On October 19, we celebrate World Mission Sunday. In the Jubilee Year 2025, this celebration takes on a deeper resonance, for it is marked by the final message of Pope Francis for Mission Sunday before his passing. His words now come to us as both legacy and mandate: “Missionaries of Hope Among All Peoples.”
The late pope, drawing from his Jubilee Bullm Spes Non Confundit [Hope Does Not Disappoint], invites the Church to recognise its fundamental vocation—to be, in Christ’s footsteps, messengers and builders of hope in a world where dark shadows loom. Hope, the Holy Father reminds us, is not optimism born of human calculation, but a gift of the Risen Christ. We are “born anew to a living hope” [1 Peter 1:3], a hope that can never disappoint, because it rests on the fidelity of God.
In his reflection, Pope Francis insisted that Christ himself is the divine Missionary of hope. In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus carried the Good News to the poor, healed the broken-hearted, and endured human anguish. To follow him is to take up that same mission, becoming “not a static Church, but a missionary Church that walks with her Lord through the streets of the world.”
We live in an age marked by uncertainties: migration reshaping families, loneliness affecting the elderly, and consumerism dulling our compassion. In this context, Mission Sunday is not just a remote call to far-off lands, but an invitation to live as artisans of hope in our own city—whether in our schools, workplaces, or homes. Each act of closeness, compassion, and tenderness becomes a seed of evangelisation.
This year, various deaneries across Hong Kong are commemorating Mission Sunday with concerts, dramas, pilgrimages, and community outreach initiatives. These events are more than programmes—they are visible signs of a Church alive in mission, embodying the Pope’s reminder that evangelisation is always communitarian. Mission is never the work of isolated individuals but of a people walking together, praying together, and witnessing together.
The Holy Father also pointed us back to the heart of all mission: prayer. “The person who hopes is a person who prays,” he quoted François-Xavier Cardinal Van Thuan, the heroic former Archbishop of Saigon who was imprisoned by the communist forces in Vietnam for 13 years, including nine in solitary confinement, which he endured only by prayer and the Eucharist.
For us too, prayer nourishes our missionary zeal and keeps alive the flame of hope. Every Mass, every Psalm, every personal prayer becomes an offering that fuels the Church’s mission, here and to the ends of the earth.
On this Mission Sunday in this Jubilee Year, may Pope Francis’ parting exhortation echo in our hearts: to be men and women of hope, witnesses to Christ’s victory over despair and death. In Hong Kong, let us continue to walk together as a missionary Church, carrying to every corner of our city the message that “hope does not disappoint.” jose, CMF
