Rome (Italy). In view of the 99th World Mission Day, which is celebrated on Sunday 19 October 2025, through a video message Pope Leo XIV addresses each Catholic Parish in the world to promote participation, reminding that “every year, on World Missionary Day, the whole Church unites in prayer for the missionaries and for the fruitfulness of their apostolate.”
Then recalling his personal experience, first as a priest and then as a missionary Bishop –called by Pope Francis to exercise his ministry in the Chiclayo Diocese, in Peru, since 26 September 2015 – he testifies, “I have seen with my own eyes how faith, prayer, and generosity demonstrated on this Day can change entire communities.”
Hence, the heartfelt appeal for active participation. “Your prayers and help serve to spread the Gospel, support pastoral and catechetical programs, build new churches, and respond to the health and educational needs of our brothers and sisters in mission territories.”
The Holy Father therefore concludes the Video Message by making an appointment on 19 October. “As we reflect together on our baptismal call to be ‘missionaries of hope among the peoples’, we renew our sweet and joyful commitment to bringing Jesus Christ, our Hope, to the ends of the earth. Thank you! Thank you for everything you will do to help me help missionaries everywhere in the world. God bless you.”
October 19, 2025 is undoubtedly a long-awaited World Missionary Day, as it will be unforgettable for all the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians and members of the Salesian Family, who will come from all over the world to Rome in St. Peter’s Square to attend the Eucharistic Celebration with the Canonization of Sister Maria Troncatti, FMA missionary, together with the other six Blesseds, or they will follow the event from home.
That of Sister Maria, like that of others now close to Canonization, is the testimony of a life of the baptized fully realized, following “the footsteps of the Lord Jesus to become, with Him and in Him, signs and messengers of hope in every place and circumstance that God gives us to live. May all the baptized, missionary disciples of Christ, make His hope shine in every corner of the earth,” encourages the Pope (Message for the Day).
It is a light that shines through the face of these great missionaries, as Mother Chiara Cazzuola highlighted in Goodnight to the Community of the Generalate, a week before the great event, looking at the “elderly face, worn out by the years” of Sister Maria, who nevertheless has “an enchanting serenity, which comes from within, which makes us feel how much she fully realized her Salesian vocation, her mission. Beyond the missionary spirit expressed concretely among the Shuar, there is a completed Salesian mission lived entirely.”
