How to Be a Missionary Church


Published October 3, 2024

The Catholic Thing

One of the delightful consolations of the Catholic faith is that we seem to have a patron saint for everything, no matter how serious or seemingly trivial: St. Clare of Assisi is the patron saint of television; St. Peregrine the patron of those suffering from cancer; St. Anthony the patron saint of lost items; St. Hyacinth the patron of those in danger of drowning; St. Bibiana patroness of hangovers; St. Drogo is patron of ugly people; and so on.

Unlike the process of canonization, which has become formalized over the centuries, there is usually no official process by which a saint becomes patron of one thing or another. Occasionally, we get a formal declaration, as when, for example, Paul VI declared St. Benedict to be patron of Europe. But usually patronage is assigned by acclamation or tradition, and matches some event or condition from the saint’s life to the object of patronage. St. Denis was beheaded, so he gets to be the patron saint of headaches.

Sometimes the connection between a patron and a cause is less obvious. For example, Thérèse of Lisieux, is one of several patron saints of aviators, though she died several years before Wilbur Wright watched his brother Orville take flight at Kitty Hawk. Her cult was growing rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century, and she quickly became a favorite of French aviators during the First World War. The patronage stuck.

Aviators and flight crews are not the only ones entrusted to the patronage of the Little Flower. Pope Pius XI declared her patroness of the missions in 1927, and Pius XII named her among the patrons of her native France in 1944.

There is a beautiful irony, of course, in St. Thérèse being the patroness of missions and missionaries. She lived most of her 24 years in the near-total obscurity of her parents’ home and, for the last nine, within the walls of the Carmel at Lisieux. A world traveler like Francis Xavier or Junipero Serra she was not.

I was thinking of St. Thérèse earlier this week when her feast day, October 1, happened to coincide with the opening of the latest session of the Synod on Synodality. The synod is devoted to the theme “How to be a missionary synodal Church,” so perhaps it is fitting that such an event would open on the feast of the patroness of missions and missionaries.

I am not going to go so far as to suggest that St.Thérèse be made the patron saint of Synodality. (The multi-year synod process has not always been exactly emblematic of her “Little Way.”) But if the object of the entire synodal exercise is to renew the Church for the sake of mission, then perhaps it makes sense to consider what the patroness of missions and missionaries can teach us about how to do that.

Last October, Pope Francis published a short apostolic exhortation (titled, “C’est la Confiance”) on the life of St. Thérèse, holding her out as “a model of evangelization.” As Pope Francis noted, it was unflagging confidence in the love and mercy of God which enabled Thérèse to live as she did. She lived, not for herself, but for others. “Thérèse never set herself above others,” Pope Francis wrote, “but took the lowest place together with the Son of God, who for our sake became a slave and humbled himself, becoming obedient, even to death on a cross.”

“Jesus does not demand great actions from us,” St. Thérèse wrote, “but simply surrender and gratitude.” This is how she grew in holiness: not through self-assertion but through surrender, obedience, gratitude, and, above all, love. This is how little Thérèse was transformed into one of the greatest saints of the modern era. This is how she, through her Little Way, became the patroness of missionaries and a Doctor of the Church. This was the source of her unflappable confidence and trust, even through times of spiritual darkness.

Pope Francis, in his exhortation, emphasized this point:

Thérèse, for her part, wished to highlight the primacy of God’s action; she encourages us to have complete confidence as we contemplate the love of Christ poured out to the end. At the heart of her teaching is the realization that, since we are incapable of being certain about ourselves, we cannot be sure of our merits. Hence, it is not possible to trust in our own efforts or achievements.

The only trust, the only confidence, of which we can ultimately be assured is trust in God and confidence in his mercy. To realize our utter dependence upon God is liberating: we, sinners that we are, cannot even save ourselves, let alone the world. And we don’t have to! He has accomplished by his own death and resurrection what we never could. In this realization, the full force of the Good News crashes home. Surrender and gratitude, as the Little Flower says.

Even the “smallest” life, if lived in the confidence of this conviction and given over to it completely, can transform the world. That is the “model for evangelization” we find in Thérèse of Lisieux. In truth, that is the model of mission and evangelization we find in the life of every saint.

As the final meeting of the Synod on Synodality gets underway, it’s worth remembering that the world would have the Church set her sights on any goal other than holiness. In place of surrender and gratitude, the world would have the Church chafe against the very truth that sets us free and behave as though our own clever efforts might somehow improve on God’s mercy.

The pursuit of holiness – conforming ourselves to Christ in response to the gratuitous gift of God’s love and mercy – is the sine qua non of all mission and evangelization. St. Thérèse of Lisieux showed this. All the saints have. We are called to show it, too. That is how one becomes a missionary. That has always been the Way.


Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).

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