October is World Mission Month, culminating in World Mission Sunday, which since 1927 has taken place on the penultimate Sunday of October.

In 2025, World Mission Sunday falls on Oct. 19, normally the feast day of St. Isaac Jogues, St. Jean de Brébeuf and their six Jesuit companions — the North American martyrs whose evangelical endeavors helped plant the seed of the Gospel in northeastern United States and Canada. This concurrence provides priests not only with powerful homiletic material but an example of the missionary dimension of every priestly vocation.

Pope St. John Paul II, in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio (“The Mission of the Redeemer”), emphasized this priestly missionary dimension.

“All priests,” he said, “must have the mind and the heart of missionaries” (No. 67). That’s because the Sacrament of Holy Orders “prepares them, not for any narrow and limited mission, but for the most universal and all-embracing mission of salvation ‘to the ends of the earth.’ For every priestly ministry shares in the universal scope of the mission that Christ entrusted to his apostles” (No. 67, quoting Presbyterorum Ordinis, No. 10).

Lacking such a missionary mind and heart, the priest’s spiritual life and pastoral effectiveness will suffer, because, St. John Paul II wrote, preaching the Gospel to every creature “is the first task of the Church, which has been sent forth to all peoples and to the very ends of the earth. Without the mission ad gentes, the Church’s very missionary dimension would be deprived of its essential meaning and of the very activity that exemplifies it” (No. 34).

The Church’s Priority

The point that St. John Paul II makes is essential for a proper understanding of the Church and of the priesthood. The mission to the nations — to those who don’t yet know Jesus Christ, an estimated 5.5 billion people out of 8 billion alive today — is not just one among many important duties. It’s the “first task” of the Church.

That missionary zeal is what is meant to fuel our efforts to go out for the lost sheep, the baptized who have given up the practice of the faith, what is technically called the “new evangelization.”

It’s also what is meant to characterize our pastoral care of the faithful, since everything we give those who do practice the faith is supposed to form them to become evangelized evangelizers, of missionary disciples in communion.

If we’re not on fire to help everyone come to a saving friendship with Jesus Christ — in our prayer and personal sacrifices, but also in our pastoral priorities — then that relative lukewarmness may fail to inspire our people to take up their role in the Great Commission.

Pope Francis was pointing to this zeal in his inaugural exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), when he outwardly dreamed of a “missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures, can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation” (No. 27).

Everything the Church does, he was suggesting, is meant to be understood in a missionary key. He poignantly asks, “What would happen if we were to take these words seriously?” — implying that we haven’t yet taken them seriously enough. Then he answers his own question: “We would realize that missionary outreach is paradigmatic for all the Church’s activity” (No. 15).

So the mission to the nations is meant to be the paradigm, the model, for everything that takes place in the Church universal, in a diocese and in a parish. It’s supposed to be a guiding principle for the curriculum of a Catholic university, primary or secondary school, and religious education program. It should be what inspires Catholic charitable outreaches and hospitals, youth and young adult programs, sacramental preparation and ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. “Everything” and “all of the Church’s activity” are meant, Pope Francis suggests, to be taken literally.

Today’s Challenges

We know that at most of the 17,000 parishes in the United States, this missionary impulse has not yet leavened everything. As a result of secularism, the size of families, diminishing priestly vocations, deficient catechesis, the continued fallout from scandals, money and other reasons, many parishes are just struggling to survive. In those places where the Church is contracting and schools and parishes are merging and closing, enthusiasm to support the Church in the missionary dioceses and territories where she’s too young, poor or persecuted to be self-sustaining takes a practical backseat to keeping the doors open, finding a priest for Mass and confessions, and getting someone to teach CCD.

In parishes where the Church is growing, the focus is often precisely on that growth, with time and attention often being given to raising money or paying off the debts for a bigger church, new pastoral center or school, caring for the dozens enrolled in OCIA and launching new ministries to solve local pastoral needs. The focus is on helping the Church grow and thrive locally, with the needs of the Church universal a real but relatively remote concern. These trends are understandable. Spiritual and pastoral myopia are normal. We certainly don’t want a circumstance in which people think loving their neighbor means caring first for those thousands of miles away while neglecting those who are their actual neighbors.

But what John Paul II and Francis are driving at is that when we take the mission to the nations seriously, rather than forsaking the needs of our family, parish, diocese, city or country, we will address them in a more properly Catholic way. Just as loving God more helps us to love our neighbor more, and taking the kingdom of heaven more seriously, rather than withdrawing us from the world, helps us to commit more to the transformation of the world, so prioritizing the bringing of the Gospel to every creature helps us to commit even more to sharing the Gospel in its fullness with those people with whom the world has surrounded us.

Saintly Inspiration

The missionary metamorphosis of the parish begins with the priest’s having a missionary mind and heart. He’s got to think about the missions. He’s got to love the missions.

Every Dec. 3, we have a chance to ponder whether we have a missionary mind and heart when in the Office of Readings the Church gives the appeal of St. Francis Xavier, the great 16th-century patron of the Church’s mission work.

After describing the great number of conversions and baptisms he was doing himself and the enormous need for collaborators to baptize thousands more and help those who have come to faith grow, he implored:

Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: There is nobody to make them Christians. Again and again I have thought of going round the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: “What a tragedy: How many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!” I wish they would work as hard at this as they do at their books and so settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them. This thought would certainly stir most of them to meditate on spiritual realities, to listen actively to what God is saying to them. They would forget their own desires, their human affairs, and give themselves over entirely to God’s will and his choice. They would cry out with all their heart: “Lord, I am here! What do you want me to do? Send me anywhere you like — even to India.”

When the future St. Philip Neri, a contemporary, heard those words, he immediately wanted to leave Rome and join Francis Xavier in the East. His spiritual director helped him to discern that Rome was to be his Indies and Philip set out to re-evangelize Rome with the same missionary zeal with which Francis Xavier would evangelize India, the islands of southeast Asia and Japan. Together with the Holy Spirit, that’s what Philip ended up accomplishing. At a minimum, God wants the parish to which we’re assigned to be our “Indies.”

Just like their mutual friend St. Ignatius of Loyola, while convalescing after having his leg shattered on the battlefield and reading the lives of the saints, was provoked to ask why he couldn’t do what Francis of Assisi and Dominic did, so we need to ask why we can’t serve our parishioners with the zeal, with the virtues, with the heroism of the Church’s great missionary priests.

How would St. Francis Xavier or St. Philip Neri serve our parish? How would Sts. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf, Junipero Serra, John Neumann and Damian of Molokai, or Blesseds Francis Xavier Seelos and Stanley Rother? What advice would Sts. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Rose Philippine Duchesne, Mother Teodore Guerin, Katharine Drexel or Teresa of Calcutta give us with regard to maximizing the opportunities given to us?

The Substance of Our Hope

I’d like to explore various practical ways we can help build a missionary culture in our parishes.

The first is through a focus on the substance of our hope. This year World Mission Month is taking place within the Jubilee of Hope, and the theme for World Mission Sunday is taken from the Jubilee: “Missionaries of Hope Among All Peoples.” The Jubilee of Hope makes plain that the Church’s mission is to bring “Christ Jesus our hope” (1 Tm 1:1) to the world. The Gospel we proclaim is the explanation for the reason for our hope, which St. Peter calls us to be always ready to give (1 Pt 3:15).

Hope means ultimately living with God in the world (Eph 2:14). The Church’s mission work is to help everyone come to realize that God himself entered the world in the Incarnation, taking on human nature in order to redeem it through his passion, death and resurrection. He remains with us in the world, most especially by means of the holy Eucharist. We want everyone to experience this hope. That’s what drives the Church’s mission. This is the Gospel that we feel burning our bones and filling us with holy woe unless we share it (Jer 20:9; 1 Cor 9:16).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us another helpful tip for the Church’s mission in its definition of hope. Hope is “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (No. 1817). The Church’s missionary work involves proclaiming that God wants not only to be with us in this world but have us with him forever in the next.

One of the reasons the Church’s mission to the nations has lost some momentum from the time of St. Francis Xavier, Philip Neri, Thérèse of Lisieux, Frances Xavier Cabrini and other great missionary saints is defective ecclesiology.

If we believe that basically everyone goes to heaven — whether they know and love Jesus, are baptized and live a sacramental life, keep or break the commandments, praise or curse God, welcome or reject strangers, feed or stiff the poor, are faithful to or cheat on their spouses, receive or kill their babies, frequent or refuse God’s mercy — then the stakes as to whether we share the Gospel goes way down. But if Jesus is right that there are many more on the broad road that leads to destruction than the narrow way that leads to life (Mt 7:13-14), then we have every reason, like he had, like the apostles had, like the missionaries had, to invite people to repent and believe in the Gospel, because the stakes are eternal.

The Jubilee of Hope — based on the real theological virtue — is meant to be a remedy for this soft universalism. We are called to be missionaries of hope among all the peoples because the fulfillment of Christian hope matters. Many, including some Christians, have lost a sense of the “great hope” that is eternal life. Priests first and foremost are supposed to be emissaries of this good news and leaders as “pilgrims of hope” in the pilgrim Church on earth, following Christ all the way to the place he ascended to prepare for us in the Father’s house.

Opportunities in the Parish

A second practical step we can take is to take advantage of the multiple opportunities every year to help bring about a missionary transformation in our parishes.

World Mission Month and World Mission Sunday are meant to help the whole Church to think about the missions, to pray for missionaries and those whom they’re trying to evangelize, and to sacrifice to support them. Materials are provided by The Pontifical Mission Societies U.S.A. — posters, bulletin blurbs, homiletic helps, prayers of the faithful, videos for parish websites and social media accounts and more — to help World Mission Sunday not just be “another second collection,” but something that helps every Catholic focus on the Church’s, and his or her, baptismal missionary identity.

The best way to take World Mission Sunday seriously is to take World Mission Month seriously and then try to plan activities throughout the parish that can focus on the missions. Those in Catholic schools and religious education programs, for example, can use some of the activities from the Missionary Childhood Association (one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies). Since October is also the month of the Holy Rosary, the World Mission Rosary, designed and promoted by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, former national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, can be used to pray to the Queen of Apostles for the fruits of the Church’s missionary work in each of the five continents.

Similarly, there’s the Missionary Cooperative Program that most dioceses participate in, when once a year priests or religious from the missions come to preach or speak at all parish Masses about the missionary work they are involved in. The more parish priests, before and after the missionary’s visit, are able to communicate the importance of the missions, the greater the impact will be, for the missions and for the parish. The more they help missionaries craft their message, print their thank yous and keep the parish in touch, the easier it is to augment the fruits of the missionary appeal.

Some parishes try to adopt a missionary parish or diocese that is struggling in situations of poverty. Some dioceses across the world are so poor that a thriving American parish’s annual budget dwarfs the missionary diocese’s. The typical subsidy that mission dioceses receive from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization is $30,000-$50,000, which is most of the budget of the diocese! Imagine how many lives could be impacted if an American parish were to adopt such a diocese.

Some parishes are able to plan trips to visit the missions and help out for several days with one or more projects. While the long-term impact on the missionary community can vary, invariably those who go on the missions return strengthened in missionary identity, as they experience not just the poverty of those living in missions, but the joy of the faith that radiates despite those hardships.

The biggest impact on the missionary culture of a parish would likely come through a parish priest’s overall advocacy for the missions in his regular preaching, bulletin columns, adult education classes, catechetical talks and more. If a priest’s mind and heart are in the missions, so will be the minds and hearts of many of his parishioners.

St. John and Blessed Pauline

The patron saint of parish priests, St. John Vianney, shows all parish priests what a great love for the missions looks like. He was spiritual director to Blessed Pauline Jaricot, the foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. He knew her from the time he was a young parochial vicar in Dardilly, France, where she and her family belonged to his parish. He shared with her a great love for St. Philomena, through whose intercession Vianney invoked many miracles and from whose intercession Jaricot received one. But more than anything they shared a love for Jesus Christ that led both to give their lives to trying to bring his love to others. Vianney helped to form Blessed Pauline in her missionary zeal and stir it into a flame.

That’s what parish priests are meant to do: foster the missionary vocation of every parishioner, some who will hear a calling to dedicate their lives as missionaries, others who will be helped to recognize their sacred summons to pray for and support the missions. That’s supposed to happen 365 days a year, but just like holy years and the Church’s liturgical calendar give us opportunity to focus more attentively to certain perennial aspects of Catholic faith and life, so October is the time that priests can themselves grow, and help our people to grow, in a missionary mind and heart.

So this October, let us respond to the graces of the Jubilee to help the whole Church — in mind, heart, prayer, sacrifice and action — become missionaries of hope to all the peoples.

MSGR. ROGER LANDRY is national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States.