For All the Missions of the World
Journey With the Pope
Deepen your faith with a daily encouragement from Pope Francis. Sign up!
Lent
During Lent, we reflect on the blessings found in the Lord by reading Sacred Scripture. We repent and deepen our faith by following Christ’s will. We renew our missionary hearts in service of others.
Many who serve in the Pope’s Missions enter this season under threat of persecution, physical harm, and even death. During Lent, prayerfully consider how you can encourage and sustain our missionary brothers and sisters who daily share the Gospel with millions of children and families around the globe.
Father Venansio’s Story
“There is a dire need for highly educated people in my country, which is why I am here, though my heart, and my thoughts, are always in my home, with my people.”
When he was seven in 1984, Father Onesimo Keneyi Joseph Venansio’s village was besieged for months during the second Sudanese war. Almost four decades later, he assisted in the funeral Mass of fourteen teenagers as an ordained priest.
Father Venansio is one of just 180 priests in South Sudan who survive on $460 per year. They struggle to bring peace, dignity, and hope to their people under the constant threat of death.
Today Father Venansio is in Rome, where he is studying in the Missionary College to become a lawyer. He will then return to his home country better suited to help the Church as it strives to build peace in a nation that has seen too much blood shed these past decades. His formation, however needed, is an incredible sacrifice for his entire diocese. Please join us in praying for him, as he works hard to sow concord while sharing the Gospel to the next generation of Catholics.
During this season of Lent, we ask that you consider supporting the Pope’s missions and assist the Church in supporting our brother priests like Father Venansio.
“Lent invites us to conversion, to a change in mindset, so that life’s truth and beauty may be found not so much in possessing as in giving, not so much in accumulating as in sowing and sharing goodness.”
- Pope Francis
Pauline Jaricot was born in Lyon in 1799, as the French Revolution was ending. A woman of deep faith, she understood she could bring the Gospel to millions without traveling to the Pope’s Missions.
Pauline would follow her missionary heart and go on to establish the Society for the Propagation for Faith, which today assists with building churches, serving the poor, and funding the education of missionary priests religious leaders like Father Venansio.
The Pontifical Mission Societies are active in 120 countries around the globe, gathering support for the efforts of nearly 1,100 mission dioceses in Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, remote regions of Latin America, and parts of Europe.
Our evangelical mission is to spread the gospel and local churches, including building houses of worship, seminaries, convents, schools, communications, and transportation as well as life sustaining infrastructure and programs.
The Pontifical Mission
Societies have supported:
-
26 Million
Children in
Primary Schools -
38,140
Seminarians Preparing
for the Priesthood
-
8,750
Homes for Orphaned
Children and the Elderly -
11,480
Clinics Caring for the Sick
and Dying
-
844,000
Catechists Teaching
the Faith -
258,540
Religious Sisters Caring
for Children and Families