November 17, 2013

The Evangelization We Need

--Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI

There's a lot of talk today about New Evangelization. What is meant by that? In simple terms: Millions of people are Christian in name, come from Christian backgrounds, are familiar with Christianity, but no longer practice that faith in a meaningful way. They've heard of Christ and the Gospels, believe they've already been evangelized, and their attitude toward Christianity is, "I Know what it is. I've tried it. And it's not for me!" That group often includes our own children.

And so we have a new task: How do we make the Gospel fresh for those for whom it has become stale? How do we help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian? Not a simple task, and it's not as if we haven't already been trying. Anxious parents have been trying to do this with their children. Anxious pastors have been trying to do that with their parishioners. Anxious bishops have been trying to do that with their dioceses. Anxious spiritual writers, including this one, have been trying to do that with their readership. And an anxious Church as a whole has been trying to do that with the world. What more might we be doing? This is a question and task for all of us.

We are in for a long, uphill struggle, one that demands faith in the power and truth of what we believe in and a long, difficult patience. Christ, the faith, and the Church will survive. They always do, but we too must do our parts. What are those parts? To try to evangelize the already evangelized we need to bear down on a number of things.

We need to work at trying to re-inflame the romantic imagination inside our faith. We need to find ways to get people not just to know their faith but especially to fall in love with it. Before we can do this, we need to fall in love with our faith.

We need to become people of daily prayer, to really get to know Christ in Scripture and the sacraments. We need to recognize that we are among the evangelized who need to be evangelized - talk about a long, uphill struggle.

We need to appreciate the need for both catechesis and theology, focusing on teaching the essentials of our faith and on trying to make intellectual sense of it. Evangelization is impossible if we do not permit questions-or if our answers are intellectually indefensible or spoken without love.

We need to appeal to the idealism of people, particularly the young. We need to let the beauty of the Gospel speak to the beauty inside people.

We need to remain widely "Catholic" in our approach. This requires a multiplicity of approaches. Our faith reflects God's heart and is a house with many rooms. We need to evangelize beyond any ideology of the right or the left. We need to build bridges, build communion. We need, today more than ever, to bear down on the essentials of respect, charity, and graciousness. Cause never justifies disrespect.

We need an evangelization that works at winning over hearts, not hardening them.


(Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world, and his weekly column is carried by more than seventy newspapers worldwide.)