Pope Leo to missionaries: 'We must do the will of the Father'

By Vatican News

“We must be ready to put our hands into the dough of the world! It is not enough to talk about flour without getting our hands dirty; we must touch it.”

Pope Leo XIV sent that encouragement to participants in the 17th National Missionary Congress, being held in Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, on November 6-9.

In his message, Pope recalled the origins of evangelization in Mexico, where “the leaven of the Gospel arrived in the hands of a few missionaries.”

“These were the hands of the Church,” he wrote, “which began to knead the leaven they carried with them—the deposit of faith—together with the new flour of a continent that did not yet know the name of Christ. By bringing them together, the Church began a slow and admirable process of rising.”

“The Gospel did not erase what it found but transformed it,” Pope Leo explained. “The extraordinary richness of the peoples of these lands—their languages, symbols, customs, and hopes—intertwined with the faith until the Gospel took root in their hearts and blossomed in unique works of holiness and beauty.” This was, he adds, “a dawn of faith that God gave to the Church as a sign of perfect inculturation.”

Message of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The Pope recalled the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which “from the beginning became a missionary impulse.”

The apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac was “the visible testimony of the love with which the Lord drew near to the people of these lands, and of the believing response of a people who lifted their eyes to their Savior, ready to accept the invitation of Our Lady, as at Cana, to do whatever He tells them.”

The first evangelizers—diocesan priests, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits—“faithfully accepted the task that Christ asked them to fulfill. Wherever they preached, faith flourished, and with it culture, education, and charity. Thus, little by little, the dough continued to rise, and the Gospel became bread capable of satisfying the deepest hunger of this people.”

True missionaries do not dominate but love

He pointed to the figure of Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, “a pastor and missionary who saw his ministry as service and leaven.”

"In his life and writings," said the Pope, "he shows us that the true missionary does not dominate but loves; he does not impose but serves; and he does not use faith to obtain personal gain—whether material, political, or of prestige—but distributes faith as bread."

Pope Leo then reflected on today’s challenges: “Our time presents itself as a mill where the pains of poverty, social divisions, the challenges of new technologies, and the sincere desires for peace are still being ground together like new flour that risks being fermented with a bad leaven.”

For this reason, he said, “the Lord calls you, today’s missionaries, to be the hands of the Church that place the leaven of the Risen One into the dough of history, so that hope may rise again. It is not enough to say, ‘Lord, Lord’; we must do the will of the Father.”

“The Kingdom will grow, not by force or by numbers," concluded the Pope, "but through the patience of those who, with faith and love, continue to knead with God.”