Evangelization & Formation: November 2012 Archives

Philadelphia archbishop and Capuchin friar Charles J. Chaput writes well about the sobering reality of evangelization in his weekly column for this week. (Get in the habit of reading the Archbishop's weekly essay.) The content of His Excellency's essay "The new communities and the 'New Evangelization'" has "three simple things today: first, I'll share some observations on the general state of the Church; second, I'll talk about the role of new communities and charisms like the Sodalitium in the new evangelization; and third, I'll offer some thoughts to this group as a brother in consecrated life, based on my own experience as a Capuchin and a bishop.  I have a fourth point to mention as well; but it's really more of a story.  I'll come back to it at the end of my remarks."

The Pope will tweet. Is this a mortal sin or a gospel value?

In recent years, we have seen a significant interest in teaching the faith more authentically, but also we've become more attentive to answering the real questions believers and unbelievers have. With the Year of Faith fully engaged now, I think we need to attend to three unavoidable questions whether we are teaching teens, adults, or expanding the horizons of our faith and understanding of the cosmos we live in.

Tommaso Spinelli, 23, a catechist of young catechumens who works at the Catechetical Office of the Diocese of Rome, has some good things to say:

The new evangelization needs substance: it needs catechesis of a certain depth that is able to say something serious to our lives, but also and above all it needs lives of substance that demonstrate through actions the solidity of the Christian. It is even more important today, now that families are disunited and often abdicate their educative role, that priests demonstrate to the young their faithfulness to a vocation and the possibility of choosing an alternative way of living, better than that proposed by society.

My concern however is that these figures of substance are becoming a minority. The priest has lost trust in the importance of his ministry, he has lost charisma and culture. I see priests who adapt to the dominant thought. The same is true of the liturgy, which in the attempt to become original becomes meaningless. Priests, I ask you to find the courage to be yourselves. Do not fear because where you are truly priests, there you propose the truth of the faith without fear, we the young will follow. Indeed, the words of Peter are also ours: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life". And we are infinitely hungry for something eternal and true.

I therefore propose:

The Cambodian Catholic experience is not something that rolls off our lips at cocktail parties or lunch dates in the USA. But the Asian perspective is needed: how does the Good News get rooted. Notice his points at the end of the post.

The rather young bishop, The Most Reverend Olivier Michel Marie Schmitthaeusler, MEP, 42, vicar apostolic of Phnom Penh, Cambodia since 2010 told the Pope and the Synod:

The Khmer Rouge genocide killed bishops, priests, religious persons and the majority of Christians. For twenty years now, we are living a new time of the Acts of the Apostles with a first announcement of the Good News ensured by the small group of survivors, supported by the massive arrival of missionaries. Today we have about 200 adult baptisms each year... The small Church of Cambodia is in some ways a laboratory for evangelization in a Buddhist world, fully entered into a process of secularization driven by globalization a bit like the Asian dragons. The Ad Extra Mission is intimately tied to the Ad Intra Mission. Ad Extra and Ad Intra are mutually enriched by stimulating each other with the same and unique Mission of Evangelization!

At the Synod of Bishops men and women from all parts of the world gathered in Rome in October to speak on matters pertaining to evangelization. We in the USA, need perspective: the lower Europe and North America is not the only place where the Christian faith is incarnated. The bishop of Tromso since 2009, Norway, Berislav Grgić, 52, said to the Synod Fathers:

The Catholic Church in the Northern Lands - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden - is a very small minority and therefore has neither the advantages nor the disadvantages that the Catholic Church often comes across in traditional and prevalently Catholic regions. Despite its limited relevance, numeric as well as social, our Church is nonetheless a growing Church. New churches are built or bought, new parishes are instituted, non-Latin rites are added, there is a relatively high number of adult conversions and baptisms, there are vocations to priesthood and to religious life, the number of baptisms is much higher than the number of deaths and number of those who abandon the Church, and attendance at Sunday Mass is relatively high.

We need to keep a close eye on what happened at the Evangelization Synod just finished in Rome. A judgment, that is, an assessment of meaning, needs to be made so that we can derive a deeper call to conversion and New Life offered by Christ. Far from being a matter of strategy, the work done at the Synod by the bishops and experts and in time by the Pope, will prove, I think, to be historic.

Among the people appointed to the Synod was Father Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. He addressed a letter to CL in which he said, in part: 

Hearing the call to conversion that came from the synod hall, I could not help but remember the call that Fr. Giussani issued many years ago in Viterbo, inviting us to "recover the truth of our vocation and our commitment." Because we, too, he told us, run the risk of "reducing our commitment too a kind of theorization of a socio-pedagogical method, reducing it to a kind of activism that follows upon this theorization, and then a commitment to the political defense of it. Instead, our task is to reaffirm and to propose to man, our brother, a fact of life.

In the time following the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization I think we need to review what was said. So often we move on so fast when an event is finished. A judgment, that is, an assessment, is required to understand with clarity and charity. 

Christians often ignorant of the content of their own faith and incapable because of this of living of and for it, are not capable of interreligious dialogue that always begins with the assertion of one's own convictions: there is no room for syncretism or relativism! Faced with adepts from other religions with a strong religious identity, it is necessary to present motivated and doctrinally equipped Christians. This makes the new evangelization a priority to form coherent Christians, capable of demonstrating their faith, with simple words and without fear.