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.”