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Scott W. HahnApril 11, 2013

Within the first few weeks of his papacy, Pope Francis won widespread praise for his emphasis on “a poor church” that is “for the poor.” His warm and casual disposition, personal simplicity and tender outreach to “the poorest, the weakest, the least important,” as he expressed it in the homily at his inauguration Mass, may prove to be a defining feature of his papacy.

It is undoubtedly true that Pope Francis’ personal style is distinct from that of his immediate predecessors. How could it not be so? Inevitably each pope has his own personality, context and point of emphasis. But what is equally true is that the content and purpose of Francis’ outreach are in clear continuity with the legacy of the Second Vatican Council and especially Blessed John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI; the new pope’s outreach is an embodiment of the new evangelization.

The New Evangelization in Context

The theme of evangelization is indeed relatively new in Catholic circles. “Evangelizing” is something we had long associated with Protestant groups that send their members door to door. When we Catholics worried about the growth of the church, we thought in terms of missions, which meant, in practical terms, sending a donation to clergy who traveled overseas. The notion of evangelization was foreign to Catholics. Though the term and its near relatives are common in the church’s documents from the second half of the 20th century, one has to strain to find it before then. In the documents of Vatican I (1869-70), the word evangelium (Latin for “Gospel”) appears only once, and only then in reference to the four written Gospels.

If one skips ahead to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), however, one will find the root evangel and its cognates—evangelize, evangelizing, evangelization—more than 200 times. These words are used to speak of the act of spreading the Good News, sharing the message and life of Jesus Christ. Something had changed between the councils. The popes noticed.

When Cardinal Giovanni Montini assumed the Chair of Peter in 1963, he took the name Paul. He explained that he wanted to pattern his ministry after the peripatetic Apostle to the Gentiles. And so he did. He was the first pope to make apostolic journeys to six continents.

He was on a mission, but it was not his alone. It belonged to the church. He reorganized the Roman Curia and changed the name of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. He made evangelization a priority. When he issued his apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi” (“On Evangelization in the Modern World”) in 1975, he lamented that Catholics were neglecting their most basic duty. “Evangelizing,” he wrote, “is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize….”

Pope Paul’s summons cannot be dodged or delegated. “The presentation of the Gospel message is not an optional contribution for the Church,” he wrote. “It is the duty incumbent on her by the command of the Lord Jesus, so that people can believe and be saved. This message is indeed necessary. It is unique. It cannot be replaced. It does not permit either indifference, syncretism or accommodation. It is a question of people’s salvation.”

What Paul VI identified as a matter of primary importance, John Paul II made a matter of urgency. It was he who gave it a name, “the new evangelization,” and made it programmatic and pervasive.

His first use of the phrase came near the beginning of his reign. During his first return to Poland in 1979, John Paul addressed a people whose religious practice had been repressed by Communist overlords, and yet he had the audacity to preach: “A new evangelization has begun, as if it were a new proclamation, even if in reality it is the same as ever.”

The phrase seemed electric. And yet it did not come up again in his work until 1983. Then, however, it emerged as something focused, intentional and programmatic. It defined a vision. That year, speaking to the bishops of Latin America, John Paul announced that the new evangelization was to be officially launched in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the first evangelization of the Americas.

How serious was he about the project? Serious enough to pledge everything the church has to its success: “I sense that the moment has come to commit all the Church’s energies to a new evangelization,” he said in his 1990 encyclical “Redemptoris Missio.” He continued, “No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church, can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples.”

Evangelization was a priority for Pope John Paul II. He eagerly took up his predecessor’s practice of making pastoral trips, but increased the pace and frequency, traveling almost a million miles to 129 countries and addressing some of the largest crowds in history. He introduced World Youth Days, sometimes drawing more than a million young people at a time. He also reached out with electronic media.

It was a preoccupation for John Paul, but his successor also took it up with gusto. It was Pope Benedict who established a Vatican dicastery to oversee the new evangelization. He also summoned a synod to discuss the new evangelization, and it was Pope Benedict who began to speak analytically and theologically about the phenomenon—as a program that could be distinguished from past efforts. The new evangelization, he said in a homily in 2010, is “‘new’ not in its content but in its inner thrust…‘new’ in ways that correspond with the power of the Holy Spirit and which are suited to the times and situations; ‘new’ because of being necessary even in countries that have already received the proclamation of the Gospel.”

What is new about the new evangelization? Pope Benedict spoke more precisely at the opening of the Synod of Bishops in 2012. The new evangelization, he said, will be carried out not only by members of the clergy and missionaries, but by everyone in the church. It will be not just the matter of a moment, ending with initiation. It will be a summons to ongoing conversion. Christians will strive to evangelize not only individuals but also culture and society, overcoming the currents of secularism that have caused many Catholics to lose their faith. And most important, it will be directed not only toward those who are unaware of the Gospel; it will aim also to revitalize Catholics who have grown cold in their faith. It will evangelize the de-Christianized.

In his apostolic exhortation “Verbum Domini” in 2010, Benedict wrote: “Many of our brothers and sisters are ‘baptized, but insufficiently evangelized.’ In a number of cases, nations once rich in faith and in vocations are losing their identity under the influence of a secularized culture. The need for a new evangelization…must be valiantly reaffirmed.”

Common Objections

In the North American milieu, this call has been received with mixed results. In the pages of America more than 20 years ago, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., raised for the sake of discussion some typical American objections to the new evangelization (“John Paul II and the New Evangelization,” 2/1/1992).

Words like evangelization and evangelism, he observed, have “a Protestant ring.” We associate these terms with fundamentalism, and so with methods that are non-Catholic and even anti-Catholic. Evangelism suggests emotionalism, revivalism and anti-intellectualism—the kind of religion we observe when we are channel-surfing late at night and momentarily land on a televangelist. Whatever he is doing, it is not what we do. We change the channel.

As Americans, moreover, we are raised with a strong sense that religion is a private matter. It is one of the two subjects never to be discussed in polite company—the other being politics.

Cardinal Dulles noted that the objections do not hold up. Our neighbors and co-workers speak incessantly about politics. And Catholic evangelization is not fundamentalist evangelism. The popes are not asking us to conquer the world with a weaponized book. “I submit that the popes of our time have correctly identified God’s call to the church in our day and have hit upon an effective remedy for the church’s present ills,” Cardinal Dulles wrote. “The church has become too introverted. If Catholics today are sometimes weak in their faith, this is partly because of their reluctance to share it.”

We need to get over this reluctance. We need to evangelize.

The Source of Evangelization

What, then, is the key to the new evangelization? I remember wondering that myself, back in 1992. As if on cue, I opened L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, and saw the headline: “Base New Evangelization on Eucharist.”

It caught my eye not only because it seemed to answer my question, but also because it made no sense to me whatsoever. Its proposal was counterintuitive. The Eucharist, after all, is for the already initiated, the folks who are showing up for Mass. Evangelization is supposed to reach outward. Yet the headline sat atop a homily by Blessed John Paul in which he referred to the Eucharist as the “beginning” (not the end!) of our outreach, “the source” and “the basis of the New Evangelization.”

Soon others picked up on this theme. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago gave an address on Catholicity and the new evangelization, and he drew the same conclusion: “All evangelizers proclaim who Christ is; Catholic evangelizers proclaim a Eucharistic Christ.”

In 2000 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told a group of catechists that the church has always begun its evangelistic efforts at the altar. “The Church always evangelizes and has never interrupted the path of evangelization. She celebrates the Eucharistic mystery every day, administers the sacraments, proclaims the word of life—the Word of God, and commits herself to the causes of justice and charity. And this evangelization bears fruit.”

The Mass reminds us that evangelization is a gift before it is a task. It is receiving before it is doing. And we cannot share what we do not first possess.

Sacrifice and Sacrament

Not long ago I was hurrying through an airport when I heard someone shout my name. I turned to see a man my age approaching with his hand outstretched. When he said his name, Chris, I recognized him from a long-ago high school lunchroom.

When I was a teen, I was a born-again Christian, an earnest evangelical eager to argue the world into seeing the truth that was so plain to me. Chris was very bright, and he went on to become successful as a medical doctor and stockbroker. Though he had been raised a Catholic, he had no clear sense of his church’s doctrine. But neither was he interested in becoming anything other than Catholic. As clever as I was at argument, I never felt I had gone far in persuading him. When he greeted me in the airport, however, he was excited to tell me that I had indeed succeeded and that he eventually left the Catholic Church and became a “Bible Christian.” I was late for my plane, but told him we needed to talk. We exchanged cards, and within a week we reconnected by phone.

Chris reminded me that one of the questions I used to bait him in the lunchroom was “Where in the New Testament do you find the sacrifice of the Mass? Calvary is the sacrifice. The Mass is just a meal.” Well, he turned my question back on me.

In that first conversation I tried to dispel misconceptions and find common ground. Both Catholics and Protestants agree that Jesus’ sacrifice took place on Calvary “once for all” (Heb 7:27, 10:10; 1 Pt 3:18). There is no saving sacrifice apart from the cross.

I asked Chris to consider, however, that there was nothing on Calvary that would have suggested sacrifice to a first-century Jew. No devout Jews witnessing Jesus’ crucifixion would have gone home and recounted what they witnessed in terms of a sacrifice. For them, a sacrifice had to take place inside the Temple, at an altar, with a Levitical priest presiding. Jesus’ crucifixion took place outside the walls, where there was no Temple, no Levite, no altar. It looked like a bloody Roman execution, not a sacrifice.

What was it, I asked Chris, that transformed Jesus’ execution into a sacrifice? He was dumbstruck. I told him that for many years I could not answer that question. But St. Paul and the church fathers led me to the answer.

The transformative moment was Jesus’ offering of his body and blood at the Last Supper. Jesus spoke of that offering in sacrificial terms, commanding his apostles to keep it in perpetuity as his memorial: “Do this in remembrance of me.” He called it “the new covenant” (or “new testament”) in his blood (Mt 26:28), echoing Moses’ words as he ratified the Old Law with a sacrifice (Ex 24:8). The apostles, too, looked upon his memorial in sacrificial terms: “For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7).

Holy Thursday is what transformed Good Friday from an execution into a sacrifice, and Easter Sunday is what transformed the sacrifice into a sacrament. Christ’s body was raised in glory, so it is now communicable to the faithful. Indeed, it is the same sacrifice he offered by instituting the Eucharist and then dying on Calvary, only now his sacred humanity is deified and deifying. It is the high-priestly sacrifice that he offers in heaven and on earth.

That is the holy sacrifice of the Mass. If the Eucharist were only a meal, then Calvary would be no more than an execution.

Where in the New Testament is the sacrifice of the Mass? The sacrifice of the Mass is the new testament! The “new testament” was a sacrament long before it was a document. It was not until A.D. 190 that we begin to find the phrase used to describe a book. It was not until the late fourth century that the church definitively ratified the canonical form of that book. But by then the New Testament sacrifice had already evangelized the world. The book was called the New Testament because of its proximity to the sacrifice of the Eucharist. The Scriptures are liturgical documents; and they need to be read as such in order to be properly understood.

My conversation with Chris continued for months. (Eventually, my portion became a book: Consuming the Word, Doubleday.) Through those months, our friendship was renewed and deepened. Eventually, he and his wife returned to the Catholic Church after more than three decades away.

Chris’s backstory is not so unusual. It is the story of many Catholics of his generation—my generation. Our hearts should at least be moved to reach out to them with the best that we have.

I have good reason for believing that a new evangelization based on the Eucharist will work. It is a papal teaching, and that is always a good bet. But I have also seen it work in my own life, in Chris’s and in the lives of so many friends.

We must evangelize. It is the church’s urgent and importunate call. Like the church, we exist in order to evangelize. Like St. Paul, we cannot be ourselves, we cannot be happy, we will never be satisfied in life if we neglect to reach out to our neighbor: “Woe to me if I do not evangelize” (1 Cor 9:16).

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Mike Evans
10 years 11 months ago
In the context of the Eucharist, would Jesus have denied it to non-Jews, to unconfessed sinners, to divorced people, or to any of the Pharisees? In the western world we continue to deny it to all Protestants and all non-baptized people. We also set a high standard for admission to the saving grace of our sacramental life, acting as gate-keepers to the inclusion of those who might not fully believe or understand the nuances of our codes and catechisms. Just among the European and North American countries we have huge numbers of unchurched and Christmas/Easter folk, still waiting to hear the good news that they, too are welcome and worthy. Where did Jesus prefer to eat? Among sinners, lepers, prostitutes and unbelievers. Who are we to exclude them?
Oscar Cavazos
10 years 11 months ago
Mike, I came back to the Church after 16 years. I could not partake in the Eucharist because my wife and i were married outside the Church (I was an agnostic so I didn't care about a dispensation). It was difficult to abstain from receiving our Lord's body and blood once I realized what was actually happening at the mass. I wanted it so bad! . The day I finally received it again for the first time as an adult, I wept. I am so thankful for God's grace in allowing me to know what it is we are partaking in. I offer you my testimony and 1 Corinthians 11:27-32. It is out of love that the Church upholds Paul's teaching through the Holy Spirit. If anyone can partake of the Eucharist without discerning what Christ has done for us, what Christ has given us through His Church, and what our role is in response, then it truly is "just a meal." Peace, and God bless!
Craig McKee
10 years 11 months ago
"If the Eucharist were only a meal, then Calvary would be no more than an execution." Exquisite phrasing. But what a pity the editors chose to illustrate this article with that tacky HOLLYWOOD HOST on the cover...itself a perfect metaphor for what's wrong with the Eucharistic evangelization/celebration/theology/discipline today: WOMEN can get only so close...and all because they weren't invited to the Last Supper!
ed gleason
10 years 11 months ago
Evangelizing is new to Catholics?.. Maybe too young to remember the Catholic parish census taking by laity in the fifties. Door to door asking if Catholics were there and then inviting ALL to come to church.and handing out a pamphlet too.
Susan Kay
10 years 11 months ago
and it was not just in the 50's . My family ( little ones accompanied my husband and me - two walking holding hands giving out pamphlets, one in a stroller) on a weekend visited every door in a designated neighborhood in our parish. We met some great people, renewed acquaintances and left notes and materials for those we did not get to speak with personally. And all this in New England yet!
ROBERT FUSELIER
10 years 11 months ago
I’m sure that most Catholics would agree that we are called to spread the Gospel message. The confusion seems to be on what exactly that message is and how to communicate it. Do we focus, as Cardinal George was quoted in this article, “… to proclaim a Eucharistic Christ,” or rather, “That life has triumphed over death, that love has triumphed over hatred, and that nothing is impossible with God”, as Fr. Martin suggests in the message from his article (http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/not-so-good-news)? Or do we follow the namesake of our pope who suggested to his followers that they go spread the Good News and, only as a last resort, use words. Since words can never explain the inexplicable and are so often misconstrued, I think St. Francis was on to something. Unfortunately, his way requires us to fully understand the other and to fully understand our own motives. How can we evangelize when the plank we seen in the eyes of those we wish to ‘cure’ is a splinter from our eye simply projected unto the other? Only when we allow the Spirit to work within us can we evangelize. Any willful effort to do so will be our own, not God’s. As St. Thérèse reminds us, a willingness to “surrender in gratitude” is all we need. But to do this, we first must be, “… willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to ourselves…” Evangelization is about humility. Our pope appears to be following his namesake.
Charlie Hearn
10 years 11 months ago
Speaking of misconstrued...until someone can point to where St. Francis actually said "...use words as a last resort" the myth is perpetuated and used to justify positions which should be supported by better intellectual arguments.
ed gleason
10 years 11 months ago
Charlie Hearn... I think the expression is "use words if necessary' not words as a last resort. Maybe your position that 'better intellectual arguments' may also be an evangelizing myth perpetuated and used to justify and sell authors works. .
Lisa Marie Gerondeau
10 years 11 months ago
Dr. Hahn, What can we do when we effectively provide witness and the other turns away? I've had this happen on a number of occasions, not surprisingly, as the truth of Christ's love does require us to change. You'll probably answer that these others need time, yes? "Give time time," as I've recently read. That said, I have lost a husband and a best friend in recent years because I continue to choose life, at a great cost to my personal life, and a great sadness when these people I have loved have turned back into the darkness where Christ is not. And, yes, my own prayer life and conversion continues and deepens. But there is a sorrow, and constant moving on is a heartache for me, as a human who needs more continuity in this lifetime for my own well-being. Lisa Marie
neil cosentino
10 years 11 months ago
The Society of Our lady of the Skies [SOLOS] .... a Catholic Aviation Network [CAN] is one the leading edge of evangelization. You are invited, all are invited to reflect - to do the math: The USA - has over 600,000 pilots and 300,000 aircraft mechanics, not including the military populations and others in the industry. If only 10% are pilot and Catholic and of that 10% - 10% would join SOLOS CAN and fly for the faith <> our Catholic Aviation Network [CAN] - we would have over 6,000 aircraft and over 3,000 aircraft mechanics. We need help - direct media help or advice to build STATE based - web based SOLOS CAN networks. Their help - service to the faith would be compensated by donations from those who contribute to or use the networks ... they would be supporting and using services not limited to the five primary missions: The Marian Travel & Faith Education Mission, The EM Mercy Missions, The Air Ambulance-Medical support Missions, The Clergy and Lay Mobility Missions, The Mission support Missions... Local CANs can offer SOLOS CAN orientation rides/flights at X dollars/per ride with the passengers making a donation to the SOLOS CAN in their state. A portion of the payment would be retained by them of their organizations for developing and maintaining the software for the Network. I hope this proposal will be given serious consideration. God bless all our works, Neil Cosentino SOLOS CAN Tampa, Florida SOLOS Office - in - Home 813-251-4669 Neil.Cosentino@verizon.net
Richard Currie
10 years 11 months ago
Scott, Thank you for a beautiful reflection on who we are as disciples of Christ! I want to add one point, which also may respond to some of the other comments. The underlying key to the new evangelization is not the "what" we preach or even the "Who" we preach, but rather the " who we are who preach". We who are called to evangelize -- and that is all of us! -- need to be people who in our everyday life, in all we do, exude the love of God both for us and, through us, for others. Yes it is Paschal Mystery centered, as you have eloquently written and as I constantly remind the parents in our parish's sacramental prep program, but if they do not see us as living & breathing what we preach, we are like "clanging cymbals" (1 Cor 13:1). Your encounter with Chris couldn't have succeeded any other way. (Thank you!). Evangelizing with an agenda won't get there, and in fact may cause hurt & pain in the process. Evangelizing by our lives of selfless love, and by explicitly acknowledging the motivational force of our lives (which is the Paschal Mystery), ultimately is unstoppable.

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