Founder of the Pontifical Missionary Union
Paolo Manna, born in Avellino (Italy), 16 January 1872, was sent to Burma after he became a missionary of the Pontifical Foreign Mission Institute (PIME). Over the next 12 years he returned to Italy three times for serious medical reasons, the last time, to his great sorrow, to remain there. Thus he discovered God’s will for him: to make him, through his writings and publications, a missionary animator of the whole Church: the missionary of the Mission. The aim of his work was not only to announce the progress of faith in the world and to help missionaries with prayers and offerings, but above all to make everyone aware of their duty to increase the number of missionaries and local clergy, so that the Church would be able to carry out its mission to the full. As director of the magazine Le Missioni Cattoliche and particularly with his first work Missionari autem pauci (The Missionaries are Few), he brought about a real surge of enthusiasm for the Church’s worldwide Mission and a large number of missionary vocations.
The Missionary Union of the Clergy
Fr Manna’s vision of founding a Missionary Union of the Clergy was realised with the approval of Pope Benedict XV, urgently requested by Blessed Guido Maria Conforti, Bishop of Parma and founder of the Xaverian Missionary Fathers. The Union’s First International Congress (3 January 1922) declared the necessity of missiology teaching in seminaries, a science that was still unknown in Catholic institutes of formation.
His Motto – “All Missionaries”
In order to encourage vocations for the missions, Fr. Manna stressed the irreplaceable role of priests in the proclamation of the Gospel and in the formation of the missionary awareness of the People of God. The Union spread rapidly after the Pope recommended its presence in every diocese in his Encyclical Maximum Illud (1919). Through his preaching and publications, Fr. Manna inflamed clergy and laity alike with missionary zeal. For him the missionary, priestly or Christian vocation were inseparable: his motto was: ‘All Missionaries!’ For Fr. Manna all the baptised, but above all every priest ‘is by his very nature and by definition missionary’. He complained that for a great part of the clergy "a great elementary truth" had been obscured, "namely, that the primary function of the Church is the evangelisation of the world - the whole world". This universal missionary spirit must be integrated into the spirit of unity with those whom he first called our "Separated Brethren", "an essential condition for the total triumph of the Gospel in the world".
With his studies and dynamic affirmations Blessed Fr. Manna prophetically anticipated the declarations of the Second Vatican Council, particularly Ad Gentes 2, 39, Lumen Gentium 28, Optatam Totius 20 and Presbyterorum Ordinis 10. ‘Not only priests, but religious men and women, as well as consecrated laity are natural mission workers.’ In 1949, with the decree Huic Sacro, the Congregation Propaganda Fide offered these too membership in the Union.
Entitled “Pontifical”
With the decree of 28 October 1956 Pius XII conferred the title "Pontifical" on the Union. It was therefore renamed the "Pontifical Missionary Union of the Clergy, Religious and Consecrated Laity", more simply as the "Pontifical Missionary Union" (PMU). Fr Manna served as Superior General of his Institute from 1924-34. The fruits of this commitment are his Observations on the Modern Method of Evangelisation in which he proposed a special and different formation for a greater number of local seminarians and the constitution of local Churches entrusted to the local clergy. In his later years he outlined his vision of his great, prophetic and far-reaching missionary plan: ‘Our Churches and the Propagation of the Gospel.’ On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, he invited the older Churches to establish missionary seminaries so that they could participate directly in the evangelisation of the world and give help to young mission Churches. Father Paolo Manna died on 15 September 1952 and was declared Blessed by John Paul II on 4 November 2001.