POPE RECEIVES GENERAL DIRECTORS OF PONTIFICAL MISSIONARY WORKS FOR FIRST TIME, CONFIRMS THEIR RELEVANCE

Vatican City, 17 May 2013 (VIS) – The Pontifical Missionary Works (POM) are “entirely relevant, even more, they are still necessary today because there are so many peoples who have still not known and met Christ and it is urgent to find new forms and new ways that God's grace might touch the heart of each man and each woman and bring them to him.” With these words, Pope Francis greeted the national directors of the POM for the first time, thanking them because they help him “keep evangelization, the paradigm of every act of the Church, alive.”

The Holy Father noted that the Missionary Works are also called “pontifical” because “they are at the Bishop of Rome's direct disposal, with the specific purpose of acting so that the precious gift of the Gospel might be offered to all.” “Certainly,” he said, “the mission that awaits us is difficult but, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it becomes an exciting mission. … This is what we should always draw courage from: knowing that the strength of evangelization comes from God, belongs to him. We are called to open ourselves more and more to the Holy Spirit's work … to be instruments of God's mercy, his tenderness, his love for every man and woman, and especially for the poor, the excluded and the marginalized. And this holds for every Christian, for the whole Church. It isn't an optional mission but an essential one.”

The Pope repeated the invitation that Paul VI had given them 50 years before: “to zealously safeguard the universal scope of the Missionary Works” and he urged them to make sure that they “might continue, in the path of their centuries-old tradition, to give life and formation to churches, opening them to the broad dimension of the mission of evangelization.” The POM also properly belong to the concerns of the bishops so that they might be rooted in the life of the particular churches. Therefore, “they must truly become the privileged instrument of education toward a universal missionary spirit and an ever greater communion between churches to proclaim the Gospel to the world. Faced with the temptations communities have to become wrapped up in themselves, worried about their own problems, your job is to recall the 'missio ad gentes', to prophetically witness that the life of the Church and the churches is mission, and it is a universal mission.”

In this context, Francis asked them to give “special attention to the young churches, which often operate in a climate of difficulty, discrimination, and persecution, so that they might be sustained and assisted in witnessing the Gospel in word and in deed.” He concluded his address by encouraging the directors of the POM to continue their work “so that the local churches might ever more generously take on their share of responsibility for the Church's universal mission.”