The month of October begins with the memorial of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, the patroness of missions. On the third Sunday of October, the Catholic Church celebrates “World Mission Sunday” and according to the Ordo, the Eucharistic celebration on this day “should help to awaken in the faithful their commitment to and responsibility for the missions.”

October as the month of mission in the Catholic Church reminds us of the importance of mission in the Church. Also, since mission is continually revisited in the liturgical life of the Church, it’s worth looking at how we should respond to God’s mission.

How should we proclaim the Good News in our age characterized by woundedness and complexity?

Globalization has awakened us to the reality of pluralism in the world — religious pluralism, multiculturalism, and the diversity of ideas and worldviews. The explosion of the tragic cases of sexual abuse by clergy and the cover-ups by authorities have deeply affected the credibility of the Church. Social inequalities worldwide have continued to wreak havoc on the lives of the poor, the victims of the economy of exclusion.

In the West, secularism has become prevalent that Pope Francis famously said in 2019 to the Roman Curia: “Christendom no longer exists! Today we are no longer the only ones who create culture, nor are we in the forefront or those most listened to. We need a change in our pastoral mindset, which does not mean moving towards a relativistic pastoral care.”  

Attuning herself to the current signs of the times, the Catholic Church needs a paradigm shift in doing mission. Without sacrificing the truth of God’s salvific love revealed in Jesus Christ, the old mindset of withdrawing from the world and condemning it into hell needs to be discarded. The credibility of the Church doesn’t merely lie on the truths she is proclaiming lest she forget the essential spirit of Jesus’ mission, the “how” of proclaiming the Good News: kenosis.

Kenosis (Greek word for self-emptying) is something we learn from the spirituality of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. Pope Francis, who has a special devotion to St. Therese, dedicated an apostolic exhortation for her 150th birth anniversary entitled C’Est la Confiance published in 2023. At the heart of Saint Therese’s spirituality is the “little way” which is intimately connected to Jesus’ kenosis.

Inspired by the apostle Paul’s hymn to charity from 1 Corinthians 13, Saint Therese wrote in her classic Story of a Soul: “Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a Heart, and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood it was love alone that made the Church’s members act… O Jesus, my Love… my vocation, at last I have found it… my vocation is Love!”

Pope Francis, commenting on the above quotation, draws out an important ecclesiological lesson: “This heart was not that of a triumphalistic Church, but of a loving, humble, and merciful Church. Therese never set herself above others, but took the lowest place together with the Son of God, who for our sake became a slave and humbled himself, becoming obedient, even to death on a cross.”

The image of a loving, humble, and merciful Church captures Pope Francis’ ecclesiological vision. What our world needs today is this image of the Church as a servant who proclaims and embodies the Good News of God’s love and mercy. In Misericordiae Vultus, Pope Francis states that “the Church is commissioned to announce the mercy of God, the beating heart of the Gospel, which in its own way must penetrate the heart and mind of every person… It is absolutely essential for the Church and for the credibility of her message that she herself live and testify to mercy.”

In his very first apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, considered as the manifesto of his papacy, Pope Francis declares that “pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed” for “the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing, and at the same time most necessary.” The basic core in proclamation is no other than “the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead.”

This proclamation is not confined to the message of the saving love of God. Proclaiming the Good News in our world today demands concrete actions such as promoting justice and harmony. A kenotic Church is a “Church which ‘goes forth’” and “whose doors are open.” In the memorable words of Pope Francis, this is a “Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

In his essay “The Samaritan Church and the Principle of Mercy,” the Jesuit liberation theologian Jon Sobrino explains that a Church which resembles Jesus is a Church which “reproduces the structure of his life. In gospel terms, the structure of Jesus’ life is a structure of incarnation, of becoming real flesh in real history.” Most importantly, “Jesus’ life is structured in function of the fulfillment of a mission — the mission of proclaiming the good news of the Reign of God, inaugurating that Reign through all signs of every sort, and denouncing the fearsome reality of the anti-Reign.”

The praxis of mercy, for Sobrino, de-centers the Church. Mercy “places the church outside itself and in a very precise locus — the place where human suffering occurs, the place where the cries of human beings resound.” Isn’t this what the Pope is doing to the Church? “I do not want a Church concerned with being at the center and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures.” Pope Francis’ agenda of de-centering the Church in the light of God’s mercy is moving away from an antiquated triumphalist image of the Church towards a servant Church immersed in our broken world.

In his historic apostolic journey to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Singapore, Pope Francis demonstrated to all of us how a servant Church, a loving, humble, and merciful Church looks like in actuality. Reflecting on his visit, the Pope was humble enough to acknowledge that we still have the tendency to think of the Church in a “Western” and “Euro-centric” perspective. “But in reality, the Church is much bigger, much bigger than Rome and Europe, much bigger! And also, if I may say so, much more alive, in those countries,” the Pope said in his general audience days after his papal visit.

The exchange of kisses between Pope Francis and the Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar caught the world’s attention. The affectionate and highly significant kiss of peace between two religious leaders is symbolic of the capacity of the Catholic Church and other religions to walk together in harmony and to alleviate suffering. “In that context, I received confirmation that compassion is the path that Christians can and must walk to bear witness to Christ the Savior, and at the same time to encounter the great religious and cultural tradition,” the Pope said. Since “all religions are paths to God,” as what the Pope said to the youth in Singapore, the Church in humility can learn from their wisdom and practices.

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In traveling to the peripheries, both geographical and existential, the Church is de-centered from its narrow understanding of its nature and mission. “This is a paradox that we have to learn: in the Gospel, the peripheries are the center and a Church that has no capacity for peripheries and that hides in the center is a very ill Church,” Pope Francis told the people of God at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Timor Leste. A kenotic Church is not afraid to go to the peripheries and be enriched by the experience of “becoming real flesh in real history.”

A kenotic Church engages the suffering ones and bridges distances because “God responds to such distance in the complete opposite way, with the nearness of Jesus. Through his Son, God wishes to show first of all that he is near and compassionate, that he cares for us and overcomes any distance,” said Pope Francis in his homily at his Sunday Mass in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

All of these missionary endeavors won’t be possible without mercy — the fundamental principle of the self-emptying love of God in Jesus. A servant Church is a servant of the Reign of God where the fullness of love, mercy, and humility are to be found. Mission in a kenotic key has great potential to make the Catholic Church more credible in its proclamation of the Good News in the contemporary world and more faithful to Jesus Christ. – Rappler.com

Kevin Stephon Centeno is a Jesuit scholastic. Born in Oriental Mindoro, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and spent five years of seminary formation at Saint Augustine Seminary in Calapan City. His views do not represent the position of the entire Society of Jesus.