November 1st, 2019
“Baptized and Sent: The Church of Christ on Mission in the World”. This is the theme chosen by Pope Francis for the Missionary Month that he called for this past June. “For the month of October 2019”, he said in the homily that opened the month on October 1st, “I ask the whole Church to live an extraordinary time of missionary activity”.
This special initiative marked the 100th anniversary of Pope Benedict XV’s Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud (1919), a document on the Church’s mission to the world, and was run in conjuction with the Synod of Bishops of the Pan-Amazon region. Pope Francis argued that “It will help us in our mission”, which is not about spreading a “religious ideology” or a “lofty ethical teaching.” Instead, he continued, “through the mission of the Church, Jesus Christ himself continues to evangelize and act; her mission thus makes present in history the Kairos, the favorable time of salvation.”
The Message by Pope Francis for World Mission Day (20th October) contains some important aspects of Roman Catholic missiology that deserve critical attention, especially on the importance that Rome attributes to baptism for mission.
Is Baptism the Foundation of Mission?
The title of the Message indicates a causative link between baptism and mission. The background of the Pope’s appeal to a renewed missionary effort by his Church is given by the presentation of the standard Roman doctrine of baptism, and by extension, of the sacramental life. Mission begins with a sacrament and unfolds in a sacramental journey. This is what the Pope said:
This life is bestowed on us in baptism, which grants us the gift of faith in Jesus Christ, the conqueror of sin and death. Baptism gives us rebirth in God’s own image and likeness, and makes us members of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. In this sense, baptism is truly necessary for salvation for it ensures that we are always and everywhere sons and daughters in the house of the Father, and never orphans, strangers or slaves. What in the Christian is a sacramental reality – whose fulfillment is found in the Eucharist – remains the vocation and destiny of every man and woman in search of conversion and salvation. For baptism fulfils the promise of the gift of God that makes everyone a son or daughter in the Son. We are children of our natural parents, but in baptism we receive the origin of all fatherhood and true motherhood: no one can have God for a Father who does not have the Church for a mother (cf. Saint Cyprian, De Cath. Eccl., 6).
Here we find the traditional Roman Catholic view of baptism in a nutshell. Baptism is thought of as bestowing the gift of faith, giving new birth, incoporating into the Church, granting salvation, enacting adoption, making accessible the promise of God, and making it possible to enter into the sacramental reality which finds its climax in the Eucharist. The Church administers God’s grace through the sacrament of baptism and nurtures it through the sacrament of the Eucharist. In the Roman Catholic view, this sacramental life, beginning with baptism, is what is offered in mission to all people.
In passing, notice that even when Rome speaks the seemingly evangelical language of mission, it does so in its own sacramental understanding. Baptism, and thefore the sacraments, and therefore the Church, are central to the Roman Catholic gospel. Rome cannot be and will never be committed to the gospel truth that salvation is by faith alone. One is not saved by believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but by receiving the sacrament of baptism by the Church. Rome finds it hard to accept the straighforward biblical message that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Romans 10:9-10). Whatever view of baptism churches might hold (and notoriously Protestants disagree on the meaning of baptism), the gospel is clear that it is by confesssing and believing (in other words, by faith and by faith alone) that one is saved.
“Every baptized man and woman is a mission”
According to Francis, then, mission stems from baptism. One is sent into mission because he/she is baptized. One who is baptized is a missionary by definition. Here is what he said to reinforce the point: “Our mission is rooted in the fatherhood of God and the motherhood of the Church. The mandate given by the Risen Jesus at Easter is inherent in Baptism”. In this Roman Catholic view, there is something intrinsic and objective in baptism that makes it foundational to the missionary mandate. This conviction was further elaborated when Francis affirmed, “Today too, the Church needs men and women who, by virtue of their baptism, respond generously to the call to leave behind home, family, country, language and local Church, and to be sent forth to the nations, to a world not yet transformed by the sacraments of Jesus Christ and his holy Church.”
“By virtue of their baptism” people become missionaries, thus the theme of the missionary month: “Baptized and Sent”. Later Pope Francis made the point again when he said,“Every baptized man and woman is a mission”. So mission is rooted in baptism and the missionary calling derives from baptism. Once baptized, one is sent.
There are severe problems here. First, baptism, i.e. a sacrament of the Church, is elevated to an importance that makes personal faith second; it therefore highlights the centrality of the institution that administers it and the physical objects that the Church uses (i.e. water), rather than the personal response to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Secondly, most baptized people in the Catholic church don’t show any evidence of this missionary awareness; indeed, many don’t believe in the biblical gospel at all. Many Catholics in majority Catholic contexts have never professed a personal faith in the biblical Jesus and fall short of any biblical qualifications to be missionaries because they are not believers in Jesus Christ in the first place! How is it possible to maintain such a view that runs contrary to Scripture and the empirical evidence? From both theological and sociological grounds, the link between baptism and mission is not causal and linear as the Pope thinks.
Again, Romans 10 is helpful here: “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” (10:14-15). The Bible teaches that mission requires believers in Jesus Christ to be sent, not baptized people by the Church. This is a significantly different view than that of Pope Francis! One wonders if the link between baptism and mission actually suffocates the gospel rather than propelling it.
The language of Roman Catholic missiology may look like the evangelical understanding of it but, despite the common language, the theological meaning of the words and the overall theological framework are different. The Roman Catholic Missionary Month promoted by Pope Francis is not good news for evangelical mission.
