What fruits can we expect?
The fruits this Augustinian Recollect Missionary Year 2026 may bring are not primarily organisational but spiritual and communal. We can expect a renewed personal encounter with Christ that rekindles interior joy and restores to Christian life its missionary impulse. This Missionary Year does not ask us to add more activities but to rekindle the fire of our first love. It invites us to look with new eyes at the mission we already live, to allow the Holy Spirit to free us from lukewarmness, from routine, from spiritual worldliness, and to restore to us the joy of the Gospel. (Prot. CG 134/2025)
We can expect more fraternal communities, more capable of listening to one another, of walking together, of discerning in the Spirit, and of living authority as humble and evangelical service. We can also expect a new apostolic ardour that helps us look at our presences with interior freedom, to recognise where the Spirit continues to give life and where he invites us to open new paths. Shared mission with lay people, young people and families may be strengthened and acquire a more co responsible, closer and more fruitful face.
A motto as a challenge: “Proclaim Christ wherever you can”
The Order has chosen this phrase of Saint Augustine to express with depth the concrete fruit desired for this Missionary Year: “Proclaim Christ wherever you can.” As the Prior General expressed: The theme of the Missionary Year, taken from Saint Augustine — “Proclaim Christ wherever you can” (Serm 260 E, 2) — is not a slogan or a generic motto. It is a demanding, concrete call. It leads us back to the heart of our vocation: Christ who goes before us, sends us, and walks with us. To proclaim Him “wherever we can” does not mean doing so in any way whatsoever, but rather proclaiming Him where life places us, with creative fidelity, humble boldness, and a truly converted heart. (Prot. CG 20/2026)
These words contain a call to concrete and direct evangelisation, an invitation to proclaim Christ as the ultimate reason for our existence and the source of hope for the men and women of our time, as the divine response to the deepest longing of the human heart to rest in divine Truth and Love.
Thus, the Missionary Year 2026 opens before us as a time of grace in which the Order of Augustinian Recollects invites us to return to the heart of the Gospel, of the Church’s magisterium and of our Constitutions, to rediscover the beauty of proclaiming Christ from the concrete reality of our daily lives, without the need for extraordinary settings or spectacular gestures.
How can we be missionaries in ordinary life?
To be missionaries in ordinary life means living from a missionary dimension that orients our existence towards God as origin and end, and towards our neighbour as the path. Mission does not begin when we travel far away, but when we open our eyes to what is already before us. It is not about considering daily life as the place from which we will be sent, but as the reality to which we are already being sent.
From this mindset, we live life as a going out to encounter the other, as an evangelical presence that welcomes, consoles and accompanies our brother or sister on their journey towards Christ. These are the attitudes the Prior General exhorts us to live: To go forth, to welcome, to console, to accompany—these are the four missionary attitudes this year seeks to rekindle in each of us. And all this is possible only if we first allow God to renew in us the fire of His love. For there is no mission without conversion, no proclamation without prayer, and no sending forth without communion. (Prot. CG 134/2025)
To be missionaries in ordinary life means discovering that every gesture, every word, every relationship can become a place where Christ becomes present. In the family, mission is expressed in patience, forgiveness, listening and education in the faith. At work, it is manifested in honesty, justice, compassion and Christian coherence. In the parish, it is lived in humble availability, sincere welcome, silent service, joyful celebration of faith, and accompaniment of Christian life processes. In the neighbourhood, it is embodied in closeness, solidarity and consoling presence. Even on social media, mission is played out in the ability to sow hope, build bridges and communicate the beauty of evangelical witness, being light amid empty noise.
This everyday vision of mission is deeply rooted in Vatican II, which reminded us that holiness and mission are the vocation of all the baptised. As our missionaries in China would say: ALL MISSIONARIES. Saint Augustine would summarise it by saying that whoever truly loves cannot fail to proclaim, for love always expands and communicates itself.
The Augustinian Recollect missionary is, above all, a person who is in love with Christ—one who carries within his heart the holy restlessness of one touched by Love, who desires to “draw everyone into the love of God.” Our mission is not born of duty, but of overflowing love: of having been touched by a love that cannot be contained. (Prot. CG 134/2025)
What is the importance of missions in the Church?
Missions are the beating heart of the Church. They are not a secondary activity but the deepest expression of her identity. The Church exists to evangelise, and the history of the Order is woven with faces that have embodied this truth with radicality and tenderness. Missions remind us that the Gospel is not kept but given; that faith is not preserved but shared; that Christian life is not enclosed but poured out.
As the Prior General says: The missions have been, and continue to be, the most precious flower of our Order—the place where charity becomes concrete and obedience turns into a path. Within them, saints and martyrs have been forged: witnesses of a love that never gives up. (Prot. CG 134/2025)
What frontier missions are to the universal and everyday mission can be better understood through the relationship between ordinary Christian life and martyrdom as its supreme expression; or between religious life as radical expression of the evangelical life to which every Christian is consecrated by baptism. In the same way, everyday and universal mission reveals that evangelisation is not an external addition, nor a task reserved for exceptional moments, but the habitual, daily and radical dimension of one who has been seized by Christ. In the so called missions ad gentes —the traditional ones and the ministries of frontier—this dimension is required with greater intensity, the process of incarnation and dying to oneself in order to become all things to all in a concrete reality that is physically and culturally distant from one’s own is much more demanding.
A horizon opening before us
This Missionary Year can awaken in us a more incarnate spirituality, a more real fraternity, a freer mission and a closer Church. It can help us move from doing things to allowing ourselves to be sent; from fulfilling to loving; from maintaining structures to opening paths; from caring for what is ours to caring for others. It can restore to us the joy of feeling part of a living history, sustained by the Spirit and nourished by the witness of so many Augustinian Recollect saints and martyrs.
Christ walks ahead, the community walks united, and the world waits hungry for the Gospel. Along this path resounds the gentle and firm voice of Saint Augustine reminding us that mission begins where we are and continues wherever the Spirit sends us: Proclaim Christ wherever you can. And he also points out its urgency and inner dynamism, as the Prior General reminds us:
Saint Augustine, master of the heart, understood that love cannot remain idle. Whoever loves, proclaims; whoever has been touched by Christ cannot remain closed in on themselves. (Prot. CG 134/2025)
