Point 44. The extension of God's Kingdom

“ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. ” Faithful to Christ’s order and impelled by the Holy Spirit, the Church must proclaim the Gospel to the whole world; she must baptise all nations, teaching them to observe the commandments and counsels of the Lord. She thus has a sovereign right and an absolute duty to make herself known everywhere and thereby extend Christendom to the whole world, making of all nations the kingdom of God. The following represent the three great works, concerted and convergent, which liberals and revolutionaries have horribly set in opposition to each other, and which they have calumniated and in the end cynically betrayed.

1. The mission of preaching the Gospel has always been and must remain the function and charism of an elite body in the Church, admired and cherished by all good Christians, aided by their prayers and financial aid, and trained for this dangerous apostolic task that is constantly dominated by the thought of martyrdom: the missionaries. The Saviour’s charity for souls still lying in darkness urges them on, just as it animates the Pope and bishops who send them to distant lands, giving them every power to save souls and win nations for Christ.

2. Christian colonisation is the normal consequence, in the temporal order, of evangelisation. Under whatever form it takes, colonisation is unavoidable and incontestably providential. It is necessitated and called for by the immense needs of the pagans as they start living in Christendom, even more than it is desired by those Christians who have come from afar to establish themselves among them or to rule them. This is a constant fact of history and quite contrary to the chimeras of a false, egalitarian and subversive charity, whose most obvious effect has been the destruction of the new areas of Christendom and the annihilation of the missions, the real target behind their hatred of colonisation.

Spiritual zeal has always been preceded, accompanied and followed by a temporal, personal and collective charity, which establishes political and economic ties and institutions that are stamped with the Christian spirit and are to this extent happy and blessed by God.

3. The crusade protects and secures both mission and colonisation. It is a defence for established Christendom, a threat to tyrants who would oppose the Gospel and persecute the missionaries and their new Christians. It is sometimes decreed in order to destroy persecuting and enslaving powers who prohibit the preaching of the Gospel and the peaceful establishment of Christian morals by exerting a sanguinary terror over defenceless peoples.

The Christian crusade is a sacred right, a right of war over which the Sovereign Pontiff is master.