Go therefore and teach all nations

The Church’s missionary impulse is rooted firmly in the teaching of Jesus himself, and in his disciples.

Mission at its core meaning means “being sent.” The whole of Christian life can be understood in light of this word. 

Jesus, sent by the Father in the power of the Spirit, brought good news to the chosen people of Israel, news that explained and expanded the teachings of the prophets and lawgivers of the old covenant. He opened that message, a teaching of mercy, justice, and peace, beyond the narrow confines of his own Galilean culture. He cured the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman who believed in his power, and he offered the living water of grace to the Samaritan woman at the well, a notorious sinner and a member of an outcast nation. In his final meeting with his disciples, he speaks what is called the “Great Commission”—go and teach and baptize all nations—and in the flush of joy and power after Pentecost, his followers head out, we are told, to the ends of the earth: Peter to Rome, Thomas to faraway India. 

The proto-missionary was certainly St. Paul, who heard the invitation of the crucified and risen lord on the road to Damascus, and never stopped traveling again. He brought the Christian message to the gentile world of the Mediterranean basin, adapting himself to diverse cultures while holding fast to his proclamation of the same Jesus he had met and would continue to proclaim until his martyr’s death. 

As Christianity came out of the catacombs and was first recognized and then became a powerful institution, it spread across the declining Roman empire and its teachers and preachers began to convert large numbers of one-time “pagans”, a derogatory term that meant “country bumpkins.” Church and secular power often linked up and backed each other up: kings and conquistadors opened the doors to fertile fields of converts, and missionaries helped to pacify and sometimes even subdue indigenous peoples. In these unholy alliances, Church often acted as an arm of State. The history of the colonization of the so-called “New World” is rife with such sobering and contradictory tales.

No story is ever all black or all white. Francis Xavier travelled from Europe as far as India and Japan to convert the world, yet he did so under the umbrella of the King of Portugal without ever learning local languages. Some courageous missionaries—Dominican preacher Bartolomé de las Casas and the Jesuits who founded the Paraguay reductions to protect the Guaraní, or those who wrote dictionaries, studied local history and cultures, or cared for their flocks as they were being decimated by European epidemic diseases—were counterbalanced by many other European missionaries who worked to turn indigenous peoples into docile peons of imperial powers. Yet under it all, and despite it all, the good news was preached. 

In this country, our American church was seeded by Irish and Italians who met opposition from the culturally-dominant Protestant classes. Many of us in Sacramento recall the not so far off days when every priest, every sister spoke with a musical Irish brogue. We were immigrants being ministered to by immigrants, and now we full-fledged Americans are often being ministered to by international missionaries invited here to recatechize us. 

The insights of Vatican II and the consistent teachings of the papacy since then have opened a new and more complex, inculturated understanding of what it means to be a missionary: one sent to bring good news with respect for local cultures, without compulsion and with tender loving care. We don’t have to look farther than a certain man from Chicago who spent 20 years in remote corners of Peru before donning a white cassock in Rome, or our own beloved Fr. Jack Donald, S.J. who has spent his entire, colorful life far from his original home. They show us how the mission and great commission of Christ continue to be followed, for the glory of God and the good of souls. 

And their example reminds us that we are no less sent to bring the good news to each other.