The assignments of families, priests, and seminarians of the Neocatechumenal Way preparing to serve as missionaries abroad were approved by Pope Francis on Monday during a meeting.
“Do not forget the gaze of Jesus, who sent each of you to preach and obey the Church,” Pope Francis said on June 27.
“We have heard Jesus’ mission, ‘Go, bear witness, preach the Gospel,’” he said. “And from that day the Apostles, the disciples, the people all went forth with the same strength as Jesus had given them: it is the strength that comes from the Spirit: ‘Go and preach, baptize.’”
The pope’s brief remarks came during the Neocatechumenal Way missionary confirmation and sending in the Paul VI Hall of the Vatican, which also included prayer and music.
The Neocatechumenal Way is an ecclesiastical movement that offers post-baptismal Christian development in around 40,000 small, parish-based communities. It is inspired by the traditions of the early Church.
The movement claims to have more than 1 million members and is present throughout the world. In 1964, Kiko Argüello and Carmen Hernández started it in Spain.
Argüello welcomed everyone and declared that Hernández’s cause for beatification, who passed away in 2016 at the age of 85, will soon begin.
Along with listing the missionary families’ final destinations, the 83-year-old movement leader also included a list of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas.
According to Argüello, a number of Neocatechumenal Way seminary students will be serving as missionaries in China.
Pope Francis encouraged the new missionaries to let a Christian community grow “in its own ways, in its own culture.”
“This is the story of evangelization,” he continued. “All are equal in terms of faith: I believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Son who became incarnate, died and rose again for us, the Spirit who helps us and makes us grow: the same faith. But all with the mode of their own culture or the culture of the place where the faith was preached.”
He said the multi-cultural richness of the Gospel is the story of the Church: “So many cultures but the same Gospel. So many peoples, the same Jesus Christ.”
By way of the local bishop, the pope commended the families for their desire to serve as missionaries and exhorted them to be submissive to the Holy Spirit and obedient to Christ and his Church.
“This is the spirituality that must accompany us always: to preach Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit in the Church and with the Church,” Francis said.