Excerpt from Pope Leo’s message delivered Oct. 5 in St. Peter’s Square for the Jubilee of the Missionary World and the Jubilee of Migrants. 

Today we celebrate the Jubilee of the Missions and of Migrants. This is a wonderful opportunity to rekindle in ourselves the awareness of our missionary vocation, which arises from the desire to bring the joy and consolation of the Gospel to everyone, especially those who are experiencing difficult and painful situations. In particular, I think of our migrant brothers and sisters, who have had to depart their homelands, often leaving their loved ones behind, enduring nights of fear and loneliness, experiencing discrimination and violence firsthand.

We are here because, at the tomb of the Apostle Peter, each one of us should be able to say with joy: the entire Church is missionary, and it is urgent – as Pope Francis affirmed – that we “go forth and preach the Gospel to all: to all places, on all occasions, without hesitation, reluctance or fear.” 

The Spirit sends us to continue the work of Christ in the world’s peripheries, marked at times by war, injustice and suffering. Faced with these menacing situations, the cry that so often in history has been raised up to God has re-emerged: Lord, why do you not intervene? Why do you seem absent? This cry of sorrow is a form of prayer that pervades all of Scripture and, this morning, we heard it from the prophet Habakkuk: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? … Why do you make me see wrongs and look upon trouble?” 

Pope Benedict XVI, who had reflected on these questions during his historic visit to Auschwitz, returned to the theme in a catechesis, affirming: “God is silent and this silence pierces the soul of the person praying, who ceaselessly calls but receives no answer … God seems so distant, so forgetful, so absent.” 

The response of the Lord, however, opens us to hope. If the prophet denounces the inescapable force of evil that seems to prevail, the Lord, for his part, announces to him that all of this will end, will cease, because salvation will come and it will not delay: “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”

Therefore, there is life, a new possibility of life and salvation that comes from faith, because it not only helps us to resist evil and to persevere in doing good, but it transforms our lives so as to make of them an instrument of the salvation that even today God wishes to bring about in the world. And, as Jesus says in the Gospel, this is about a lowly strength, for faith does not impose itself by means of power and in extraordinary ways. Indeed, it is enough to have faith the size of a mustard seed in order to do unimaginable things, because it carries within it the strength of God’s love that opens the way to salvation.

This is a salvation that is fulfilled when we take responsibility and, with the compassion of the Gospel, care for the suffering of others; it is a salvation that leads the way, silently and apparently without success, in daily words and actions, which become precisely like the tiny seed of which Jesus speaks; it is a salvation that slowly grows when we become “unworthy servants”, namely when we place ourselves at the service of the Gospel and of our brothers and sisters, not seeking our own interests but only bringing God’s love to the world.

Trusting in this, we are called to renew in ourselves the fire of our missionary vocation....Brothers and sisters, today a new missionary age opens up in the history of the Church.

If for a long time we have associated with mission the word “depart”, the going out to distant lands that did not know the Gospel or were experiencing poverty, today the frontiers of the missions are no longer geographical, because poverty, suffering and the desire for a greater hope have made their way to us. 

Mission is not so much about “departing”, but instead “remaining” in order to proclaim Christ through hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity. We are to remain without fleeing to the comforts of our individualism; to remain so as to look upon those who arrive from lands that are distant and violent; to remain and open our arms and hearts to them, welcoming them as brothers and sisters, and being for them a presence of consolation and hope.