NEWSLETTER INSERTS

‘Dear Brothers and Sisters. On World Mission Sunday every year, the whole Church prays, united, particularly for missionaries and the fruitfulness of their apostolic labours. When I served as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, I saw first-hand how the faith, the prayer and the generosity shown on World Mission Sunday can transform entire communities. I urge every Catholic parish in the world to take part in World Mission Sunday. Your prayers, your support will help spread the Gospel, provide for pastoral and catechetical programs, help to build new churches, and care for the health and educational needs of our brothers and sisters in mission territories.

This October 19th, as we reflect together on our baptismal call to be "missionaries of hope among the peoples," let us commit ourselves anew to the sweet and joyful task of bringing Christ Jesus our Hope to the ends of the earth. Thank you for everything you will do to help me help missionaries throughout the world. God bless you all!

Pope Leo XIV, Message for Mission Sunday 2025

‘How baffling you are, O Church, and yet how I love you! How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely. And where should I go? To build myself another Church? But I could build one only with the same defects, because they are mine, defects which I have inside myself. And if I built one, it would be my Church, no longer the Church of Christ.

Carlo Carretto (1910-1988)

‘You first loved us so that we might love You - not because You needed our love but because, we could not be what You created us to be, except by loving You.’

St William of Saint Thierry (c 1075-1148)

‘At the end of the Gospel for this Mission Sunday, Jesus asks the haunting question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?” Each of us need to direct that question to ourselves – ‘When Jesus returns will he find any faith in me?’ Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief!’

Fr Billy Swan