PONTIFICIUM OPUS A SANCTA INFANTIA

INTRODUCTION

         We are happy to share the wonderful reality of the Pontifical Society of the Missionary Childhood or Holy Childhood, in order to know and take advantage of it more in our own communities.

         Bishops, missionaries, animators and children, God is helping children to achieve evangelizing wonders in their families, with other children and for the sake of universal evangelization. We also observe with immense gratitude that this Society is constituting a special way for children's Christian and missionary maturation.

         Each parish, each Diocese and the universal Church can feel that this Society of Missionary Childhood is its own.

MISSIONARY CHILDHOOD
OR HOLY CHILDHOOD

         Missionary Childhood or Holy Childhood celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1993. Today there are millions of "little missionaries" distributed throughout parishes, schools and movements of the five continents.

         Concretely, the Pontifical Society of Missionary Childhood proposes to:

• Help educators to progressively awaken in children a universal missionary conscience.

• Help children to develop their missionary protagonism.

• Move children to share their faith and material means, especially with the children of the neediest regions and Churches.

• Promote missionary vocations.

• To be integrated into the overall pastoral program of Christian education, to which it will contribute its missionary projection.

          In order to achieve its objectives, Missionary Childhood lends two services to children: the first and principal one is missionary education; the second is missionary cooperation with the neediest children and the missions of the whole world.

          Therefore, the Pontifical Society of Missionary Childhood or Holy Childhood, which is a Society of the universal Church and of the local Churches, is animating and forming children (up to 14 years of age) from a missionary viewpoint and their educators so that they will live in ecclesial missionary communion and carry out their local mission and their missionary cooperation with universal evangelization, especially of children.

         The boys and girls belonging to Missionary Childhood, accompanied by their animators, propose to be missionaries in their communities and to help the children of the whole world. They are friends of Jesus and they make friends for Jesus.

        Educators, parents, catechists, young people, religious sisters and priests can participate in this Society as animators of Missionary Childhood. The animators help and guide the children while letting them take on their own responsibilities and accompanying them in carrying out everything that they themselves must do.

        The universal Church asks all the ecclesial Institutions and Movements to collaborate with Missionary Childhood in its life and service to the children of the whole world.