57. Therefore, ever since the apostolic age, the Church's mission has continued without interruption within the whole human family. The first evangelization took place above all in the region of the Mediterranean. In the course of the first millennium, missions setting out from Rome and Constantinople brought Christianity to the whole continent of Europe. At the same time they made their way to the heart of Asia, as far as India and China. The end of the fifteenth century marked both the discovery of America and the beginning of the evangelization of that great continent, North and South. Simultaneously, while the sub-Saharan coasts of Africa welcomed the light of Christ, Saint Francis Xavier, Patron of the Missions, reached Japan. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a layman, Andrew Kim, brought Christianity to Korea. In the same period the proclamation of the Gospel reached Indochina, as well as Australia and the Islands of the Pacific.

The nineteenth century witnessed vast missionary activity among the peoples of Africa. All these efforts bore fruit which has lasted up to the present day. The Second Vatican Council gives an account of this in the Decree Ad Gentes on Missionary Activity. After the Council the question of missionary work was dealt with in the Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, in the light of the problems of the missions in these final years of our century. In the future too, the Church must continue to be missionary: indeed missionary outreach is part of her very nature. With the fall of the great anti-Christian systems in Europe, first of Nazism and then of Communism, there is urgent need to bring once more the liberating message of the Gospel to the men and women of Europe.(39) Furthermore, as the Encyclical Redemptoris Missio affirms, the modern world reflects the situation of the Areopagus of Athens, where Saint Paul spoke(40). Today there are many "areopagi", and very different ones: these are the vast sectors of contemporary civilization and culture, of politics and economics. The more the West is becoming estranged from its Christian roots, the more it is becoming missionary territory, taking the form of many different "areopagi".