Closing Thoughts
I share these "final thoughts" with you because the Paulist Fathers decided to close down our evangelization office, effective December 31, 2024. Since I have been in Catholic Evangelization Ministry since 1988, and have been serving as President of PEM since 2009, I hope you will permit me some closing thoughts about evangelization.
1) Urgency
Virtually every major document on evangelization has begun with this question: what has happened with our obligation to share the Catholic faith with others? However, in the past several years, it has seemed to me that the sense of urgency in the American Church has waned, particularly in our parishes. I see little ministry to Inactive Catholics—in all the various shapes they have today—nor much ministry to reach out to seekers who have no faith background. I know there are national initiatives in evangelization, but I have the sense that it’s mostly like trying to roll a ball up hill.
2) Ministry
I have long espoused the idea that evangelization has to be a ministry in our parishes—a discernible set of actions that one can reflect on, improve, and teach others. Surely there are the “intangibles”—those charismatic moments and people that sparkle. But ministry has a process and consistency of its own, like liturgy, social justice, or catechetics. But most parishes have no apparatus for evangelization activity; hardly any parishes have “evangelization teams.” Until evangelization becomes a discernible, teachable ministry that we can plan and reflect on, I suspect it will garner little attention among active Catholics.
3) Purpose
Pope Francis has tried to clarify the purpose of evangelization. It is not about self-preservation, or gaining power, or creating a parallel universe to modern culture. It is about sharing the joy we experience because we have encountered Jesus Christ through the power of his Spirit, and Jesus brings us into the clearest relationship with God the Father. In other words, evangelization is not about us! It’s about the other whom Jesus invites into relationship. Mixing evangelization with images of Charlemagne, or the Counterreformation, or the Crusades, or the “glorious” 1950s—these distort the purpose of evangelization.
4) Object
Evangelization, as Pope Paul VI articulated so clearly, touches every life. Active Catholics needs to be evangelized because unless we have received the Gospel, how can we share it? But the ultimate object of evangelization is the gift of faith for those who do not have it, or for those who have let this gift grow dull. If Catholics need to be “perfect” before they can reach out, outreach will never happen. In fact, an essential dimension of Catholic perfection is the passion to reach out to others. Evangelization always faces the temptation to make it about “us” rather than about “the other.”
5) Planning
Planning is extremely difficult in evangelization because it has to be local. That is to say, the local church has to adapt larger evangelization ideas and discover how they will work in their setting. This means that evangelization entails the difficult work of discerning local needs and gifts, inventing processes that use local gifts to address the parish’s broader community (which includes all people who reside in a parish territory), honing these processes so that they better accomplish their purpose, and cultivating ministers who are committed to making this happen.
6) Vision
Parish leadership needs to hold up a particular, viable vision for the parish, one that includes the ways in which the parish engages its neighbors and neighborhoods, with images of a dynamic ministry to people seeking faith today, space for people to meet parishioners on a variety of levels, ministries that allow people to come with questions, excitement to encounter and to accompany people in their journeys of faith, and the capacity to adapt its life to accomplish mission. Pope Francis elaborated all of this under the rubric of “pastoral conversion” in “The Joy of the Gospel.” “Pastoral conversion” is a great idea; let’s see if we can actually embody it in our parishes.
7) Authority
I do not like the word “authority” very much, so I am like many modern people. I prefer a word like “responsibility”—people are designated to be responsible for one or another aspect of church life. However, we are a Church that wants to develop synodality while, at the same time, recognizing the need for authority and leadership. Bishops have documents and canon laws (e.g., Canon 528) that make it quite clear that evangelization is not an “add on” to the parish’s basic ministry. They need to make this clear to their clergy and expect the clergy to be responsible for evangelization planning and activity. Likewise, clergy need to make their parishioners responsible for embodying the ideals and vision of evangelization. It seems that we are far more ready to be responsible around financial issues than we are about “the essence” of the Church, namely, evangelization.
8) Discipleship
It seems that ideas of discipleship have flourished among active Catholics. Many initiatives to increase awareness of discipleship have emerged with greater or lesser effect. However, we need to recognize some potential hazards with this important language we are trying to adapt. (1) It is way to easy to dismiss much “ordinary” Catholic life as being bereft of discipleship. Alternatively, we need to help “ordinary” Catholics see and deepen the aspects of discipleship already present in Catholic life. Discipleship should not be a whip with which we beat ourselves. (2) We also need to avoid the temptation of making faith life seem so intense, involved, and extraordinary (under the rubric of discipleship) that we distance people even more from the ideal. We should not be expecting our teens to be like saint-to-be Carlos Acutis, nor expecting our parishioners to be like Dorothy Day. Rather these ideals we hold up need to be basically allusive of what ideals Catholics can actually live out in their everyday lives.
9) Inactive Catholics
Books have been written about “nones,” the “dechurched,” “cultural Catholics,” and a variety of other statistical categories. These categories can lead us to see our own fellow-Catholics as somehow estranged from the Church. And this often leads us to treat people as estranged. If our teenager says he or she no longer “feels like going to Church,” they are hardly becoming atheists. Pope Francis has placed non-church-goers into the “ordinary pastoral ministry” of the Church. Through empathy and accompaniment, we need ways to see and engage the religious activity and faith that still endures in people, even if they don’t go to church every Sunday. We dismiss people as “secular” who have fundamental faith perspectives deep inside them.
Thank you for letting me expatiate for a bit. My own spiritual life and sense of mission has been abundantly blessed by being able to serve under the umbrella of “evangelization.” I can only wish this for all Catholics.
Frank DeSiano, CSP
December, 2024