Special event to bring attention to the Church’s missions, second collection
By Jay Sorgi
for the Register
The colors, languages and sounds of the world God created will come more to life than the average Sunday morning Mass Oct. 18 at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ in Lincoln, all to illuminate the world the Catholic Church supports in the mission of bringing Christ all over the Earth, and to engender Catholics to locally support it.
The World Mission Sunday Mass is scheduled for 9 a.m. at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ. For the first time, the diocese is giving that Mass a more international flavor, and just in time for the 100th anniversary of World Mission Sunday, the global observance established by Pope Pius XI in 1926, through The Pontifical Mission Societies.
Diocesan Mission Director Father William Holoubek, who is also pastor of St. Anthony Church in Steinauer, said the diocese is inviting people to wear clothing that reflects their ancestral culture with a reserved place in the Cathedral’s front rows where they can sit together.
“The idea is also to hopefully build that relationship between the different countries and nations and our own people after Mass,” Father Holoubek said.
Organizers are also working on bringing international choirs in to participate, before, during or after the Mass.
“The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature, since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin,” a papal decree from Vatican II expresses.
A second collection will be taken – at the Cathedral and at all parishes – to help fund the world’s missionary dioceses, a collection which the Vatican mandates to be taken every second-to-last Sunday in October.
“World Mission Sunday is the only canonical required collection in the Church,” Father Holoubek said. “Every parish in the entire world is required to take up this collection for the support of the 1,150 missionary dioceses in the world.”
One of those locations happens to be the diocese where Pope Leo XIV served in Peru as both a priest and bishop, the diocese of Chiclayo.
“I would like to thank the Pontifical Mission Societies for their service to missionary cooperation, which I experienced with gratitude during my ministry in Peru,” Pope Leo said in 2025 for World Mission Sunday.
“The pope gave a video message, just a minute-and-a-half last year,” Father Holoubek said. “Those parishes that played his message, even if just audio, had a three- to four-times increase in donations for World Mission Sunday. (The pope) will be giving one again this year.”
Father Holoubek said the collection helps build the physical infrastructure of the Church. The 2025 World Mission Sunday raised enough money to build 751 churches worldwide in mission dioceses.
“For $10,000 in Bangladesh, you can build a church. It’s very effective and very powerful in transforming the world, in this vast area of the world that is still mission territory for the Catholic Church.”
He added that it helps fund seminaries and religious formation worldwide, funding more seminarians worldwide than the capacity of Memorial Stadium at the University of Nebraska.
“Almost 88,000 seminarians are being supported by the Pontifical Mission Societies,” Father Holoubek said.
Those societies, united for worldwide funding efforts by Pope Pius XI and later popes, include:
- The Missionary Union, which forms missionary disciples from clergy, lay and religious.
- The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which offers catechesis, church construction, education, health care and pastoral support.
- Society of St. Peter the Apostle, which supports vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
- The Missionary Childhood Association, which helps in care for children’s needs and for their faith formation.
The recently-beatified Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen led the U.S. office for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. That beatification brings extra attention to the day which supported so many missionary ministries.
“It just seemed very appropriate this year to acknowledge his love for the missions and the poor and to make something bigger,” Father Holoubek said of Blessed Sheen who visited Lincoln in 1967 and 1972.
“He raised [the] equivalent in today’s money of over $2.1 billion for the missions,” he added. “He traveled throughout the world, and he also then invented the World Mission Rosary as a way that he could give to Our Lady, all the countries of the world, asking her to bring them to Jesus.”
That rosary, shared by then-Bishop Sheen on a 1951 broadcast, will become part of Sunday’s celebration as well, preceding the Mass at 8:40 a.m.
“People will pray for the conversion of the entire world, by each decade being for a different region of the world, of the five different colors of those rosaries,” Father Holoubek said.
He said the entire Mass experience for World Mission Sunday at the Cathedral is meant to bring more Catholics to understand each other’s nationalities while making the Church’s mission part of our own mission.
“That would be my goal for this to take pride in the beauty and the wonder of these different cultures in our diocese and how they help us. and how strong and great they are,” he said. “Continue to be a Catholic, a universal church and at the same time, encourage them and open their hearts to support the missions and to pray for the missions.”
