Delivered by Kevin Foy
December 4, 2025
USCMA and the “New Missionary Age”
Greetings again, everyone. I am pleased to join you at this Annual Members Meeting. When I began in my role as executive director a little over fifteen months ago, I did so understanding two things: one, that the world and Church need this community now as much or more than it ever has since our founding as the Mission Secretariat of the US Bishops over seventy-five years ago, and two, that USCMA faces significant challenges in remaining a vital, relevant and sustainable channel for connecting, supporting and mobilizing mission leaders today.
In order to assess where USCMA stands today, I want to frame these brief remarks around three key points:
- First, we are in a Kairos moment for mission and the Church. As the systems of social, political and environmental cohesion continue to break down on a worldwide scale and the center of gravity in the Church itself continues to shift to the Global South, Pope Leo is articulating vital pathways to re-center the mission on what he calls, in Dilexi te, “the most forgotten and wounded places of humanity.” (DT 76)
- Second, over the course of the past year USCMA has been cultivating new relationships, methods and opportunities to meet this mission moment. We have attended to the stirrings of the Spirit to seek out where mission is happening, where it needs to be happening, and how our community can remain present to the living Christ in our midst.
- And, finally, current realities call this community to action. While the opportunities which lay before us position USCMA for significant impact in our mission efforts, we face major hurdles in engaging our members, growing and diversifying our community, and achieving financial sustainability.
Kairos
Let us begin with the moment. When our twenty-eight USCMA pilgrims celebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Square alongside thousands of fellow Christians for the Jubilee of the Missionary World and the Jubilee of Migrants, the Holy Father spoke to us of a “new missionary age…in the history of the Church.” Antoinette and I reference this moment in our recent appeal letter to members, partners and friends, and there are a few points which, I think, are important to expand upon here. First, Pope Leo builds upon the clear message of Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council by continuing to blur the geographic, “out there”-ness of mission:
“If,” he says, “for a long time we have associated with mission the word ‘depart’, the going out to distant lands that did not know the Gospel or were experiencing poverty, today the frontiers of the missions are no longer geographical, because poverty, suffering and the desire for a greater hope have made their way to us. The story of so many of our migrant brothers and sisters bears witnesses to this:,” he goes on, “the tragedy of their flight from violence, the suffering which accompanies it, the fear of not succeeding, the perilous risk of traveling along the coastline, their cry of sorrow and desperation.”
Now, some may balk a little at this characterization of mission. After all, if mission is everywhere, doesn’t that excuse the faithful in looking no farther than their own block, neighborhood, town, city or nation? But I think it is important to look at how Leo, in expanding the “where” of mission, homes in on the “how” and the “who.” In that Jubilee homily, he goes on to say that, “Mission is not so much about ‘departing’, but instead ‘remaining’ in order to proclaim Christ through hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity.” It is the “through” to which I would call our attention here. The Gospel does not impel us to proclaim Jesus merely with or in a spirit of compassion and solidarity, but, instead, reveals these tasks as primary to embodying the incarnate message of Jesus Christ.
Pope Francis, we will recall, described a “community of missionary disciples” as a community which “takes on the smell of the sheep,” “gets involved by word and deed in people’s daily lives” and “embraces human life, touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others” (EG 24). Here, Leo makes clear: that call not only involves everyone but requires concrete encounter with and action alongside those who suffer from poverty, violence, and “the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination.”
Elsewhere in his homily, Leo goes on to note that Pope Francis’ call in Evangelii Gaudium to “let ourselves be ‘permanently in a state of mission’…entails at least two important missionary tasks: missionary cooperation and missionary vocation.” Here, he names two emerging realities to which we, at least in the United States, are often ill-attentive: one, that as missionary vocations and migration from the Global South only continue to rise, “brothers and sisters from the world’s South should be welcomed as an opportunity, through an exchange that renews the face of the Church and sustains a Christianity that is more open, more alive and more dynamic.” Secondly, he affirms “the beauty and importance of missionary vocations,” particularly the “need for a new missionary effort by laity, religious and priests who will offer their service in missionary lands.” To foster such vocations, he tells us, “We need new ideas and vocational experiences capable of sustaining this desire, especially in young people.”
Cultivation
I don’t think that Pope Leo, in any of this, is saying something wholly new, but rather channeling the Spirit in naming realities that we in USCMA have been striving to live into even before he addressed them in this homily.
Our July Summit on Mission and Evangelization and our Authentic Church virtual formation series emphasized these incarnational aspects of Gospel proclamation, featuring new ideas and diverse voices to broaden our perspectives and deepen our mission practice. Our participation in the Global 2033 Summit for leaders in evangelization, as well as our facilitation of member feedback for the US Bishops consultation process on the role and experience of the laity, helped elevate this very emphasis on holistic, fully embodied mission which seeks to encounter Christ at the peripheries and collaborate with the Living God to heal the wounds of poverty, disregard and discrimination. Our collaboration with Catholic Relief Services and others to advocate for international aid and development funding made manifest our commitment, as a community of leaders in Catholic mission, to Jesus’ mandate to “heal every illness” as we proclaim the Good News—a message we will continue to convey in 2026 with our Catholic Social Teaching resource featuring the work of USCMA members.
And our participation in the Pan-African Congress on Theology, Society and Pastoral Life brought us into deeper engagement and greater missionary cooperation with the Church of the Global South. Through this engagement, we have been invited to play a significant role in a major upcoming initiative of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, one which attends to a growing set of concerns among our members: strengthening the missionary and intercultural formation of pastoral agents from the global South who minister in North America and Europe, and preparing pastoral agents in our parishes and dioceses to build welcoming and vital churches in the context of the rapid migration and cultural diversity which is reshaping local communities.
Call to Action
As much as we can point to all of this as a sign of momentum in our response to the mission moment, we do face significant challenges to remaining not only vital but viable beyond the next few years. The first challenge is in member engagement and involvement. We call ourselves a community of faith leaders, and the USCMA committee structure was designed to call upon the passions, insights and expertise of our members to serve, sustain and grow this community. The ground we have cultivated over the past year is only poised to bear fruit if members such as yourselves are willing to join us in designing and engaging our existing members in creative and resonant networking, formation and advocacy initiatives, as well as helping to identify and invite new members who can both benefit from and enhance our ministry.
The second major challenge is financial sustainability. In 2025, revenue is projected to cover less than half of our expenses. Given our minimal staffing and aforementioned challenges with member engagement on committees and initiatives, the effort put into revitalizing our community and our ministry often comes at the expense of fundraising. Going forward, we will need to reset that balance. The concern, however, is that we not fall into a pattern of spending more time raising the money to stay afloat than we do delivering the opportunities which connect and form leaders, as well as increase mission awareness, understanding and engagement. To remain vital, we need not only to grow our membership, but also cultivate a donor base, encouraging significant contributions from mission stakeholders such as religious congregations and developing relationships with foundations and sponsors.
This may sound daunting, but looking at the past year, I believe that the Holy Spirit is truly present within our efforts. Everything we have done and been trying to do is affirmed in the vision for mission laid out by Pope Leo in that Jubilee homily. This is an incredible moment for evangelization, one in which the poor—whom Leo describes in Dilexi te as everyone from the “those who lack material means of subsistence” to “those who are socially marginalized” to “those who have no rights, no space, no freedom” (DT 9)—are recognized not as mere objects of charity but “a source of extraordinary renewal” (7) and “a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.” (5)
USCMA has and will continue to play an invaluable role in naming this reality, supporting those who attend to it, and inviting all the faithful to answer the call to mission today.