What is the "New Evangelization?" In light of Pope Francis scolding people for "proselytizing" and synodal clerics bragging about never baptizing an indigenous person, not to mention the messages that all faiths are paths to salvation....what exactly is the "New Evangelization?" Is there such a thing? Do we find it in Abu Dhabi with its monuments to Judaism, Islam, and, by the way, Christianity?
Is the "new evangelization" syncretism? Is it the "I'm okay, you're okay" philosophy? Is the Catholic Church still the true path to salvation or just one path among many? Do all roads lead to heaven including Freemasonry and Wicca? Fr. Collins offers some insights on the confused premises undergirding the "new evangelization." We'd do well to listen and avoid the "dangerous detours" tempting us to follow dead ends into a labyrinth of confusion.
DANGEROUS DETOURS FROM THE NEW EVANGELIZATION
by Fr. Tom Collins
Over the past several decades, many programs in the Church have been developed in order to promote the New Evangelization. Sadly, though, many of these programs have been developed by adopting defective premises of secular society, rather than being firmly and decisively rooted in the whole truth of God entrusted to His Church. Thus it is that the simple truth of the adage, “Garbage in, garbage out”, has been dramatized as the Church in the Western world has been suffering from a steady decline in vocations, spirituality and membership. It is thus rather important that we identify and address some of these defective and at times degenerate premises.
The first defective secular premise is that hubris should be identified as zeal. This distorted perspective harkens back to the late 1950’s, when the upcoming Second Vatican Council was anticipated with great hubris, rather than humble and docile repentance. And it was reflected in the tendency to assert that the liturgy and the Church needed to be reformed, rather than I need to be reformed into a greater conformity to God’s truth. Once the quest for relevance led us to forget our need for greater docility to God’s revelation, the distracting winds of secularism blowing into the Church were able to distract us from the quiet whispering sound of the Holy Spirit speaking to us in the depths of our souls. Over the past six decades, this tendency to try to attract souls by making Christ relevant to their agendas, rather than challenging them to critique their agendas in the light of God’s eternal truth, has led many to wander away from Christ in order to embrace the perpetual pursuit of self-fulfillment and self-gratification. Jesus is thus treated more as a mascot for their agendas, rather than as the Master of their lives.
This tendency to deemphasize the centrality of the mystery of Christ crucified has been further augmented by Church leaders trying to make Catholicism more comfortable. As one old man told me years ago, “Father, the Church began to decline when they put cushions in the pews.” Note how we have de facto downgraded Fridays as days of mortification, degraded decisive disciplines of fasting during Lent into minor daily inconveniences, eliminated ember days and diminished the importance and even the dates of holy days of obligation for the sake of catering to complacency. And whereas the ancient disciplines of authentic spirituality combined prayer and fasting, prayer and feasting have become the norm for most spiritual renewal programs. Thus we seem to have forgotten the spiritual parallel to the proverb “feed a cold, starve a fever.” For we can only feed the spirit when we starve the flesh. Authentic sanctification cannot be realized through a compulsive capitulation to our desires for gratification, since sanctification leads to liberation, whereas compulsive capitulation to gratification leads to the slavery of sinful addictions.
Another secular premise, which has poisoned the New Evangelization, is the dialectical dynamic of dialogue.
When Church leaders decided to embrace this premise, they de facto denied a basic spiritual reality. Truth can only be efficaciously appreciated through humble, reverent and docile discernment. Dialogue, on the other hand, is merely an exchange of premises, perspectives and opinions. Thus, as the premises of dialogue have been allowed to displace a reverent and careful discernment of the truth as the foundation of spiritual relationships, we have witnessed a concomitant degradation of a proper appreciation for the sacred integrity of truth. The fruit of this distortion is the increasingly popular assertion of “my truth” as opposed to “the truth”. Through dialogue, in the minds of many, the concepts of truth and of accountability to the truth have been displaced with a new concept of truth as what is relevant to me and to the fulfillment of my agenda.
As an aside, this helps to explain the decline and degradation of the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the lives of so many Catholics. If the “relief” a person gets from falling into sin in a certain occasion helps him/her to feel fulfilled, it must not really be a sin in that situation. This is indicated in the sacrament, when a penitent begins his/her confession not with “I am sorry for having offended God by . . .”, but rather with “I feel bad about …”. Whereas the Sacrament should be directed to helping a soul be better, it is more often primarily directed toward making the person feel better. Sadly, many forget that merely suppressing a symptom does not cure the disease.
Another secular premise crippling the New Evangelization is that of responsibility. At first, that word sounds reasonable, but in light of our true dignity as God’s children, it is quite seriously defective. The problem with the term is that it tends to evaluate human actions on the basis of material or practical consequences, which can be directly experienced by one’s self or others. It thus provides a spiritual “privileged sanctuary” for certain private sins or sins, the consequences of which will not be immediately experienced. In opposition to this, the Church teaches that each of us is accountable for our actions. Since each human being is sacred, we can only be true to ourselves by being true to God, ourselves, and others – even when we are alone. Sin is thus to be seen as an objective desecration of one’s premises, perspective, self, others, and relationships. Accountability recognizes this. And, whereas responsibility seeks salvation through excuses and resentments; accountability humbly seeks salvation through repentance - through a grateful and contrite receptivity to God’s redemptive and regenerative mercy. While the avoidance of negative consequences may provide some transient thrills, true happiness can only be realized by growing in those virtues which promote integrity of character.
Our secular age has also distorted our appreciation of the true nature of hospitality. While it is good to welcome all to join us in our life and worship, we need to realize that the greeting, “All are welcome”, is not accurate. Since the Church on earth is a hospital for sinners, rather than a museum of self- righteous saints, we only welcome those who want to join us in offering God the hospitality of grateful and humble repentance. Personally, I would love to see a church sign, which proclaims, “Come in and repent with us – there is plenty of mercy for all of us!”. And, to be honest, I would be uncomfortable with a church, which would welcome me merely as I am. As a human being, I am not stagnant. I am a mysterious and sacred dynamic continually being transformed through the relationships to which I commit myself either deliberately or through acquiescence. At the core of all of us is a longing to be transformed in a way that will allow each of us, in our uniqueness, to share the transformative love of God with us. Thus as a soul joins with us in the sanctifying dynamic of regenerative repentance, our whole congregation is able to grow more deeply in docility to that mercy, which purges away pride and infuses in us a joyful and sanctifying gratitude. Pride says, “I am better than you”, whereas gratitude proclaims, “I am better because of you”. Pride leads to alienation, but gratitude opens our hearts to the grace of reconciliation, regeneration, and redemption.
The tendency of Church leaders to embrace the secular premises of evolution is another way by which the efficaciousness of the New Evangelization has been compromised. The dynamic, by which human development takes place, is not impersonal evolution, but rather evocation. God did not merely create the world, command it to evolve and then depart into an aloof transcendence. Rather, He is intimately involved in the perfecting of His creation. And so He is continually calling humanity into a greater intimacy with His truth, love, and righteousness. Sadly, the acceptance of an evolutionary perspective has spawned racism, genocide, eugenics, aborticide, and other forms of oppression, all of which have been justified as merely means to accelerate the evolutionary development of a perfect human race.
The decision to embrace the secular idea of social justice has also adversely affected the New Evangelization. Aside from the fact that Christianity is based upon the supreme injustice, by which the innocent Son of God was given what He did not deserve, an agonizing death on a cross, and sinful humanity was given what we did not deserve, mercy and eternal life. The guiding principle of the Gospel, then, is not justice, but divine righteousness. Such righteousness is consecrated to form God’s image and likeness anew in all dimensions of our shared humanity. Justice tends to be reactionary, while righteousness resilient, regenerative, and redemptive. Also, since social justice is deeply invested in a sense of entitlement, the entitlement mentality easily skewers people’s spirituality to the point where they view eternal life as an entitlement, rather than humbly and reverently appreciate it as the gracious fruit of divine mercy and righteousness. And if people are free to believe that all are going to heaven, then why do they need Baptism, the Church, or “antiquated moral doctrines? All they need are the ongoing liberation of libido and the ever-evolving dictates of political correctness as more technology is developed to overcome the negative consequences of sin and its desecration of God’s image.
Finally, the secular concept of human rights is very dangerous. Aside from promoting a false sense of entitlement indicated above, it tends to close people’s hearts to their accountability for their sins and to the awesome reality of God’s gracious mercy. Due to sin, the only human right is the right to eternal damnation. What are referred to as human rights are actually rooted in God’s right to be graciously faithful to His original word committed to forming us in His image and likeness. Thus all is grace, and grace can only be efficacious in our human condition in a context of reverent, repentant, humble and docile gratitude. Also, it should be noted that the secular sense of human rights tends to spawn resentments, rather than resilience, when a person does not get what he/she believe to be an entitlement.
The secularization of evangelization is thus one of the most serious dangers confronted by the Church as we enter the new millennium. Hopefully, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we will soon rediscover the importance of insisting on sacred language and sacred vocabulary in order to convey sacred truths. Otherwise, much time, effort and money will be invested in trying to pour the new wine of God’s graciousness into the old wineskins of secular greed and resentment.
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