VATICAN CITY (Zenit.org): Pope Ben-edict XVI is pointing to the Eucharist as the seed, nucleus and nourishment of missionary activity.
The Pope said this on October 4 in an audience with Brazilian bishops in Rome for their five-yearly visit.
“The disappearance of the missionary spirit perhaps is not due so much to limitations and deficiencies in the external forms of the traditional missionary action but to forgetting that the mission must be nourished by a more profound nucleus,” the Pontiff said. “This nucleus is the Eucharist.”
“For the Continental Mission to be really effective, it must begin from the Eucharist and lead to the Eucharist,” he added, referring to the mission called for by Latin American and Caribbean bishops who gathered with him in 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil.
The Holy Father noted that Jesus came “to show us, with his words and his life, the ordinary ways of salvation, and he ordered us to transmit this revelation to others with his own authority.”
“This being so, we cannot elude this thought: Men might be saved by other ways, thanks to God’s mercy, if the Gospel is not proclaimed to them, but can I be saved if through negligence, fear, shame or because of following false ideas, I fail to proclaim it?” he asked.
The Pope pointed out that “the call to the mission is not something destined exclusively to a restricted group of members of the Church, but an imperative addressed to every baptised person, an essential element of his vocation.”
“In fact,” he said, “the mission is the overflowing of the flame of love that inflames in the heart of the human being, which, on opening to the truth of the Gospel and allowing himself to be transformed by it, begins to live his life.”
The Pope noted that “the challenges of the present context could lead to a reductionist view of the concept of mission”.
He said this concept “cannot be limited to a simple search for new techniques and ways that make the Church more attractive and capable of overcoming the competition with other religious groups or relativist ideologies”.
President of the regional episcopal conference that met with the Pope, Bishop Franz Merkel of Humaita, explained some of the challenges of missionary work in his country.
In an interview published Sunday by L’Osservatore Romano, the prelate spoke about the difficulties ministering to thousands of small villages in the Amazon region.
He highlighted the role of the laity “both within the communities as well as in the social and political realm”.
On many occasions, the bishop said, they were the ones who “carry forward the way of faith”.
