Lay missionary Angel Mortel is pictured is pictured in a file photo visiting the home of 23-year-old Sandra, 23, and her children in Ibiuna, Brazil, near São Paulo. The Catholic Church will mark World Mission Sunday Oct. 18, 2026. OSV NEWS PHOTO/SEAN SPRAGUE, COURTESY MARYKNOLL

BY FR. RAY CLARK, SPECIAL TO THE WESTERN KENTUCKY CATHOLIC

As I sort through the parish donation envelopes for this month of October, somewhere between the envelopes for Sunday the 18th and the parish maintenance fund I will find an envelope for World Mission Sunday.

This is the 100th anniversary of the collection, when we in the U.S. are asked to support the Church in Latin America, Asia and Africa. My first thought, I must admit, is: “I’m all give out,” as we in the South like to say.

But then I remember missionaries I have met over the last 18 years as I have coordinated missionaries coming to the diocese and appealing for prayer and funds.

My most dramatic moment came as I was driving a young American missionary, Fr. Paul Reilly of the White Fathers of Africa serving in Ethiopia, to do his first ever appeal at the tri-parishes of Fulton, Hickman and Clinton. It was during the month of June and we were driving through lush green fields of soybeans and corn.

Fr. Paul remarked: “If the farmers of Ethiopia could see this, they would weep.” He stopped. “Why would they weep?” I asked. He replied: “Because they could feed their families.”

I think of Bishop Siby, a member of the Heralds of Good News who served as a missionary in Papua New Guinea and was made bishop of a diocese there. There are many Catholics in his diocese. They raise their own food but have little left over.

I am haunted by the question: “How do you run a diocese – pay the salaries of priests and sisters and lay catechists, build and maintain churches, with no source of income?” He spends summers in the U.S. making appeals.

It is easier to give to a person speaking in front of us. For World Mission Sunday there will be no speaker in front of us. Pope Leo, who served as a missionary in Peru, will make a video recording that parishes who can do so will play at Mass that day. Few of our parishes have that capability so the video will be posted on our diocesan website, if you would like to hear him speak of his experience.

As the Sunday approaches I ask God for the grace to be generous, whatever my situation.  I have been given so much and other members of the Church have so little. I write my check, place it in the envelope, and put the envelope in the collection basket as it comes around.

And I thank God for the opportunity to be reminded to look beyond the needs of my parish and diocese, to be reminded that I am a member of a catholic, universal Church with members in every country of our world.

And I ask God to continue to open my eyes, and my heart, to the needs of my Church throughout the world.

Fr. Ray Clark is the director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in the Diocese of Owensboro, as well as the Catholic chaplain to Owensboro Health Regional Hospital.

Originally printed in the October 2026 issue of The Western Kentucky Catholic.