Throughout the year, the Pontifical Mission Societies (TPMS) support the proclamation of the Gospel, the building of the Church, and the work and witness of mission priests, religious Sisters and Brothers, and lay pastoral leaders. These missionaries provide food, education, and medical care to the most vulnerable communities in the Pope’s missions. Through their work, they reveal the compassionate heart of Jesus. Help support their efforts this World Mission Month.
The Pontifical Mission Societies provide for a global network of people who are making the difference for the poor and forgotten. Young Pauline Jaricot (pictured here) learned about the Missions of her day from letters from missionaries. She decided to do something to help their work, right from her home in Lyons, France. Pauline gathered her friends and workers in the local silk factory into small groups. Everyone in the group pledged to pray for the Missions daily and to offer the equivalent of a penny each week. Each group member then found ten other friends to do the same. Within a year, she had 500 workers praying daily and offering help each week.
Pauline's efforts became The Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The first collections supported the missions of China and the United States. By 1922, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith – and three other societies established to help the Missions – became Pontifical, or the Pope's official ways to help the Missions, moving their headquarters to Rome.
Please continue Pauline's legacy of Love & Hope!
Help us direct you gift by noting World Missions in the Memo or For section of your check, Venmo, or online gift.
Pope Francis’ Message for World Mission Sunday, 2022
Dear brothers and sisters, I continue to dream of a completely missionary Church, and a new era of missionary activity among Christian communities. I repeat Moses’ great desire for the people of God on their journey: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” (Num 11:29). Indeed, would that all of us in the Church were what we already are by virtue of baptism: prophets, witnesses, missionaries of the Lord, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth!
Pope Francis seeks to promote greater awareness of “missio ad gentes” and to animate the missionary transformation of Church life and pastoral activity by asking each country to highlight a great missionary who shared their life for the love of the Gospel.
In the United States, Sister Dorothy Stang, SNDdeN, martyred in Brazil in 2005 because of her defense of Indigenous people and the Environment is our great missionary of the Gospel who died reciting, "Blessed are the peacemakers..." (Mt 5:9)
To learn more about her exemplary missionary life, please view the video at the left and visit this link to the website of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, her congregation ~