Not long ago, I came across an interview with a famous Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, who has just published a non-fiction novel about Pope Francis: “El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo” (The Madman of God at the End of the World). In this exchange, the writer begins by admitting to being an atheist and an unredeemed anticlerical. But he adds that, in his contacts with believers, he has discovered some important things. One of them is the situation of some Christians who are a bit “crazy”: the missionaries.

He says about them: “They are people made of different stuff. They have given everything for others: their academic careers, their affection, their families and their homes. They are fighting all over the world to shelter those who are freezing, feed those who are starving and give drink to those who are thirsty. It is impossible not to admire the work of the missionaries”.

Evidently, Javier Cercas also wonders where this inner strength, the “madness” of these special believers who are the missionaries, comes from … and he answers categorically: faith lived with an authentic dedication and with a granite-like conviction.

His account, however, while heartfelt, does not fully capture the depth of what drives missionaries. Because to faith must be added the firm hope that comes from the Risen Christ … and thus, the missionaries become witnesses of a true hope that not even death can defeat, because they base their life and their their call to evangelize on the One who defeated death forever.

There is a deep connection between missionaries and the joy of Easter. These men and women endure dangers, hardships, and exhaustion because they live by an unshakable truth… because they live an incontrovertible truth: that the Risen Christ has opened wide the windows of hope and has made it possible for death to be transformed into life, darkness into light, injustice into justice and mercy and inhumanity into fraternal solidarity.

Moreover, since the turning point of Christ’s Resurrection, missionaries are aware that they have been chosen to embody, in the poorest and most peripheral places of the planet, the loving embrace and the endearing goodness of the good God. For this reason, they feel sent by the spirit of the Risen Lord to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8). One of the characteristics of the true witness of the Risen One is joy…. Missionaries do not gloss over or frivolously sugarcoat pain and injustice…. On the contrary, Easter joy is a fighting and transforming force encouraged by hope. It is, in short, a luminous sign that it is worthwhile to give one’s life for those whose very will to live has been taken away.

Fr. Celestino Fernández, CM.
Source: “Tu Misión al día” magazine, published by the NGO COVIDE-AMVE, special issue 2, first half of the year 2025.
Visit the COVIDE-AMVE website: https://covideamve.org/

The Supper at Emmaus, by Jean Baptiste de Champaigne (1631-1681). Source: Museum of Fine Arts of Ghent (Belgium).