This year the DOMUND video was recorded in Sierra Leone. A small West African country of no more than eight million inhabitants. A mainly Muslim country, where Catholics do not even represent 5 % of the population. But it is a country in which all its inhabitants, Catholic or not, feel a great pride for what the Catholic missionaries have given them. Missionaries who did not flee from the terrible war that lasted ten years, from 1992 to 2002, in which a handful of them died in the hands of the rebels in a cruel way. Who accompanied and helped to rebuild a country destroyed after the war, with thousands of orphaned children, amputees or soldiers... who bravely faced the terrible Ebola epidemic, from which a few of them died, two of them Spanish... Missionaries who have gone to the most complicated places to teach the good news of salvation, forgiveness, compassion and mercy.
This year we want to show, with this video, that missionaries, in Sierra Leone, but also in South Africa, Japan, Vietnam, Honduras or Sri Lanka... are witnesses of Christ. They are witnesses of the Redeemer. The missionary is not a volunteer, not a development worker, not a social worker or a psychologist, he is a man, a woman, married, single, ordained priest, with vows that consecrate him... who have left everything to become one with those to whom they have been sent and to be among them, with them, before them, witnesses of God.
The Pope has proposed the following motto for this World Mission Sunday "you shall be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8). And what better way to define what missionaries are, if not that they are witnesses of Christ! Every baptized person should be a witness of Jesus, but those who have left everything to go to mission lands are missionaries in their own right... thank you, witnesses of the Lord! Let us pray that they may be faithful to what the Lord is asking of them. Will you help us to help them?
