Students from 36 Catholic elementary schools across the Los Angeles area are scheduled to gather at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Wednesday to celebrate raising $72,925.64 for underserved children around the world through the Missionary Childhood Association. The money, collected during the 2025-26 school year, will help fund a nutrition program feeding 200 preschool-age children in the Vicariate of Inirida, Colombia, where families in remote Amazon communities struggle to get enough food.
Archbishop José H. Gomez is scheduled to serve as principal celebrant of the Missionary Childhood Association Youth Appreciation Mass, with Auxiliary Bishop Matthew Elshoff concelebrating, according to MyNewsLA.com. The celebration is scheduled to run from 9:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the cathedral, located at 555 W. Temple St. The cathedral is the Archdiocese of Los Angeles' cathedral, and the archdiocese has about 4.3 million Catholics, per the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The current cathedral replaced the historic St. Vibiana's Cathedral following earthquake damage in 1994, according to a Wikipedia entry on the archdiocese.
The funds raised will support community dining facilities that operate five days a week for eight months of the year, providing regular meals to the preschool-age children in the remote Colombian vicariate, the report notes. The effort is part of a global network: the Missionary Childhood Association is one of four official Pontifical Mission Societies, as described by the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth. Those societies distribute collected youth and parish funds across more than 1,100 mission dioceses worldwide, prioritizing places where local Catholic communities are too young, impoverished, or persecuted to sustain themselves, with allocation decisions reviewed annually by national directors meeting in Rome, according to the Diocese of Paterson.
A Century-Old Appeal Reaches a Milestone
This year's Mass carries extra weight: it commemorates the 100th anniversary of World Mission Sunday, which will be observed worldwide on October 18, the same report states. World Mission Sunday was instituted in 1926 by Pope Pius XI at the request of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, according to the Archdiocese of Chicago, and serves as the Catholic Church's annual appeal to support mission dioceses around the globe. For the centenary, Pope Leo XIV selected the theme “One in Christ, United in Mission,” a choice informed by his own background: before his papal election, he served as an Augustinian missionary in Peru, the Chicago archdiocese reports.
The Mass was also scheduled to feature the veneration of a second-class relic of Blessed Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who was declared blessed on September 24 — less than three weeks before the Los Angeles gathering. Sheen served with the Pontifical Mission Societies from 1950 to 1966 and helped raise global awareness of the Church's missionary work, per ChurchPOP. In February 1951, Sheen created the World Mission Rosary on his radio program The Catholic Hour, assigning five color-coded decades — green, red, white, blue, and yellow — to represent prayers for Africa, the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Asia, a rosary that remains widely used by the Missionary Childhood Association to teach youth global prayer today.
Student Artists and Scholars Honored
Two students were recognized as finalists in the national Missionary Childhood Association Christmas artwork contest for 2025-26: Jewel Diep, an eighth-grader at All Souls World Language Catholic School in Alhambra, and Matilda Huizar, a fourth-grader at Incarnation Catholic School in Glendale. Both will receive framed prints of their artwork, which is scheduled to be displayed at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., during Advent, according to the archdiocese. All Souls is the only Catholic elementary school in the country offering dual-language immersion in both Spanish-English and Mandarin-English, per KABC-TV.
Three students also won $500 Msgr. Brouwers Memorial Scholarships through the Lay Mission-Helpers Association essay contest. Following the Mass, students were scheduled to head to the cathedral plaza for a dance party, while missionary organizations were set to offer exhibits and interactive activities for attendees.
A Massive School Network Behind the Effort
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles's Catholic school system includes 214 elementary schools and 51 high schools, with more than 73,750 students, and is among the largest in California, per the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's school office. The Missionary Childhood Association has an even longer history, founded in France in 1843 by Bishop Charles de Forbin-Janson as the Association of the Holy Childhood, built on the idea of “children helping children” that still defines the program today, according to a Wikipedia history of the organization.
For families following along from home, the Mass was scheduled to be livestreamed at olacathedral.org/mca.
