom, though, what the church always needs most is God, which is to say: it always needs to pray. Unless Christians continually pray and in prayer encounter Jesus again and again, the joy of the Gospel does not fill their hearts, and they simply lack the motivation to go out into the world and give to others. This is the fourth sign of a healthy missionary spirituality.

Prayer is the first step, because one must open oneself to the Lord to be able to be open to others. ³⁴

The experience of an encounter with the Lord is what spurs us on and gives us the joy of announcing him to all peoples. ³⁵

The more that you unite yourself to Christ and he becomes the center of your life, the more he leads you out of yourself, leads you from making yourself the center and opens you to others. ³⁶

The relationship between prayer and mission, Francis says, is like breathing: “When we inhale, by prayer, we receive the fresh air of the Holy Spirit. When exhaling this air, we announce Jesus Christ risen by the same Spirit. No one can live without breathing. It is the same for the Christian: without praise and mission there is no Christian life.” ³⁷ Furthermore, real prayer is quite different from any kind of “gnostic” or narcissistic spirituality, which would just be about individuals and their relationship to God. No, Francis says, “Christ’s followers are not individuals caught up in a privatized spirituality, but persons in community, devoting themselves to others.” ³⁸ “Faith does not remove us from the world, but draws us more deeply into it.” ³⁹ The sign of true spirituality is that it always generates mission.

Mission correction

I turn finally to the third area in which Francis has sought to revitalize Catholic mission, namely, “mission correction.” I have already described his efforts to address problems of understanding and motivation. A whole other sort of problem he seeks to remedy is the problem of defective mission or defective pastoral presence. As I noted earlier, Francis indicates that there are ecclesial structures, habits, and attitudes that can directly hamper evangelization.

Put simply, in their intention to be faithful and in their intention to be missionary, some things Christians in fact do are often countermissionary in their effects and damage the church’s relationship with the potential recipients of the Gospel. The problem, in essence, is the church’s “Pharisee problem.” That is, the church often comes across looking and sounding more like the stereotyped scribes and Pharisees of the Gospels than Jesus himself. One often sees, in other words, too much policing and not enough pastoring, too much defending the faith and not enough open-handed sharing of the faith, too much protecting borders and not enough crossing boundaries. The pessimism, indifference, pride, and lack of spirituality just described may all contribute to this problem. But at its heart is something else: a kind of doctrinalism that emphasizes more the Gospel as an intellectual content to be affirmed than a witness to be lived, namely, as a follower of Jesus.

So a habitual church response to a number of the problems and complexities of our age is not to see wounded people everywhere and to rush out and set up a field hospital, but to see errors and threats everywhere and to send out the lawyers and lobbyists. The result is a public church presence that is sometimes not very pastoral at all, but aloof, inhospitable, and unwelcoming. This can be in the demeanor of particular Christians or in whole parishes and church institutions.

In response to this tendency, Francis offers a very basic point of correction: the church must truly be pastoral, as Jesus was pastoral. In all its members and in all its institutions and structures, it must extend Jesus’s merciful presence to all. It must have the tenderness of a loving mother. ⁴⁰ As a mother’s heart is always open to her children, even when they do regrettable things, so the hearts of Christians must always be open to others. The church is not meant to be “a nest protecting our mediocrity” ⁴¹ —a closed group—but a home to all people, since the Gospel is good news for all people, without exception, and our mission is to offer God’s love to everyone. Everyone, with all of his or her problems, needs to be made to feel included and welcomed, ⁴² because this is how God relates to each of us. Jesus includes us and “accompanies” us. He walks beside us and loves us and works to help us always. God does not accept or condone sin—that conclusion should be clear. But God honors all of us sinners in our freedom and loves us in our uniqueness and dignity. And God always helps each one of us take the next step in our growth and development, no matter how small that may be. ⁴³ This is God’s way, and the church needs to learn it or relearn it.

The destination of the Gospel as “good news,” for Francis, is truly universal. Our proclamation, our witness, is and must be good news to all. Sadly, the church has sometimes proclaimed not good news to all, but bad news to some. It has sometimes proclaimed not the heart of the Christian faith—God’s love—but less essential, secondary doctrines. ⁴⁴ As one of my teachers once put it to me. “How did the good news of Jesus Christ become the bad news about sex?” In challenging the church on this point, Francis has attracted his greatest internal resistance and charges of confusion and relativism. Yet his point simply seems to be that nothing should stand in the way of our efforts to always communicate best what we stand for most. Love of clear statement of secondary doctrinal positions matters far less than clear statement of God’s love. In other words, the church needs to always express a mother’s love for her children. A Pharisee church fails to do that. ⁴⁵

Changing the church’s practice on this point, though, takes us to the very heart of this problem of doctrinalism. For lying behind the church’s sometimes poor proclamation and unwelcoming presence are, in many cases, deficient intellectual tendencies that produce individuals with overly rigid and sometimes fundamentalist mind-sets. One sees, for example, Catholics who hold onto their specific understanding of the faith as an ideology, who are convinced that they are absolutely right on every point and condemn anyone who differs from them. ⁴⁶ Other individuals can be intellectually deficient in another way, by simply being out of touch with the pastoral realities of people’s lives and stuck in the bubble of their own narrow thought patterns. Viewing reality from a distance or in terms of vague generalities, they are unable to listen and learn from the experiences of others. ⁴⁷

For Francis, these intellectual tendencies in the church undermine mission by corroding the church’s thought. This pattern simply will not do, for the church continually faces new and unchartered frontiers in its mission. As history progresses and the world’s diverse cultures undergo change, novel circumstances ceaselessly arise that challenge the church to witness in ever fresh ways to the wisdom and power of the Gospel. Crucial to the church meeting these challenges is the ability to understand the new circumstances people inhabit and the ability to discern within them the presence and guiding direction of the Spirit. Church tradition is neither fixed and unchanging nor monolithic in every aspect. The church should “grow in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth” ⁴⁸ over time. The church will not grow, though, without direct contact with the new frontiers of human experience and without what Francis calls “journey faith,” ⁴⁹ the humble awareness that the church is always on a path to greater understanding of divine revelation. Put simply, the church needs to be open to the new. Not open in the sense of accepting relativistic dilutions of the faith, but open in the sense of being receptive to the signs of God’s ongoing presence in history. The two synods on the family in 2014 and 2015 showed Francis’s attempt to reinstitutionalize just this kind of intellectual openness and careful attentiveness to new pastoral and missionary settings.

Conclusion

This article previews the major findings of Go Forth: Toward a Community of Missionary Disciples (Orbis Books, 2019), a collection of Pope Francis’s statements on mission that I have edited. As I hope it shows, Francis’s recent contribution to Catholic thinking on mission is substantive, wide-ranging, and above all action-oriented. He has sought to address the practical problem of a church that on the whole often lacks a vital missionary consciousness and engagement, as well as the practical problem of a church that sometimes acts in mission in ways that are actually countermissionary. In both areas he makes clear that the church stands in need of conversion. His teaching on mission seeks to address these problems and turn them around. It is a body of teaching aimed at effecting change.

The very practical character of Francis’s teaching contrasts somewhat with the character of other recent popes’ teaching on mission, which was more theoretical in nature. Mission, of course, is practice, and the theology of mission is reflection—thought about that practice. But Francis’s predecessors since Vatican II were to a large extent occupied with the problem of resetting the theological foundations of mission—that is, a theoretical task. These foundations needed rethinking following Vatican II and several historical developments that threw the missionary enterprise into confusion. Francis’s predecessors faced urgent questions, such as, Why is mission necessary if salvation is possible outside the church? What are the different constituent activities of mission? And how does the church relate to the reality of the kingdom and to the salvation God offers to everyone in Jesus Christ? These and other questions needed to be addressed in order for mission to have a firm theological footing. Francis’s concern has largely not been with this footing. To a significant extent he accepts the theological foundations that have been laid since Vatican II. His teaching on mission attends, rather, to something else—to the pressing need to stimulate, awaken, and call all members of the church back to their true identity, which is found only in the practice of following Jesus in mission to the world.