Where we came from
The Society was founded in 1866 by Herbert Vaughan, a London priest who later became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He began with a single student in a house at Mill Hill, in north London, and a conviction that the Catholic Church in England owed something to the wider world rather than only to itself. From that small beginning grew the only Catholic missionary society ever founded in England, and the one it is still known by today.
That history matters less as a date than as a habit. For a hundred and sixty years the work has been the same: to go and to stay. We have been present in some of our mission territories for more than a century, long enough to have buried our own and to have handed the work, in time, to the people we first went to serve.
Where we are now
Today Mill Hill missionaries serve in around 19 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The map is wide, but the more telling change is in who the missionaries are. For most of our history they set out from Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. Now they come, increasingly, from the countries the Society once travelled to. Around two hundred young men are in formation, and most of them are African and Asian, preparing to serve their own peoples and others alongside them.
This is not the Society winding down. It is the opposite. A Church that once received missionaries is now sending them, and that is exactly what we hoped for when we first arrived. The work has matured into the hands of the people it was always meant to belong to.
How we work
The word missionary can call up an old picture, of someone arriving with all the answers. That is not how the work is done now, and in truth it is not how the best of it was ever done. Our missionaries arrive as companions rather than benefactors. They learn the language, they stay for the long haul, and they take their lead from the local Church and the people around them.
What they actually do varies enormously from one place to another. In some places it is pioneering pastoral work where the Gospel has not been heard. In others it is standing with communities facing real injustice, or building schools and clinics, or simply listening for God at work in cultures and faiths not their own. The Society holds all of this together under a phrase it keeps returning to without ever turning it into a slogan: to love and to serve. The shorthand for the manner of it is accompaniment, walking with people rather than working over them.
How Britain takes part
In England and Wales, most of our support comes through the Red Box, which we share with Missio, the Church’s own charity for world mission. The arrangement dates from the 1930s, and the box itself now sits in well over two hundred thousand Catholic homes. The money raised is divided, with the larger share going to Missio for the young churches it supports around the world, and the rest to Mill Hill, chiefly to form and train the next generation of missionaries.
It is worth being clear about the difference, because people often ask. Missio is the Pope’s worldwide mission charity. Mill Hill is one specific missionary society with its own people on the ground. A gift through the Red Box supports both at once, and the two have worked side by side for the better part of a century.
Going further
If you would like to go further, the most natural first step is also the oldest one: pray for our missionaries and the communities they serve. You are very welcome to do more than that, to find out about the work in a particular country, to support a project, or simply to keep in touch with what the Society is doing. Whatever shape it takes, you would be taking part in the mission, not watching it from outside.
