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ROME – Pope Leo XIV is calling on all the faithful worldwide to support the church’s foreign missions as they offer catechesis and basic services to those in need.

In a video message published Monday, Leo looked forward to the 99th World Mission Sunday – this coming Sunday, Oct. 19 – an occasion on which “the whole Church prays, united, particularly for missionaries and the fruitfulness of their apostolic labors.”

This year’s theme for World Mission Sunday is “Missionaries of hope among the peoples” – a theme that puts the annual recurrence within the broader framework of the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope currently underway throughout the world.

Pope Leo in Monday’s video message spoke directly to Catholic parishes, saying their prayers and support for missions “will help spread the Gospel, provide for pastoral and catechetical programs, help to build new churches, and care for the health and educational needs of our brothers and sisters in mission territories.”

“Let us commit ourselves anew to the sweet and joyful task of bringing Christ Jesus our Hope to the ends of the earth,” Pope Leo said, and thanked Catholics for “everything you will do to help me help missionaries throughout the world.”

Leo served many years as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, where he “saw first-hand how the faith, the prayer and the generosity shown on World Mission Sunday can transform entire communities.”

Established by Pope Pius XI in 1926 as a day of prayer for foreign missions, World Mission Sunday is observed annually in the Catholic Church as an occasion for the church to renew its commitment to missionary efforts, coordinated by the Pontifical Mission Societies.

The Pontifical Mission Societies are officially part of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization and are managed by the Section for the First Evangelization and New Particular Churches.

The entire month of October is dedicated to the Church’s missions and to missionaries (alongside October’s special dedication to the rosary).

Despite the church’s dwindling numbers throughout the western world, Catholics in western nations provide the bulk of financial support to the church’s projects in its so-called traditional mission territories, where Catholicism is booming and vocations are growing to the extent that many parishes even in the west are now assisted by priests from Africa and Asia.

In a May 22 audience with the Pontifical Mission Societies, Leo recalled his own missionary service in Peru and voiced gratitude for the “indispensable” service the Societies offer to the Church and its evangelizing efforts throughout the world.

Pope Leo XIV served as a missionary in northern Peru with his Augustinian order first as chancellor of the prelature of Chulucanas for a year in 1985, and then as head of the Augustinian formation house and pastor of two churches in Trujillo from 1988-1999.

He later returned to Peru first as apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chiclayo in 2014 and later as its bishop, from 2015-2023, when Pope Francis summoned him to Rome to lead the Dicastery for Bishops.

The election of Leo, with decades of experience as a foreign missionary, comes after the many appeals of Pope Francis, his predecessor, for a missionary Church filled with “missionary disciples.”

Pope Francis spoke openly about his own desire to be a missionary in Japan like so many of his Jesuit brothers before him and adopted missionary language from the very outset of his pontificate.

In his very first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, published just months after his election in 2013, Francis began exhorting Catholics throughout the world to become missionaries, saying, “In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples.”

“Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are ‘disciples’ and ‘missionaries,’ but rather that we are always ‘missionary disciples,’” he said.

Pope Francis said the Church must become “a community of missionary disciples” that goes out and takes the first step in evangelization, getting involved and providing support to those in need.

“The Church is herself a missionary disciple; she needs to grow in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth,” he said.

He said this also implies spiritual and pastoral accompaniment, and that “this is clearly distinct from every kind of intrusive accompaniment or isolated self-realization. Missionary disciples accompany missionary disciples.”

While Pope Francis’s call for missionary discipleship was meant to inspire Catholics to get involved and become “missionaries” in their local settings, it was an impetus to do so with the spirit of the missionaries who leave and serve.

Leo’s invitation to support the foreign missions, given his own missionary background, carries a different heft, and could give fresh gusto to both the financial contributions of the faithful to the Church’s foreign missions, as well as his predecessor’s broader call to missionary discipleship.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen