The Vatican on Evangelization

The Vatican recently issued an important statement regarding the missionary mandate of the Catholic Church. Such a document helps clarify many areas of dispute over the last few decades with regard to the relationship between evangelization and ecumenism. I will begin to comment upon this by saying that anyone who has come into a personal knowledge of the absolutely boundless and infinite mercy of God as revealed by Jesus desires to share it--for the simple reason that Jesus is Savior. What does this mean? It means He is the one upon whom we can cast our fears and receive healing, rather than the judgement we all too often expect from God. Let us take a moment to survey the landscape of these issues to see where we can go wrong.

These days, the term "proselytization" gets a bad reputation. Although the dictionary definition seems benign, perhaps we can elaborate on the legitimate concerns with regard to this mistaken form of evangelization. In Matthew 24:15 Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for making converts. Why? The chief error the pharisees was really no different than that of every clique in society. They sought to create a microcosm of the "righteous" and the "chosen" in society to separate themselves from the outcast. The same as happens everywhere--in exclusive fraternities and sororities, business clubs, and the like. In every case we see people who are imprisoned by their fear of shame and so they seek to create a group set apart in order to place themselves above others in an illusory and futile effort to be saved from disgrace (imagine the "cool kids" at school). When this happens in religion, as it did with the pharisees, it is the worst because it causes us to fashion an image of God rooted in fear, rather than love. Thus any attempt to spread faith that builds upon people's fears and distorted images of God is counter- productive.

We face the other extreme when ecumenism slides into syncretism, in which the essential distinctions that preserve our understanding of God from anything less than infinitely boundless love, are ignored. As a result, we can forget important doctrines like the Incarnation, for example, which reminds us that God's heart is big enough to live with us under our circumstances. Only when our hearts are afraid of humility are we afraid of the Incarnate God.

This brings me to the final point that true evangelization lies in coming to recognize that God's love is far greater than our greatest fears, and going out to share that freedom with others. That is the good news, and all calls to repent from sin and error derive, not from the need to appease an angry God who is about to smite us, but rather from benevolent love that desires to set us free from our habits of enslavement to fear--aka sin. Thus true evangelization shares the good news of Jesus--the Son of God who died on a cross to save us--for the simple reason that it is the most beautiful and liberating message humanity has ever heard.