I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Pope Francis said on July 25, 2022. The pope spoke to a delegation of First Nations Leaders in Alberta, Canada, on his pilgrimage of penance following the 2021 revelations of more than 200 graves at the former site of the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.
In this July speech, Pope Francis, speaking in Italian, excoriated the harm of Catholic missions to the “New World.” He decried the policies of assimilation, of which the residential schools were an example, that were “devastating for the people of these lands.
“When the European colonists first arrived here, there was a great opportunity to bring about a fruitful encounter between cultures, traditions and forms of spirituality,” Francis said. “Yet for the most part that did not happen.”
Pope Francis’ speech—and the troubling legacy of Catholic missions—brings up an important question: What should the role of Catholic missions be in spreading the faith?
While some missionaries have done great harm in the name of the church, others have elevated and cooperated with native cultures and have found articulations of the universal message of Christ in the particularities of the communities they serve. At their best, the missionary is a continuation of the Pentecost experience, of experiencing an encounter with Christ in all tongues, languages, and cultures.
Redefining mission
The troubling history of Christian mission work has not gone unacknowledged. In a 2023 statement repudiating the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, the papal teachings that supported colonial empires’ destruction of Indigenous cultures and societies, the Vatican dicasteries noted that papal teaching had been “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples.” They also noted the failure of the church to advocate for the rights of the vulnerable and that colonizers abused the native peoples sometimes “without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities.”
“Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others,” Francis said in his apology to the First Nations. And yet, Francis, at the same time as he called the church to repent of and repair the harms of missionaries in the past, has also called Catholics to be “missionary disciples.”
The idea of missionary discipleship echoes the commission that Pope Francis laid out for the church in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World). In this letter, Francis called the church to “go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel.”
Mission and missionary are used more than 130 times in this apostolic exhortation. And being a missionary is not just the task of the religious orders or those young enough to journey forth physically: Pope Francis wrote, “In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples.”
In the Western Hemisphere, grappling with the bloody and violent scars of colonization, Christians have made sincere efforts to reclaim mission as an emblem of nonviolence in a post-colonial context. Following the message of the Second Vatican Council to embrace the universal, dynamic call to holiness, Pope Francis called us to reimagine mission not as an activity of proselytization but rather as a dynamic process of encounter on the margins.
Secular Franciscan Order Sister Margaret Guider, a professor of missiology at Boston College, says that missionaries began with Jesus’ own words. “It really begins with the ascension of Jesus, telling his disciples to go forth and spread the good news and take this message to the ends of the Earth,” she says.
Over the course of 1,900 years, the church’s missionary activity meant crossing the divisions between social classes (slave and free, as Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians), races and religions (Jew or Greek), and gender divides (male or female). “All were citizens in the reign of God,” Guider says.
Over time, the word of God spread from its first-century Jewish Mediterranean roots into other cultural languages and contexts. “Every people, culture, and language receives a particular revelation that is mediated in that culture and language,” Guider says, “No culture has the completeness of God’s revelation. Every new translation or interpretation of scripture brings with it a new insight.”
“Mission is not about proselytization, not about numbers or adding members to the club—it’s inviting people to Christ,” says Phil Couture, who oversees formation for Christ in the City, a young adult formation program that brings young people into community and into encounter with people who are unhoused in their cities.
Couture has worked at Christ in the City for 11 years, but missionary DNA has been in his family for generations. His ancestor, Guillaume Couture, traveled with Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues.
Couture describes a missionary as someone who traverses the pain and isolation of ruptured relationships that trap many Americans in isolation, addiction, and loneliness. “It takes the audacity of a missionary to overcome these ruptured relationships,” he says.
A complicated U.S. legacy
In the United States, the various understandings of what it means to be a missionary have come into conflict against a particularly brutal colonial backdrop. In her book of essays The Beginning Comes After the End, (Haymarket Books) Rebecca Solnit, author and activist, writes about the resurgence of Indigenous history as a living reality after centuries of erasure and burial. She finds an apt symbol for the continuance of Native identity at Mission Dolores, the Franciscan Mission Church Father Junípero Serra cofounded in 1776 in the territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, what is now San Francisco.
“The website for this outpost of the Catholic Church delicately notes that about five thousand Indigenous people are buried in the vicinity—victims of disease, dispossession, coercion, and exploitation, or to put it more concisely, genocide—though the tombstones mark only European-American graves,” Solnit writes. “Through the bars I saw, to my surprise and delight, an Ohlone hut standing among the graves, a home for the living in the territory of the dead. A powerful statement, an assertion of ongoing presence, maybe a reclaiming of land.”
Andrew Galvan, a former Franciscan brother and the current curator of Mission Dolores, corrects Solnit’s description of what she saw. “It’s a house,” Galvan says. To call this Ohlone house a hut signals that it was less than a full, proper house, he says. Such language suggests that native culture, practices, and ways of life were less realized than white European houses.
Galvan had the house—made of thatched tules, a kind of California reed—recreated in the cemetery in 2006. He uses it to demonstrate the ways of life of the natives to whom the Mission Dolores evangelized. They made houses of tules or reeds rather than buckskin teepees. They ate fish and established villages rather than living a nomadic life hunting deer.
Galvan has the distinction of being the first native Ohlone curator of Mission Dolores. In this sense, Solnit is right: The presence of the tule house is a sign that, as Galvan once jokingly said, the Mission is “under new management.”
Serra, cofounder of the Mission, has come under intense scrutiny following the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas—during the same period that Solnit remarks upon the resurgence of Indigenous history. But Serra, to Galvan, does not deserve to be lumped in with more brutal conquistadors, and he has championed Serra’s cause for canonization.
“Serra loved the Indians,” Galvan says. Serra founded nine of the 21 mission churches the Franciscans founded in “Alta California” in the 17th century. Mission Dolores, founded on the Ohlone village of Chutchui, was his northernmost mission. At the time Serra arrived, Galvan said in a 2013 interview, there were most likely 60 Ohlone Indigenous Americans living in Chutchui. Among them were Galvan’s own ancestors.
Although Solnit only saw grave-markers for Americans of European descent in the Mission’s cemetery, Galvan’s great-great-grandparents are buried across from the tule house. Galvan’s great-great-great-great-grandfather’s baptismal entry from 1794 is in the Mission’s records. Although Galvan described his pride that his family’s faith roots were intertwined with those of the Mission, he also acknowledges the problematic nature of those roots in “forced conversions.” Galvan said in a 2021 lecture that his ancestor, Poylemja, was not brought to the Mission voluntarily; he and 18 other men were baptized the day they were brought to the Mission—no catechesis or entry into the order of catechumens, just baptism. “Do you think the native people had any idea what the words meant?” Galvan asked, describing a Franciscan baptismal ceremony, recited in Latin.
To Galvan, the Spanish colonizers were the “lesser of three evils,” the three being the Spanish, English, and French empires, all of which had a colonial presence in North America. Galvan contrasts the California missions with the oldest church in the United States, in St. Augustine, Florida, where, he notes, the native tribes the Spanish missionaries originally colonized were nearly wiped out by the English.
Robert Senkewicz, emeritus professor of history at Santa Clara University, says the missions were a site of tension between spiritual authorities hoping to turn Indigenous Americans Catholic and temporal authorities looking to make Indigenous Americans Spanish. Some missionaries had lofty spiritual aims and others were altogether compromised by empire: “It’s not all one or all the other,” he says.
Galvan, meanwhile, highlights the continued presence of Indigenous Americans around the California missions, many of whom can trace their lineage back to the missions’ foundings, as he can. “I proudly remind people that the mission was built by and for Indians,” Galvan says.
And yet, despite this Indigenous investment, Galvan also notes ways in which museum displays and docent tours can perpetuate the narrative of erasure, the idea that the Ohlone and native tribes have been wiped out. He calls on all missions to waive entrance fees to Indigenous Californians visiting the museums and missions that their ancestors built. “We’re here still,” Galvan says. “Don’t promote the myth that we are extinct.”
From missionaries to missioners
That insistence on presence and on refusing erasure is also shaping how some Catholic organizations are rethinking what mission means in the first place. Maryknoll Lay Missioners is an initiative that grew out of cooperation between lay volunteers and the Maryknoll Mission Society, the first Catholic mission society based out of the United States. The Missioners, inspired by Vatican II’s Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), founded their own nonprofit in 1975.
From the beginning, they were intentional about calling themselves lay missioners rather than missionaries: They wanted to use a term free from the negative connotations that many native populations associate with missionaries in the Western Hemisphere.
The Maryknoll Foreign Mission Society of Priests’ initial goal was to “convert people,” Elvira Ramirez, executive director of Maryknoll Lay Missioners, says. She notes that this reflected the mission of the whole church at the time—to convert the so-called pagans.
Guider of Boston College agrees that before Vatican II, many missionaries were operating out of a firm belief that they had to introduce Christ to people who had not heard of him to give those people a chance at salvation. However, Vatican II emphasized that God’s truth shone in various ways through all people, and mission work adjusted to fit this emphasis.
Now, there was a greater understanding that “God was already present in the people you were sent to,” Ramirez says. “The real mission was to help one another see God’s presence and follow God’s commands.” It’s not about trying to convert people to Catholicism, but more about encountering them—recognizing God in them, while they hopefully see God in you as well.
Ramirez contrasts missionaries and missioners by saying, “Missionaries came to change everything about the culture.” Maryknoll, meanwhile, understands that there is something good about every culture. They try to understand each culture in order to speak into it and have that transformative encounter.
Missioners are “always to be countercultural when that culture is oppressive to any group of people,” Ramirez says. But they also operate with humility, as guests in the culture they are spending time with. “We are all to be missionary disciples,” she says. “We are all followers of the way.”
Mission of liberation
Recognizing God in others is inseparable from recognizing and responding to what oppresses them. The 1971 Synod of Bishops declared that “actions on behalf of justice” were a “constitutive element of the preaching of the Gospel.” Preaching the good news was not complete, in other words, if it was not preached to the poor and announced as liberation from oppression. It requires concrete actions to alleviate the violence of poverty and to release the captives.
Central to a missionary identity is experiencing that oppression. Missioners express solidarity with the persons that they serve. According to Apostolicam Actuositatem, “They fulfill their mission also by fraternal charity which presses them to share in the living conditions, labors, sorrows, and aspirations of their brethren.”
Ramirez speaks about a missioner currently in Beirut, Lebanon, who has remained in the country throughout Israel’s constant bombings of Lebanon, which killed roughly 2,000 people in one month, including 300 people in one 10-minute attack. Despite Ramirez’s encouragements to leave, the missioner has said she will stay put.
“This is why I came here: to be present when people are in situations of violence and to accompany them and reassure them that they are not forgotten,” Ramirez says this missioner told her. She is working at a parish where 200 people a day seek refuge from the bombs.
Ramirez tells another story, this one of a missioner in Cochabamba, Bolivia. She was about to leave her mission when a neighbor asked her to do something about child abuse in a suburban neighborhood. “She said, ‘How can I not help? How can I not do something?’ ” Ramirez says.
This missioner signed up for another two and a half years in Cochabamba and now runs a sanctuary that teaches parents about child abuse, intervenes in the cycle of violence that stems from the stress of poverty, and interrupts and prevents the social violence that bleeds into a culture over time.
Bringing the mission to the West
“Is it time to say that we are on mission in the United States?” Ramirez asks. Although Maryknoll Missioners are sent forth into transformative encounter overseas, she cites the violence against native populations, immigrants, and others in the United States as highlighting the need to expand the definition of missioner even further.
“We’re always on mission,” says Celine Woznica. Woznica and her husband, Don, spent more than a decade in Central America and Mexico as missioners. They joined the Maryknoll Lay Missioners in 1981, leaving for Nicaragua, where their daughter was born. They then served in Oaxaca, Mexico, until 1992, at which point they returned to Chicago. “When we returned to the United States, our neighbors in Oaxaca commissioned us to serve our Mexican neighbors in Chicago,” Woznica says.
Her husband worked for a couple of decades as a family practitioner in free healthcare clinics in South Chicago. Then, four years ago, they began a new mission in Oak Park, Illinois. Shortly after President Joe Biden lifted Title 42, allowing asylum seekers to enter the United States, Texas governor Greg Abbott began bussing asylum seekers to Chicago and New York. The Woznicas led the effort to create Centro San Edmundo, a center that has helped resettle nearly 30 families and assisted more than 22,000 immigrants with food, clothing, and basic needs.
They opened the first center in a closed church in Oak Park that was waiting to be sold, filling the pews with donations neatly sorted into white plastic garbage bags. Woznica apologized to the pastor of the merged parish for encroaching on the altar space. She recalls him replying, “That’s OK. That’s what church should be.”
This article also appears in the July 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 7, pages 20-23). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash
