Now is the time for evangelization on the home front: archbishop

This is an excerpt of Archbishop J. Michael Miller’s address at the Upper Room Sept. 18.

We can never forget that the Church (that means our parishes) “exists in order to evangelize,” as Pope St. Paul VI wrote.

I believe that the Risen Lord himself has given us this calling – in this time and in this place. I recognize that many of our contemporaries view the Church, especially her leadership, with suspicion and distrust. The clergy sexual abuse scandals and the heartbreaking disclosure of unmarked graves at Indian Residential Schools could tempt us to batten down the hatches, make it through the storm, and just hope for better days. Although this is a time for reflection and healing, it is not the time to recoil from the Great Commission the Lord has given each of us at our Baptism: to go forth and make disciples.

Our metropolis, that of the Lower Mainland, is mission territory. Here 40 per cent of the population report that they have no religion and here, in our Archdiocese, more than 50 per cent of baptized Catholics no longer take part regularly in the Church’s sacramental life. Occasions for evangelization are everywhere.

Our Church here in the Archdiocese of Vancouver, therefore has a vocation, a supernatural calling given to us by the Lord. Now is the time to focus our pastoral efforts in such a way that they will “be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world,” as Pope Francis said in Evangelii Gaudium. Everything we do in our parishes, schools, associations, ministries, and movements should be put into “a missionary key,” leaving models of maintenance behind us.

The new evangelization that has been launched is an “opportunity,” or more properly a “grace,” for the Church. It must first of all focus on what constitutes the purpose of its existence and its mission, that is, the question of Jesus Christ and of the God of Jesus Christ, the question of belief. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI affirms that the evangelizing mission of the Church today “has been particularly challenged by an abandonment of the faith – a phenomenon progressively more manifest in societies and cultures that for centuries seemed to be permeated by the Gospel.” That would be us.

Some forty years ago, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge whose book Something Beautiful for God put Mother Teresa on the world stage, wrote that he saw the up-until-then social acceptance of Christianity as “sinking” in the Western world. Why? Because of the Church was being compromised by its association with what he called “Christendom;” that is, the worldly structure of the faith that, unlike the faith itself, is “constructed by men,” and therefore perishable.

In the era of Christendom – our situation in Canada until perhaps 50 years ago – the culture, its laws, and generally accepted moral principles were more or less aligned to Christian truths. Great institutional achievements naturally emerged from this culture: Catholic hospitals, universities, cathedrals. The pastoral emphasis was on maintaining and strengthening this status quo, which upheld or at least didn’t undermine Christian beliefs.

Evangelization was active, yes – but to foreign lands, such as those in Africa, where, in the last hundred years, the growth of the Church has been phenomenal. There was no talk of evangelization on the home front.

Today, we are, unfortunately, no longer living in a world shaped by Christianity. People no longer view the world through a lens shaped by Christ. Modern men and women don’t know who God is, what it means to be human, and what true love is.

Our current culture is characterized by secularization; that is a culture in which God tends more and more to disappear from the public consciousness. Sometimes, too, we talk about an “eclipse of the sense of God,” a phrase made popular by Pope Benedict: “we see a certain ‘eclipse of God’ taking place, a kind of amnesia which, albeit not an outright rejection of Christianity, is nonetheless a denial of the treasure of our faith, a denial that could lead to the loss of our deepest identity.”

“A secularized society is a society that is not open to the transcendent, to God. It is a society where the option for the transcendent, for God, becomes a question of choice. Religion is pushed into the sphere of private choices.”

You can see the problem for evangelizers. The reaction to them in this context is basically, “my religion is none of your business; just leave me alone.”

In fact, today, to practice one’s Catholic faith is seen as merely a personal option, another lifestyle choice. It is no longer an integral component of belonging to a particular culture or a particular nation. We used to talk about Irish or Italian Catholicism, assuming that nearly everyone was baptized. That’s no longer the case. As has been said many times, we are moving, in the words of Charles Taylor, “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”

Secular culture no longer pretends to give an account of reality but rather becomes a set of beliefs that help people deal with the stress of existence. God, then, if personal at all, takes on the role of a therapist, not the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, who guides his people by his providence.

So, what can we do? In order to be faithful to our mission in today’s world, we must continually return to the New Testament. “When Christianity first spread it followed the example of Judaism in resisting integration into prevailing society,” wrote John C. Gallagher.

This means that we must adapt the essential content of the witness of Jesus and the Apostles to our own times: the kerygma – what is most essential – and the style of proclamation. When we look at Scripture, we see that it reveals that the Apostles, following Jesus’ example, used various approaches in bearing witness, depending on the context they found themselves in.

In light of the adaptability shown in the Apostolic age, the new situation of the faith in our secularized environment in British Columbia pushes us to transform our traditional ways of defining the message, the agents, and the approaches to evangelization. In a nutshell, this is what we have to do.

Thinking of those who have distanced themselves from the Church, we can affirm Pope St. Paul VI’s words: “the Church’s evangelizing action . . . must constantly seek the proper means and language for presenting, or re‑presenting, to them God’s revelation and faith in Jesus Christ.”