AMERICAN CATHOLICS are accustomed to second collections at Mass on Sunday mornings. Many of us often do not really know precisely what the money we contribute to these collections is going to be used for. If the Church endorses it, and the basket is passed, we try to give something. But if we knew more about the collection, its connection to our faith and its impact, we might want to give more generously.
I think that’s definitely the case with regard to the World Mission Sunday collection that will take place this year on Oct. 18.
The World Mission Sunday collection helps the Church spread the Gospel in missionary lands. These are places (1,130 of them to be exact) where the Church basically barely exists, or where she is so young, poor, or persecuted that she cannot support herself in terms of personnel and resources.
World Mission Sunday is first and foremost a day of prayerful solidarity for missionaries and mission Churches. But it’s also a day on which we try to help them succeed. World Mission Sunday features the only collection mandated in the Church’s canon law, because it’s essential to the Church’s carrying out the mission Jesus entrusted to us to proclaim the Gospel to all people and nations.
What’s raised on World Mission Sunday is used to make possible the heroic work of missionary bishops, priests, religious sisters and lay catechists who labor, sometimes under threat of death, to share our faith. It helps build churches, seminaries, convents and catechetical centers. It provides basic needs like transport, food and shelter. It helps pass on the faith to children and to their parents.
Nowhere is this reality more vivid than in a place like Mongolia. This is one of the youngest Catholic communities on earth. If you don’t count the occasional forays by missionaries in times long past, Mongolia has only had a stable Catholic community for just over 30 years. It was in 1992, following the fall of communism, that three Catholic missionary priests arrived from Italy.
At the time, there were zero Catholics except them. But today, thanks to the hard work of these missionaries, supported in large part by World Mission Sunday, about fifty Mongolians a year have become Catholic. As of Easter Sunday, there are exactly 1,575 baptized Catholics in a nation of over 3.5 million people. The Church in Mongolia is the missionary frontier in the fullest sense, and most of this work has been made possible by the support the missionaries receive from abroad, especially World Mission Sunday. The first three missionaries, and the two dozen or so missionaries who have followed them, are literally building the Church from scratch. Even today, the first seminary is still in its planning stages, and the first native priest was ordained only in 2016.
These Catholics are in the exhilarating but fragile phase of first-generation faith.
Monsignor Roger Landry, National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies-USA, helps oversee the distribution of the World Mission Sunday collection to these remote need prayerful solidarity and financial support, making sure every U.S. Dollar is stretched as far as possible. He has highlighted Mongolia as a powerful example of why World Mission Sunday matters: “Mongolia is at the frontier of the Church’s mission. Two thousand years after Christ’s death and resurrection, most Mongolians have never heard of Jesus’ saving name, not to mention been exposed to his teaching and had the chance to enter his life through the Sacraments. In 2024, there were 1,516 Catholics; in 2025, 1,549. Today, 1,575. That’s less than converted on Pentecost in Jerusalem and less than most U.S. parishes! It’s an honor to witness and help the courageous Catholics in Mongolia to live out Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed, starting small but eventually growing into a large tree where all the birds of the air will find refuge!”
Last year, support from U.S. Catholics helped the Church in Mongolia expand a formation center to train catechists and Church workers to bring the faith more effectively throughout their vast country, as well as a study center where the Christian classics can be translated into Mongolian. Right now, only the Bible exists in Mongolian; at the new study center, the translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is underway, together with writings of the popes and classics from the saints.
Pope Leo XIV recently said, speaking about World Mission Sunday, that it helps “remind people in the older churches, if you will, in the established churches, how important it is that they too join in the missionary spirit of the whole Church (June 1, 2026).”
This Oct. 18, when your parish takes up the World Mission Sunday collection, I hope you will join this “missionary spirit” of the Church, considering the people in Mongolia. Their names and faces, and their dreams, are the names, faces and dreams of World Mission Sunday.