Celebration of the Word and Delivery of Crucifixes to New Missionaries (6 November 1982)

On 6 November 1982, the Holy Father celebrated the Liturgy of the Word at the Javier Mission Center and delivered Crucifixes to the new missionaries. In his homily, the Pope spoke on Saint Francis Xavier, the universal Spanish missionary.

Venerable brothers in the Episcopate,
dear brothers and sisters.

1. In this place where everything speaks to us of Saint Francis Xavier, this great Navarre and universal Spanish saint, I greet first of all the Pastor of the diocese, the Bishops who came from other areas of Spain, the priests, the missionaries, together with their families, and the community and apostolic school of the Society of Jesus which, with such zeal, takes care of this place and this Sanctuary.

In this popular and missionary meeting with you, all children of Navarre and Spain, I want to pay homage to the heritage of noble human values ​​and solid Christian virtues of the people of this land. I want to express the Holy See's profound gratitude to the Church of Spain for its great work of evangelization; work to which the sons of Navarra have made such a notable contribution.

Pioneer of evangelization in many fields - not only those opened by Xavier, but above all those of Latin America, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea -, the Spanish Church continues to make an important contribution to this evangelization with its current 23,000 missionaries and missionaries operating in all latitudes.

The Spanish Church has become a creditor of the gratitude of the Apostolic See also for the fact of being one of those that most supports, with personnel and material help, the strategy of cooperation in the universal mission; and for his missionary animation effort, in which the “Javier Missionary Center” existing here is an initiative of high significance and great scope. The main architects of this cooperation and this animation were the Pontifical Mission Societies, a living expression of the missionary awareness of the Church, with the collaboration of religious and missionary institutes. For its part, the Episcopal Conference, with the document on the "Missionary Responsibility of the Spanish Church", three years ago, has given new impetus to the missionary animation of pastoral care.

2. I know that the recent DOMUND campaign had as its delivery: “The Pope as the first missionary”.

Yes, in the Church, which is essentially missionary, the Pope feels himself to be the first missionary and responsible for missionary action, as I demonstrated in my message from Manaus, Brazil.

Therefore, since I feel this singular personal and ecclesial responsibility, I wanted to come to Javier, cradle and sanctuary of the "Apostle of the new people" and "heavenly patron of all missionaries and of all missions" (cf. AAS 20 [1928] 147 ff.; ASS [1903-1904] 580 ff) and also patron of the Work for the Propagation of the Faith. I come to gather his missionary spirit, and to implore his patronage in the missionary plans of my pontificate. Xavier also has a particular relationship with the Pastor and head of the Church; in fact, if every missionary, being sent by the Church, is in a certain way sent by the Pope, Xavier was sent with a special title as Nuncio or Papal Delegate to the East.

3. The liturgy of the Word that we are celebrating to deliver the Crucifix to the new missionaries, in the presence of their parents and family members, renews the meeting and the call of Jesus to his Apostles - to Peter and Andrew, James and John - next to the Sea of ​​Galilee. They were fishermen, and Jesus said to them: "Follow me, I will make you fishers of men."

Then Christ did not give them the missionary cross, as we will now do with these new missionaries. They only heard the call: “Follow me.” At the end of their earthly pilgrimage with Jesus, they would receive his cross as a sign of salvation. As testimony to the Way, the Truth and the Life; testimony that they had to confirm with their preaching, with their life of service and with the holocaust of their own death.

The Apostles had to bear witness, and they did, to the fact that "Jesus is Lord", as Saint Paul recalls in the letter to the Romans ( Rom 10:10); and they had to lead all men to this faith, because Jesus is the Lord of all. How is this work of salvation accomplished? The Apostle responds: "With the heart one believes to obtain righteousness and with the mouth one makes the profession of faith to obtain salvation" ( Rm 10, 10).

Like the Apostles called at the beginning, you too, dear missionaries, who, following in the footsteps of the great Francis Xavier, receive the missionary crucifix today, must assume with him, fully and with all your heart, the service of faith and salvation.

Saint Paul, referring to the work of salvation, asks very timely questions: “How will they be able to call on him without first believing in him? And how can they believe without hearing about it? And how will they be able to hear about it without someone announcing it? . . .”. “Faith – he adds later – therefore depends on preaching and preaching in turn is carried out through the word of Christ” ( Rm 10, 14.17).

With what availability and commitment did you, Saint Francis Xavier, son of this land, respond to these words! And how many imitators have you had, down the centuries, among your compatriots and among the other children of the Church in other peoples! Truly "their voice has gone throughout the earth, and their words to the ends of the world" ( Rom 10:18).

4. Dear missionaries who are about to receive the Crucifix in the apostolic spirit of Xavier: Be imitators of him, as he was of Christ!

Xavier is the prototype of missionaries in line with the universal mission of the Church. His motivation is evangelical love for God and man, with main attention to what has priority value in him: his soul, where man's eternal destiny is played out: "For what does it benefit man to gain entire world, if he then loses his soul?” ( Mk 8, 36). This evangelical principle stimulates his interior life. Zeal for souls in him is a passionate impatience.

He feels, like Paul, the irrepressible urge of a conscience fully responsible for the missionary mandate and love of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 5, 14), ready to give his temporal life for the spiritual health of his brothers (cf. Cartas y writings of San Francisco Javier , F. Zubillaga, doc. 54, 4): “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel, he will save it” ( Mk 8, 35). This is the irrepressible driving force that animates the stupendous missionary dynamism of Francis Xavier.

He has a clear awareness that faith is a gift from God, and bases his trust on prayer, which he practices assiduously, accompanying it with sacrifices and penances; and he also asks the recipients of his letters for the help of their prayers. He models his identity on the full acceptance of God's will and on communion with the Church and her representatives, translated into obedience and faithfulness as a messenger, thanks to a subtle discernment; and he always acts with universal vision and horizons, in harmony with the mission of the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation. He places a holy life that places the emphasis on humility and total trust in Jesus Christ and in Holy Mother Church before proclamation and catechesis, which he practices as fundamental work.

His charity and methods of evangelization, and concretely his sense of adaptation to places and cultures, were proposed as a sure orientation for missionary activity by the Congregation “de Propaganda Fide”, recommending in the Instruction to the first Apostolic Vicars of Siam , Tonkin and Cochinchina, the life and above all the letters of Francis Xavier (cf. Instructio , 1659, in Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, Memoria rerum , 1976, III/2, 704).

5. Your comforting presence, parents and families of missionaries, represents the Catholic family here, which, consistent with its faith, must become missionaries. In expressing the Church's authentic gratitude to you, I also want to send it to the families of all the missionaries who work in the Lord's vineyard.

The Christian family, which already operates as missionaries when it presents its children to the Church to baptize them, must continue the ministry of evangelization and catechesis, educating them from an early age in missionary awareness and in the spirit of ecclesial cooperation. Cultivating the missionary vocation in their sons and daughters constitutes the best collaboration for parents in the divine call. And how often does this missionary awareness of the Christian family lead it to become directly missionary through temporal services, according to its possibilities.
Christian families: compare yourselves with the model of the Holy Family, which favored with delicate attention the gradual manifestation of the redemptive, we can say missionary, mission of Jesus.

Also reflect yourself in the edifying action of Xavier's parents, especially his mother, who knew how to make their family an exemplary domestic Church. The customs of that family reveal a profound attention to the life of faith, with a strong devotion to the Holy Trinity, the Passion of Christ and the Mother of God.

Following the example of the family of Xavier, the families of this Church of San Fermin have until recently been a fruitful nursery of priestly, religious and missionary vocations. Beloved families of Navarre: you must recover and jealously preserve such an exalted heritage of virtue and service to the Church and humanity!

6. The Pope must become the permanent spokesperson of Christ's missionary mandate. And he feels the duty to remember it in a special way today, when he notes, alongside the consoling development of the Church among peoples of recent Catholic tradition - who in turn were already missionaries - the horizon of three-quarters of humanity - mostly young people - who they do not know Jesus, nor his program of life and salvation for man; and the disturbing spectacle of many who have given up on the Christian message or have become insensitive to it. This panorama and the increasing rate of non-Christians challenge the Church at the end of the second millennium of its life.

The conciliar reflection of Vatican II on the situation of man in today's world revived in the Church the awareness of its missionary duty; a duty that concerns all its members and communities, in relation to all men and peoples.

When the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the Council comes, the whole Church - the Pope, the Bishops, the priests, the men and women religious and the laity, all the People of God - must ask itself about its response to the powerful missionary call of the Spirit Saint through that Council. On the other hand, never have the heralds of the Gospel had greater possibilities and means to evangelize humanity despite many difficulties.

7. The evangelical cry of Jesus: "the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few" ( Mt 9:37), also worries the Church today. The accentuated decline in vocations, in recent decades, in many particular Churches with a rich missionary tradition, also in this archdiocese and in other dioceses and religious and missionary institutes in Spain and other countries, must push all the Pastors and workers of pastoral care, as well as Christian families, to raise young people's awareness of their willingness to collaborate in the proclamation of the Gospel, helping them to recognize the call of Jesus and to welcome it as a grace of predilection.

Because you, dear young people, are the hope of the Church. Do you love the embodied and actualized coherence of your faith? When a Catholic becomes aware of his faith, he becomes a missionary.

Inserted as you are in the mystical Body of Christ you cannot feel indifferent towards the salvation of men. Believing in Christ is believing in his life plan for us. To love Christ is to love those whom he loves and as he loves them. Only Christ has words of eternal life. And there is no other name in which men and peoples can be saved.

Are you looking for motivation for the work of greater human solidarity towards your brothers? There is no service to man that can be equated with missionary service. Being a missionary means helping man to be the free creator of his own promotion and salvation.

Do you want a program that gives full meaning to your life and fulfills your noblest aspirations?

Here, young like many of you, Xavier opened himself to the values ​​and wonders of temporal life, until he discovered the mystery of the supreme value of Christian life; and he became a messenger of the love and life of Christ among his brothers of the great peoples of Asia.

8. Young people of Navarre: your annual javierada (pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Javier) and the annual appointment of the new missionaries of Spain to receive the Crucifix have created the “camino de Javier” (the pilgrimage route to Javier); where your meeting with the universal missionary saint becomes an embrace of reconciliation, Easter renewal and a commitment to life and collaboration - including missionary - with Jesus Christ.

Young students and workers, sons and daughters of the entire Catholic family: the vast horizons of the non-Christian world are a challenge to the faith and humanism of your generation. Today the Spirit of God calls everyone to a generous and constant missionary effort, of an ecclesial nature, to make all peoples one family, the Church. Francis Xavier also wrote for you the insistent reminder of his letters to the Universities of his time, asking professors and students for missionary awareness and collaboration: "Many times I feel moved by the thought of going to the universities in your area, shouting, like a man who has lost his mind, and mainly in the university of Paris, to say to those of the Sorbonne. . .: How many souls fail to reach glory and go to hell due to their negligence!” ( Cartas y escritos de san Francisco Javier , F. Zubillaga, doc. 20, 8).

Young people: Christ needs you and calls you to help millions of your brothers to be fully human and to be saved. Live with these noble ideals in your soul and do not give in to the temptation of ideologies of hedonism, hatred and violence that degrade man. Open your heart to Christ, to his law of love; without conditioning your availability, without fear of definitive answers, because love and friendship never fade.

9. Responding to the call of the Spirit through the Church, do not forget what occupies first place in the order of values ​​and means: prayer and the offering of your sacrifices. Faith and salvation are a gift from God that we must ask for. Prayer must be combined with the effort and sacrifice to experience the wonders of Christian love on a daily basis.

In Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Therese of Lisieux we have two great intercessors. If Saint Teresa, as she herself confided to her sisters, obtained through Saint Francis Xavier the grace to continue to shed a shower of roses from heaven onto the earth, and helped the Church so much in her missionary activity, why shouldn't we expect the same from missionary saint?

Francis Xavier certainly offered his last prayers in the world and the holocaust of his life, on Chinese soil, in Sancián, for the great people of China who he loved so much and who were preparing to evangelize with intrepid hope. Let us unite our prayers with his intercession for the Church in China, which is the object of special solidarity and hope of the entire Catholic family.

To the powerful intercession of the two Patrons of the Missions we recommend today: the intention of a vigorous evangelizing impulse of the whole Church, the fruitful flowering of missionary vocations and the noble disposition of all peoples to experience the supreme value and the great hope that Christ and his Church represent for all men.

10. To the missionaries emulating Xavier, ready to leave, and to those who feel Christ's call to work in his mission, I repeat the words of Saint Paul which inspired this liturgy: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good” ( Rom 10, 15). With these words I send you to missionary work.

The effort to announce the Good News is the daily task of the Church, which embellishes her as a Bride, faithful and without reservations towards her Groom. Accept, therefore, a part of this effort that beautifies the Church.

Go! Spread the Good News to the ends of the world! Go and announce: “Jesus is Lord”. “God raised him from the dead.” In him is salvation! May the Mother of Jesus and the Church always accompany your steps. And may my cordial blessing also accompany you.

© Copyright 1982 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Copyright © Dicastery for Communication - Libreria Editrice Vaticana