Last week, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Canadian Bishops who were making their ad limina visit. A worthwhile read, especially concerning the strong language His Holiness uses to condemn the symptoms of crumbling Western culture.
…the fundamental task of the evangelization of culture is the challenge to make God visible in the human face of Jesus. In helping individuals to recognize and experience the love of Christ, you will awaken in them the desire to dwell in the house of the Lord, embracing the life of the Church. This is our mission. It expresses our ecclesial nature and ensures that every initiative of evangelization concurrently strengthens Christian identity. In this regard, we must acknowledge that any reduction of the core message of Jesus, that is, the ‘Kingdom of God’, to indefinite talk of ‘kingdom values’ weakens Christian identity and debilitates the Church’s contribution to the regeneration of society. When believing is replaced by ‘doing’ and witness by talk of ‘issues’, there is an urgent need to recapture the profound joy and awe of the first disciples whose hearts, in the Lord’s presence, “burned within them” impelling them to “tell their story” (cf. Lk 24:32; 35).
(Somehow, the above takes on a grandfatherly tone when heard in a Bavarian-accented English.)
This is all, of course, nothing new. Benedict makes as much clear in Deus Caritas Est, but I think the way he phrases it here offers special insight into the Christian’s role in engaging social issues. When engaging ‘issues’, it is important to remember that the Christian’s primary role to help “individuals to recognize and experience the love of Christ” (my emphasis). Policies, initiatives, bills, marches, protests, arguments, campaigns, advertisments, even blogs — all fine and good, but none of these tools are able to convey love. Only the human person can. Something I personally ought to remember better.
