The
Face of
Mercy / Daniel Conway
Living the joy of a life in Christ and witnessing it to others
(En Espanol)
Pope Francis has been speaking about evangelization in his weekly Wednesday audiences, and he loves to cite what he calls the “magna carta” or foundational document on the subject: Pope St. Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation “Evangelli Nuntiandi” (Announcing the Good News).
As the Holy Father says:
St. Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii nuntiandi” (Dec. 8, 1975) is topical. It was written in 1975, but it is as though it had been written yesterday. Evangelization is more than just simple doctrinal and moral transmission. It is, first and foremost, witness—one cannot evangelize without witness—witness of the personal encounter with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word in which salvation is fulfilled. An indispensable witness because, firstly, the world needs “evangelizers to speak to it of a God whom the evangelists themselves should know and be familiar with” (#76). It is not transmitting an ideology or a “doctrine” on God, no. It is transmitting God who is living in me.
Evangelization is not about knocking on doors or proselytizing (selling your religion). It is about witnesses to a person, Jesus Christ. It is about sharing an experience that is life-changing, an encounter that has caused a dramatic shift in the way we look at the world and ourselves. It is about introducing others to “the God who is living in me.”
Pope Francis quotes his revered predecessor as saying, “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (#41). If we want to teach the Gospel, we must live the Gospel. And living the Gospel means being filled with the joy of life in Christ.
What we teach as evangelizers who are living what we believe is what Pope Francis calls “a professed faith,” a faith that is integral to who we are as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.
As the Holy Father says:
It is necessary to remember that witness also includes professed faith, that is, convinced and manifest adherence to God the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, who created us out of love, who redeemed us. A faith that transforms us, that transforms our relationships, the criteria and the values that determine our choices. Witness, therefore, cannot be separated from consistency between what one believes and what one proclaims, and what one lives.
A “convinced and manifest adherence” to our triune God means that we are seen to be passionate about our commitment to Christ. This doesn’t mean that we brag about our Catholic faith in a simplistic or superficial way. Rather, it means that we take it quite seriously and we are eager to share the substance of what we profess as our relationship with Jesus Christ.
The pope asks us to consider three fundamental questions:
• Do you live what you are proclaiming?
• Do you live what you believe?
• Do you preach what you live?
“We cannot be satisfied with easy, pre-packaged answers,” the Holy Father says. “We are called upon to accept the risk, albeit destabilizing, of the search, trusting fully in the action of the Holy Spirit who works in each one of us, driving us ever further: beyond our boundaries, beyond our barriers, beyond our limits, of any type.”
A professed faith is not simply memorized the way we study catechism questions. To be sure, the information that we learn in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is important to develop a mature, informed and adult faith, but it is not enough. We must make what we learn from the Scriptures and from Church teaching our own. We must live what we believe and preach what we live.
In order for the Church to effectively carry out her evangelizing mission, Pope Francis says:
The Church as such must also begin by evangelizing herself. If the Church does not evangelize herself, she remains a museum piece. Instead, it is by evangelizing herself that she is continually updated. She needs to listen unceasingly to what she must believe, to her reasons for hope, to the new commandment of love.
Evangelization is the work of the Holy Spirit, and “without the Holy Spirit we can only publicize the Church, not evangelize.” We are called to become Spirit-filled evangelizers who proclaim what we live and believe.
(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †