5. Increasing Mobility of Peoples

Moreover, one of the phenomena that has been rapidly increasing in our time is the growing mobility of so many persons, coming from different continents, cultures, and economic backgrounds and life-styles. International tourism has become a regular event or as the Holy Father has remarked a "mass phenomenon" (RM, 82). Reasons of work are bringing both Christians and non-Christians from young communities to areas where Christianity is unknown or prohibited or persecuted. Even more numerous, as we see here in Italy and in other European countries, are the citizens from what we call mission countries and followers of non-Christian religions who settle in other nations for reasons of study or work or for political or economic reasons which have contributed to their native lands. All this can be a source of enrichment of one kind or another, such as, increased exposure to the realities of other nations and cultures and the riches which they have to offer the world. But it can also bring certain difficulties, hostility against strangers crime, confusion, isolation, and loss of one's faith. And all this is making it difficult to determine geographical and cultural boundaries that are fixed. All this is acting as a stimulus to hospitality, dialogue, service, sharing, solidarity movements, witness and direct proclamation to peoples that are just as much "ad gentes" groups as those in the so-called "mission lands", offering the possibility of real missionary activity in the "ad gentes" sense in these first world countries either by priests, religious or lay persons from the immigrant peoples themselves, or by returned missionaries who are now staying in their lands of origin (RM, 82). The "melting pot" syndrome which has been so characteristic of the United States for centuries is now becoming a phenomenon that is present in almost all European countries, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, making certain areas in these countries in a sense equivalent to situations which one finds in the territories dependent on the CEP and in need of initial and first evangelisation.