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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

Does the Catholic Church send missionaries to spread the gospel?

Question:

I was recently reading about a Protestant organization that sends out missionaries to teach the faith to illiterate populations, making Bible translations for them and teaching them to read them. Do we have any programs like this in the Catholic Church?

Answer:

Catholic missionaries have been traveling the globe for centuries educating other cultures about the Christian faith as well as all the other things needed for the improvement of people’s spiritual and physical lives. And they have, in fact, also provided Bibles when they can in the people’s own languages. But since we know that the word of God is also spoken, missionaries tell people about Christ first in word and action.

A logical outcome of the “Bible alone” theology is that everyone in the world must be able to read and have a Bible. But as Catholics we know that we can immediately begin to tell anyone who will listen about Jesus and invite them to repentance and baptism. They can lead a full Christian life in the Church even though they are illiterate. This is not to say that we should not strive to encourage literate societies, but being literate is not necessary for salvation, nor is owning a Bible.

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