The Mission clearly reflects a support for "liberation theology." The mid-eighties were also the period when "Liberation Theology" was widely discussed in the Church and eventually censured by the Holy See. Robert Bolt, the author of The Mission, was a friend of Rev. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, a Jesuit activist. This film also endorses clerical activism in opposition to tyranny, a familiar theme of the 1970's and 1980's. If this sympathy is not clear enough from the film itself, which includes Daniel Berrigan as one of the missionaries, there is at the end a dedication to priests still laboring and dying for justice in Latin America.