23 July 1990
Benagalbon, Spain

My dear Young People,

The character of Jonah would hardly figure among the ten most interesting characters of the Old Testament. It could be said that he probably never existed. The story of Jonah is just a story, but a story with a point to it. Jonah received a missionary vocation from God and he tried to avoid it. Instead of going to the country for which he received a vocation, he tried to go somewhere else. What happened? He was shipwrecked. Then, the story goes, he was swallowed by a whale and after three days, thrown up on a seashore, alive. Jonah got the message and straightaway set out for the city of Nineveh, the city to which God from the very beginning had intended him to go as a missionary.

It would seem that Jonah at first did not want to be a missionary, and the reason seems strange to us. He did not want a pagan people to share in the privilege of the Israelite faith. He was like a Christian who says, "charity begins at home" and then lets it end there. Jonah was a little like the elder son in Our Lord's parable of the Prodigal Son, and we know that the love of the elder son in that parable was narrow and selfish.

To be a missionary one must have a strong love in one's heart for Jesus Christ and His Church. It was his personal love for Jesus Christ and His Church that pushed St. Paul to go from country to country--sometimes at great personal risk--to proclaim that Christ had come, that Christ had died, that Christ had risen, and that Christ would come again. Today, as always, it will be true that, unless the love of Christ overwhelms the heart of the contemporary Christian, missions will remain an 'optional extra' for those who like that sort of thing.

I once heard a man say that the first question each of us will be asked by Jesus Christ after our deaths will be: "And where are the others?" We don't go to heaven alone. Every Christian is a missionary: some in mission lands, others in the wide circle of national life, others in the narrower circle of parish life and others again in the inner circle of family life. Every Christian is a Public Relations Officer for Jesus Christ. It is hard to realize this in a country where almost everyone at least bears the name Christian. Jesus Christ does continue to count on each of us Christians setting out every day from that little independent island that is one's self, and touching down on the shores of other peoples' lives with His gifts of understanding, compassion and support, and with the gift of faith in Jesus Christ and His Church.

One half of the world does not know how the other half lives. Whoever first made that statement was exaggerating. We scarcely know how the family in the next block lives, much less half the world. Yet it is one definition of a Christian that he is one who is interested, not in how half the world lives, but in how the whole world lives. "Go, make disciples of all nations." That was the final message given by Jesus Christ to His friends before He ascended into heaven. If He asked us to do it, then it must be possible.

The Marian Vincentian Youth has taken that final message of Jesus Christ seriously. Tonight I salute those of your members, thirty-four of them, who set out this summer for Honduras and Santo Domingo. I greet, too, those young people who have already spent three years working in Honduras and who now have asked to remain a further two years.

Let us who remain here at home, however, never forget that every Christian at every moment is called to be a missionary. Make no mistake about it. You are proclaiming a message at every moment of the day, even when you are not speaking. Your message must be authentic. It will be so, if you are authentic. Your authenticity as a Christian comes from your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, and with His Mother Mary. Often ask yourself: "Could Jesus Christ and His Mother Mary share what I am going to say or what I am going to do?" If you can reply yes, then you are authentic. You are transmitting a message that will have an effect, not only on those who hear and see you, but you will also be building up the Body of Christ, which is the Church.

All that I have been saying to you, my dear young people, can be marvelously summed up in the final phrase of the first reading of today's Mass: "God has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God." (Mi 6:8).