Full text: Homily of Pope Leo XIV during the jubilee of the missionary world and migrants

The Pope celebrated a Mass for the jubilee of the missionary world and the jubilee of migrants, two central moments of the Holy Year 2025, which have been held on October 4 and 5. Read the full text here.

Dear brothers and sisters:

We celebrate today the jubilee of the missionary world and migrants. It is a beautiful occasion to revive in us the awareness of the missionary vocation, which is born from the desire to bring all the joy and consolation of the Gospel, especially those who live a difficult and wounded story.

I think in a particular way of the migrant brothers, who have had to leave their land, often leaving their loved ones, crossing the nights of fear and loneliness, suffering in their own skin discrimination and violence.

We are here because, before the tomb of the apostle Peter, each of us must say with joy: the whole church is missionary, and it is urgent – as Pope Francis said – that “it goes out to announce the gospel to all, in all places, on all occasions, without delay, without disgust and without fear” (exhort. Ap. Gospel joy23).

The Spirit sends us to continue the work of Christ in the peripheries of the world, sometimes marked by war, injustice and suffering. Given these dark scenarios, the cry that has been raised to God so many times springs again: Lord, why don’t you intervene? Why do you seem absent?

This cry of pain is a form of prayer that permeates all writing and, this morning, we have heard it from the Habakkuk prophet: “How long, Lord, will I ask for help without you listening (…) Why do you make me see the iniquity and look at the oppression?” (Ha 1,2-3).

Pope Benedict XVI, who picked up these questions during his historic visit to Auschwitz, resumed the subject in a catechesis, stating: «God silences, and this silence lacerates the mood of the prayer, which incessantly calls, but without finding an answer. (…) God seems so distant, forgotten, so absent »(CatechesisSeptember 14, 2011).

The Lord’s response, however, opens us to hope. If the prophet denounces the uninluctable force of the evil that seems to prevail, the Lord for his part announces that all this has a fixed moment, a term, because salvation will come and will soon: “He who does not have a straight soul, will succumb, but he will live for his fidelity” (Ha 2,4).

There is a life, therefore, a new possibility of life and salvation that comes from faith, because faith not only helps us resist evil persevering in good, but also transforms our existence until an instrument of salvation that God continues to make in the world is made.

And, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel, it is a meek force, faith is not imposed with the means of power and in extraordinary ways; A mustard grain is enough to achieve unthinkable things (cf. Lc 17,6), because it carries in itself the strength of God’s love that opens roads of salvation.

It is a salvation that is done when we commit ourselves in the first person and we take over, with the compassion of the Gospel, of the suffering of others; It is a salvation that makes its way, in a silent and apparently ineffective way, in gestures and in everyday words, which are like the small seed that Jesus speaks of; It is a salvation that slowly grows when we make ourselves “useless servants”, that is, when we put ourselves at the service of the Gospel and the brothers not to seek our interests, but only to bring to the world the love of the Lord.

With this trust, we are called to renew in us the fire of the missionary vocation. As Saint Paul VI said, “it is up to us to announce the Gospel in this extraordinary period of human history, a time, certainly, unprecedented, in which, to vertices of progress, never before achieved, abysses of perplexity and despair are associated, also unprecedented” (Message for World Missions DayJune 25, 1971).

Brothers and sisters, today a new missionary era is opened in the history of the Church. If for a long period we have associated the mission with the “leaving”, going to distant lands that had not known the gospel or were in poverty situations, today the borders of the mission are no longer the geographical ones, because they are poverty, suffering and desire for greater hope that come towards us.

It is witnessed by the history of many of our migrant brothers, the drama of their escape from violence, the suffering that accompanies them, the fear of not achieving it, the risk of dangerous journeys along the coast of the sea, their cry of pain and despair.

Brothers and sisters, those boats that expect to see a safe port in which to stop and those eyes full of anguish and hope that look for a firm land to reach, cannot and should not find the coldness of indifference or stigma of discrimination.

The issue is not “leave”, but rather “remain” to announce Christ through the reception, compassion and solidarity. Stay without taking refuge in the comfort of our individualism, staying to look at those who arrive from distant and suffering lands, remain to open their arms and heart, welcome them as brothers, to be for them a presence of consolation and hope.

There are so many missionaries, missionaries, but also believers and people of good will, who work at the service of migrants, and to promote a new culture of fraternity on the issue of migration, beyond stereotypes and prejudices.

But this beautiful service question each of us, to the extent of their possibilities.

This is the time – as Pope Francis said – to constitute us all in a “permanent state of mission” (exhort. AP. Gospel joy25). All this requires at least two great missionary commitments: the Missionary cooperation and the Missionary vocation

First, I ask you to promote a renewed Missionary cooperation Among the churches. In the communities of ancient Christian tradition such as the western ones, the presence of many brothers and sisters of the southern world must be welcomed as an opportunity, for an exchange that renews the face of the Church and arouses a more open, more lively and more dynamic Christianity.

At the same time, each missionary that starts for other lands, is called to inhabit the cultures that it finds with sacred respect, directing to good everything that finds good and noble, and taking them the prophecy of the Gospel.

I would also like to remember the beauty and importance of Missionary vocations. I go to the European Church in particular. Today a new missionary impulse is needed, of the laity, religious and priests who offer their service in the mission lands, new vocational proposals and experience capable of raising this desire, especially in young people.

At the same time, the communities in the south of the world are called to discern with attention the vocational motivations of those who want to be a missionary or missionary.

Dear brothers and sisters, I send my blessing to the local clergy of the private churches, to the missionaries and the missionaries, to those who are in vocational discernment.

While emigrants tell them: they are always welcome. The seas and deserts that have gone through, in writing are “places of salvation”, in which God was present to save his people.

I want to find this face of God in the missionaries and in the missionaries they will find. I entrust everyone to the intercession of Mary, first missionary of her son, who puts herself on the way without delay towards the mountains of Judea, taking Jesus in her bosom and putting himself at the service From Isabel.

She holds us, so that each of us is a collaborator of the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of love, justice and peace.