Christopher West describes Catholic faith as ‘primarily a religion of longing’
OTTAWA (CCN)
The New Evangelization Summit 2016 featured top-notch Catholic speakers Christopher West, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM, Sherry Weddell, and others.
The April 15-16 conference reached an estimated 3,000 people. More than 600 attended the main site at an Ottawa hotel, while the rest participated in 30 host sites across North America, from Prince Edward Island to North Dakota.
Michael Dopp, founder of Mission of the Redeemer Ministries, modelled the summit after Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit, using a conference hub with satellite sites live-streaming the talks to draw as many people as possible. This gave participants an opportunity to hear an array of speakers one conference could never afford.
Dopp kicked off the event with a call to those attending not only to be saints, but also to be missionaries, noting great saints were usually both.
Christopher West, well known for popularizing and explaining St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, explained that the Catholic faith is “not principally a religion of law; it is primarily a religion of longing.”
Any religion that is not connected to our deepest desires will produce a caricature of a Christian, he said. He noted the “Internet frenzy” over Pope Francis’s post-synod apostolic exhortation, with some complaining the Pope is setting aside the law.
The Pope writes about the “law of gradualism,” how people “grow in stages” vs. “gradualism in the law,” he said. “The law remains the law,” and you “don’t water down the truth of our humanity,” or “the proclamation of grace.”
“When the law is written on the heart, the law of God wells up from within, from the heart, and the law doesn’t feel like a burden,” he said. “We only desire to break the law when our hearts are not in conformity with it.”
Because of sin, there’s a rupture between God’s law and our hearts, he said. God’s law is meant to lead us “to our destiny” to live with Him forever.
When Christianity is looked at through the lens of law, “two warring camps result”: those who are “rigorist,” who “think they can live the law and impose it on others”; and those who are “lax,” who say the law is impossible to follow so they sidestep it.
Those in both camps ignore the good news of Grace, which has the power to “transform our desires,” he said.
Evangelization
“Apologetics: giving a reason for your faith, is a crucial part of evangelization,” said philosopher Peter Kreeft, appearing via video. The object of apologetics is, first, to convince atheists to become theists; second, to transform theists into believing Jesus is God Incarnate; and third, to convince Christians the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ.
Modernists insisted on reason too much, while in today’s post-modern world, “all meta narratives” are deemed “purely subjective,” he said.
“You have to start with getting people to thirst for truth,” and that sometimes involves “tearing up the motherboard” to get there. He advised getting skeptics to become “skeptical of their skepticism,” and relativists to become “relative about their relativism.”
“Not caring about the truth and not worrying about not having truth is a very serious disease,” Kreeft said. The heart might be seeking, but the mind can remain skeptical.
Arguments from desire, about the narrative of God’s love in Scripture and from beauty, are ways to appeal to today’s sensibilities, he said.
Sherry Weddell, author of <ct:Italic>Forming Intentional Disciples: The Heart of Parish Renewal,<ct:> warned “lack of fruit” in parishes should be “our warning sign evangelization is not taking place.”
She used the image of a mountain stream plunging around boulders to illustrate the lavish stream of grace coming from the sacraments, such as the Eucharist. However, if people do not experience directly the “redeeming power of Jesus Christ,” they will be like those boulders, with grace flowing around them but not penetrating.
Self-denial and prayer
Father Raniero Cantalamessa, a Capuchin who is the Preacher to the Papal Household, appeared via video from Rome to speak about the importance of the Holy Spirit in making Christ present in the world.
Quoting Marshall McLuhan’s famous: “The medium is the message,” Father Cantalamessa said only in Jesus is connection between the medium and the message “perfect.”
The key to evangelization is for Christians to come ever closer to having their lives reflect the message of the Gospel, following St. Paul’s teaching that “It is not I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.”
Everyone has the duty to evangelize, he said, and the prerequisites are self-denial, prayer, and compassion.
Jesus said, “Go!” and the first door we need to exit is the “door of our ‘I’ or ‘me,'” he said.
He spoke of Ezekiel’s image of a little book that was eaten and tasted like honey, and discussed the Word of God that is studied and proclaimed, and the Word of God Who is eaten.
“Only that which comes from the heart reaches the heart of the people,” he said. In Revelation, a book is eaten that tastes sweet at first but becomes “as bitter as gall.”
“This is because if the Word can wound its hearer, it must wound the preacher,” he said. Only when the Word of God has cut the heart of the preacher “can I bring it to others.”
There must be an “irrevocable decision not to live for ourselves anymore but to live for the Lord.”
There is no evangelization without the Holy Spirit, he said. Prayer is essential, and without it, those wishing to evangelize are like firefighters who rush to a fire only to get there and realize they do not have a drop of water in their tanks.
“The less one prays, the more one speaks, but empty words that don’t reach anyone,” he said.
Evangelization needs to be accompanied by love and compassion, otherwise words become like stones, or like hail that makes people take refuge during a hailstorm, he said.
Parish renewal
Auxiliary Bishop Christian Riesbeck of Ottawa shared his experience in parish renewal at Our Lady of Peace Parish in inner-city Houston, Tex. When he arrived, the parish had hardly any volunteers, and its school was on the verge of closing. He did not even have a sacristan, so had to prepare all his Masses himself, and even make sure doors were opened and closed.
He ran himself ragged, and after three months felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he remembered the words of the founder of the Companions of the Cross, his order, who urged people to “Give God permission,” so that’s what he set about doing, and he encouraged his parishioners to do the same.
Through Alpha Courses; retreats; courses for parents whose children were receiving baptism, first Holy Communion, or confirmation; and other programs to evangelize Catholics and help them have a personal experience of Jesus Christ and baptism in the Holy Spirit, the parish revived.
“Father Raniero Cantalamessa, who is the preacher to the Papal household, says that the sacraments of baptism and confirmation can be ‘bound sacraments’ that need to be released,” he said. “This is what baptism in the Holy Spirit does.”
Between 1999, when the Companions of the Cross took over Our Lady of Peace Parish, and the present, including the nine years Bishop Riesbeck was pastor, the parish has doubled in size to over 1,600 families, the school has gone from 89 students to 200, and the parish now boasts more than 600 volunteers.
Even the neighbourhood, where they used to hear gunshots at night, has been transformed as the parishioners’ lives have changed.
Angele Regnier, co-foundress of Catholic Christian Outreach, shared practical tips used by this missionary outreach to university students to share the Gospel and help facilitate an encounter with Jesus Christ.
She showed how to ask questions and used diagrams to show where God is in someone’s life: outside, a part of one’s life, or at the centre, that help draw people towards inviting “Jesus to be at the centre” of their lives.
Dopp closed the Summit with an exhortation to remember the missionary saints in Church history who were impelled to share the Gospel because “people might possibly be damned.” He asked participants to question whether they were uncomfortable with that statement.
“St. Francis of Assisi could not bear the thought of not preaching because he had so clear an understanding of the consequences of responding or not responding to the Gospel,” he said.
“For 60 years we’ve forgotten it, thinking it’s all good in the end,” Dopp said, “so we sit on our hands.”
