by Fr Giuseppe Caramazza MCCJ
The Church’s mission in the world is always the same, yet ever new. The Gospel cannot be proclaimed except within the context in which one lives. As times, cultures, and places change, so does the context, and therefore the mission must find new ways to proclaim the Gospel.
In his preaching, Jesus insisted on the category of “Kingdom”. He could have chosen another description for the society he wanted to build. He had many possibilities before him: a spiritual description, the Temple, the synagogue, other religious forms like Qumran, the Pharisaic movement, the discipleship of John the Baptist… Yet he chose to speak of the kingdom, and this is a political category. However, it must be noted that the Hebrew word malkut, like its Greek equivalent basileia, indicates both the political structure and the governing process. The Kingdom of God should therefore be understood as the mode in which God reigns. This points decisively to the social role that is at the heart of evangelization.
The Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus is not a reality of the afterlife. The Kingdom is here in our midst, he assured us. We can define the Kingdom as the new society guided by the mode God desires, a situation where every person has the opportunity to grow and fulfill themselves, giving their best. This is also the human society that missionaries proclaim and desire to grow around us.
In a recent interview, Fr Luigi Codianni, Superior General of the Comboni Missionaries, said: “The future of mission is played out in an increasingly global and intercultural dimension: the missionary of today and tomorrow must be capable of dialogue with digital cultures, attentive to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth, ready to live in contexts marked by conflict and migration, prepared for interreligious and intercultural dialogue.” This statement contains valuable indications. Mission, as always, has a social and political dimension, to which is now added attention to the cry of the earth: the ecological dimension.
But let’s proceed in order: the global and intercultural dimension. The era of romantic mission is long gone, the vision of the Western missionary gathering the village around a fire, by the river, in the evening, to tell the gospel. I doubt such a mission ever truly existed, but certainly this image was evocative. As a child, I often visited the African Museum in Verona, housed in the mother house of the Comboni Missionaries. We went there annually with school and catechism class. It was there I often heard the old missionaries speak fantastically of mission. That world has set.
Today, mission is truly global and intercultural. Pope Leo reminded us of this a few days ago. During the celebration of the jubilee of the missionary world (October 5, 2025), Pope Leo stated: “Today the frontiers of mission are no longer geographical… It is not so much a matter of ‘leaving,’ but rather of ‘staying’ to announce Christ through welcome, compassion, and solidarity: staying without taking refuge in the comfort of our individualism, staying to look in the face those who come from distant and wounded lands, staying to open our arms and hearts to them, welcoming them as brothers, being for them a presence of consolation and hope.”
To these images, I would add that mission today is global and intercultural in other senses as well. Mission can no longer be considered merely in a geographical sense, as ‘going to the nations,’ since everywhere there is a need to proclaim the gospel. Mission is global because we are increasingly aware that it is not only necessary to proclaim the gospel to people, but also to evangelize social structures, politics, economics… Evangelization must reach all spheres of human experience.
The Pope has noted a link between mission and the welcome of migrants. If this welcome is limited to approaching the single migrant arriving in a new society, it will be a failure. Certainly, charity is needed towards those who need hospitality and support. It is also true that having a missionary presence in the context of human migration also implies a political commitment, establishing a dialogue with those tasked with organizing society, the political world precisely, so that the interest in migrants is not a fleeting commitment, without a future horizon.
We are in Italy, and speaking of migration, we immediately think of what we see happening along our coasts… but it would be reductive to think only of this phenomenon. Intra-continental migrations far exceed those moving from the Global South to the West.
For example, in the last two years, the war in Sudan has generated about twelve million displaced persons. Twelve million people who had to abandon their homes, their occupations, their roots in order to live. Millions of people who may never be able to return to their homes. To these, add the millions of young people moving across Africa and other continents in search of work and safety.
Considering the causes of such migrations and possible solutions to resolve the emergencies that create them means designing a new social order, and this is political action.
Then there is the great question hanging in the air. Are our ecclesial communities truly ready to engage with the stranger in our midst? Do we truly open the door to full participation in our activities, starting with the synodal journey, which would foresee the presence of all, listening but also the willingness to welcome new values and new perspectives of faith?
Unfortunately, the issue of full citizenship has not yet become an acquired value. Indeed, local communities often become defensive against the full welcome of those perceived as foreigners. This is due to the fears that every change brings. Many local communities fear change because they are insecure about their own identity. Yet, Pope Francis reminds us, refusing to address the issue means preparing “the ground for hostility and discord and taking away the achievements and religious and civil rights of some citizens by discriminating against them” (Fratelli Tutti 131).
It must be emphasized here that a welcome without rules would be equally disastrous. Those who welcome and those who are welcomed must together undertake a journey of rediscovery of themselves, their identity, their interests. Only in this way will the basis for true otherness exist. Otherness does not mean a difference to be filled to achieve conformity, the flattening of diversities. On the contrary, otherness must be seen as an opportunity: the ability to recognize differences, to find common ground, in full respect of the other, to build together. This is the way to value individual identities without compromising new future goals.
Again during the celebration of the Mission Jubilee, Pope Leo recalled that “the Spirit sends us to continue the work of Christ in the peripheries of the world, sometimes marked by war, injustice, and suffering. Faced with these dark scenarios, the cry that has risen to God so many times in history re-emerges: why, Lord, do you not intervene? Why do you seem absent?”
The Pope refers to the questions the prophet Habakkuk addresses to God. But God reminds the prophet Habakkuk that he has been placed as a sentinel of justice among the people. So we too today can think that it is our task as believers to become architects of justice and peace in our communities.
Mission is intercultural because by now no people can think they hold an evangelical truth to share with others. It is therefore necessary to enter a new order of ideas regarding the importance of cultures and their right to interpret the evangelical message along different cultural lines. This is true among ethnic cultures – Spanish culture and Thai culture – but it is also true among generational lines.
It is no coincidence that Fr Codianni speaks of digital culture, and this refers to the great transformation of communication happening around us. The new generations, all over the world, no longer depend on printed production. They communicate through digital means, social media. They no longer speak the language in which previous generations grew up. They use new ways, different models. Well, evangelization must also take into account this transformation of language and modes of communication. It is not a matter of imitating Generation Z, young people born in the last twenty years, but of acquiring new communicative models to be able to dialogue with them, to be able to use digital means profitably for the communication of the gospel. Overcoming old forms of communication can frighten us. Yet we must make the effort to be present in today’s world.
Beyond the modes, the heart of the divine message remains. A message that spurs to action. In the book of Exodus we read that “their cry has come to me,” words of a God who gets involved in the human adventure and cannot remain insensitive to the cry of the abused person, bent by every kind of poverty and suffering. The missionary reflects this sensitivity to the cry of the poor, of those who live on the periphery of the world.
It is no coincidence that the proclamation of the Gospel acquires a particular flavor when amplified by presence alongside the least of the earth: the landless, refugees, inhabitants of the many slums in the Global South, young people who see their future foreclosed. The list is endless.
There is also the cry of the Earth. A cry that has become more urgent and strident in recent years. The ecological issue is not new. Already in the early 1990s, the well-known South African Protestant missiologist David Bosch observed that Christian responsibility towards the environment “has only very rarely been linked to the missionary commitment of the Church.” He later stated: “A missiology of Western culture must include an ecological dimension. It has long been untenable to exclude the environment from our missionary agenda.” In the following decades, the issue was addressed by other theologians, but always in specialized articles that did not reach the faithful of various churches.
Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ is therefore not a document that fell from the sky; it is the result of a long journey of both theological reflection and civil society. In that document, the Pope places on the table various elements that have a strong correlation with climate change. Yet this does not seem to be the greatest problem. Climate change is serious and impacts our lives. But the problem must be healed at the root. And this can only be done by transforming the prevalent social and economic models today: exacerbated consumerism, little attention to people’s health, failure to observe human rights, the erosion of private spaces, the invasion into citizens’ lives… It is necessary to re-establish a society that places the person at the center.
In this commitment, religions have a central role. We cannot think that centers of financial and political power will easily abdicate their interests of control and profit. Only religious organizations can field the will for transformation, the moral strength to demand responsible management of the common good – and of the economy – and at the same time mobilize significant groups of people who accept the challenge of transformation.
As Comboni Missionaries, how do we respond to these challenges? Individual confreres and the Comboni provinces scattered around the world respond to this challenge in many ways. We can note some interesting activities.
In Brazil, our confreres who worked in Açailandia committed themselves in the field of justice and gave life to the Justiça nos Trilhos (Justice on the Tracks) movement. It is a non-profit association for human and nature rights. It promotes activities to discuss the hegemonic development model of mining and agro-forestry companies, and the excessive exploitation of natural resources. The movement works closely with communities affected by the Carajás Railway, involving educators, communicators, activists, researchers, and lay missionaries. The goal is to strengthen local communities, denounce human and nature rights violations by mining and agribusiness companies, and prevent further violations. Justiça nos Trilhos has received various international recognitions and, a few weeks ago, won the pastoral communication award of the Brazilian dioceses. Its founder, Father Dario Bossi, also inspired and supported the birth of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network. Today, Fr Joseph Mumbere, a Congolese Comboni missionary, is engaged with Justiça nos Trilhos, ensuring the continued Comboni presence alongside the local community.
In the political field, we can cite CAMPSSI. This is a group of Catholic parliamentarians formed in Kenya in 2012. The inspiration came from a meeting between Father Francesco Pierli, a Comboni missionary and former Father General, and a group of parliamentarians who frequented the Saint Paul university chapel in Nairobi. Since then, the group has grown to become an organization recognized by parliament. I was able to follow this group for about ten years and see the development of various activities. Among these is the School of Politics. The name is grand and has attracted much attention. The parliamentarians meet to analyze laws under discussion. They listen to experts in the field and discuss various aspects, judging everything in light of the Church’s Social Doctrine. Various initiatives have arisen from these discussions: preparing parliamentarians for debate in the chamber, modifying proposed laws that did not favor the good of society, and writing new laws. We Comboni Missionaries are not officially part of CAMPSSI, but we have always followed and inspired the group.
In Italy too, Comboni Missionaries try to respond to the new challenges of mission. I cite two examples: commitment alongside migrants and new generations of Afro-descendants; and ecological commitment. With migrants, the associations Black and White in the Castel Volturno area of Campania and Afrobrix in Brescia work particularly. In many communities, Laudato Si’ journeys have been prepared. These are educational pathways intended to educate and make visitors reflect on the urgency of a new approach to nature and human relations.
Here in Padua, we also try to participate in this new dimension of mission. And we do this through the animation of parish groups and civil society. In the ecological field, notable has been the participation in organizing the conferences “In the Furrow of Laudato Si’,” with the participation of experts. We are also present in local media, with a regular column in Difesa del Popolo (Diocesan weekly) and various interventions on TV7 (local private TV station).
Activities, therefore, are not lacking, nor is a common vision of being missionaries, evangelizers, even here in Europe. Recently, during the official visit to our province and on the occasion of this feast of our founder, Fr Codianni and his council reminded us of the importance of rediscovering the fire of mission. It is an invitation, but also a wish that the entire Comboni family – Brothers, Fathers, Sisters, secular missionaries, lay missionaries– knows how to respond to the demands of mission in Europe, and does so with generosity.
