by David Agren

MEXICO CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis once again called for Catholics to adopt a missionary mindset and make mission the priority of all pastoral activities.

The pope, speaking from the Vatican via video to an audience of clergy, religious and laity at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, also called for participants to cast aside clericalism and to get out of their churches to serve people where they are.

“It’s vital for the church to not shut itself off, not feel satisfied with what it already has achieved,” Pope Francis said Nov. 15 in pre-recorded comments to the conference on the “new evangelization” of the Americas.

“If this happens, the church becomes ill, it becomes ill from imaginary abundance, from superfluous abundance, it impedes itself and is weakened,” he said.

Pope Francis has made previous pleas for Catholics to embrace missions in their everyday lives and to go meet people where they are. He spoke about this twice in Aparecida, Brazil: during the general meeting of the Latin American bishops in 2007 and when he traveled, as pope, to Brazil for World Youth Day in July.

The mission mandate has had its focus on a region rich in Catholic history: the New World. And it comes as the Church is attempting to regain relevance on continents largely converted to Catholicism centuries earlier by the conquering Europeans but where evangelical groups have gained ground and millions more consider themselves cultural Catholics or only Catholics in name.

“Aparecida proposes putting the church in a permanent state of mission,” said Pope Francis, the first pontiff from the Americas. It also proposes “carrying out acts of a missionary nature, but in the larger context of a generalized missionary style: that all normal activity of individual churches has a missionary character.”

Church leaders in Latin America say renewal is constantly carried out and that missions were discussed by the Second Vatican Council and Blessed John Paul II’s 1999 apostolic exhortation, “Ecclesia in America.”

But with vices such as inequality still rife and many people falling way from the Church, the call for a new evangelization is timely.

“We’ve felt that it is necessary for there to be deepening of the faith of those belonging to the Catholic Church,” said Cardinal Raul Vela Chiriboga, archbishop emeritus of Quito, Ecuador.

The Nov. 16-19 conference at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with an estimated 80 bishops in attendance, was an attempt to better define the Church’s missionary role. That starts with defining an oft-misunderstood word: mission – not to be confused with “proselytizing.”