Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:
This Sunday we celebrate World Mission Day. This year we do it within the extraordinary missionary month proclaimed by Pope Francis to remind us of the necessity and urgency of the missionary work of the Church.
There are some who mistakenly think that any missionary work of the Church ought to limit itself to human promotion, setting aside the proclamation of Jesus Christ and the call to conversion.
However, as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his pontificate, if the Church abandons Jesus Christ crucified, she become a pious NGO and nothing more.
In this sense, the declaration Dominus Iesus on the universality and unicity of Jesus Christ is very enlightening and eloquent:
“One can and must say that Jesus Christ has a significance and a value for the human race and its history, which are unique and singular, proper to him alone, exclusive, universal, and absolute. Jesus is, in fact, the Word of God made man for the salvation of all. In expressing this consciousness of faith, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “The Word of God, through whom all things were made, was made flesh, so that as perfect man he could save all men and sum up all things in himself. The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the desires of history and civilization, the center of mankind, the joy of all hearts, and the fulfilment of all aspirations. It is he whom the Father raised from the dead, exalted and placed at his right hand, constituting him judge of the living and the dead”. “It is precisely this uniqueness of Christ which gives him an absolute and universal significance whereby, while belonging to history, he remains history’s center and goal: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’.”
