The Church Is a Communion of Disciples in Mission

Back in March, the Huffington Post described it as “Catholicism 2.0,” but listen to George Weigel himself talk about it and you will know that Evangelical Catholicism in fact represents Catholicism 5.0: the fifth “supertransitional moment” for the 2000-year-old Church. Two thousand years is a much longer span of time than many like to think, and the demands of history are always changing, and Catholicism has rethought itself—not its doctrines, but the way they are lived—many times before.

EVANGELICAL CATHOLICISM 5.0

I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Weigel speak at my parish last night: St. Gertrude, in Madeira, Ohio. Our pastor said it was the first time in all his years as a priest that he ever saw the front rows fill up first. Many who came had only standing room left, and St. Gertrude is a large church. Mr. Weigel spoke for roughly an hour about the “supertransitional moments” the Church has faced before, and how Catholics are meant to live their faith in our own, at the start of the twenty-first century.

Roughly outlined, Church History may be divided into five periods.

I. The Early Church, until the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

II. The Patristic Period, or age of the Church Fathers, until the time of Augustine.

III. Medieval Christendom, the age of St. Dominic, St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albert the Great.

IV. Post-Reformation Catholicism, which was shaped by the Council of Trent’s response to the Protestant schism. This was the age of the Counter-Reformation, shaped by St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross.

V. Evangelical Catholicism.

Many suspect—wrongly, according to Mr. Weigel—that the fifth “supertransitional moment,” in which we are now living, began at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. In fact, it began as long ago as 1878, when Pope Pius IX died and the College of Cardinals elected Vincenzio Pecci (Leo XIII) as his successor. Pius IX had stood in absolute resistance to modernism (and the British had great fun with his pontifical name in Italian, “Pio Nono”); but Leo XIII understood that the Church had truths that a modernist world needed to hear. His strategy was to engage modernism with distinctly Catholic “tools.”

Thus Leo XIII established the Pontifical Biblical Council. He embraced textual scholarship of the Bible.  He opened the Vatican records to secular researchers. He defined Catholic social doctrine in Rerum Novarum. And he spoke of religious freedom as the first of human rights. When John XXIII called for a Second Vatican Council, he was attempting to supply a definite shape and form to all that had been happening in the Church since Leo XIII.

THE CHURCH IS A COMMUNION OF DISCIPLES IN MISSION

According to Mr. Weigel, the main problem that the Church has had since Vatican II is that the Council did not provide an interpretive key for understanding the sixteen documents, as prior councils had done. There were no canons or creeds that came out of Vatican II. Thus the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI gave us the definitive interpretation; we need only listen to what the last two popes have told us.

And what they have told us is this: that the Church is a communion of disciples in mission. In the wake of Trent, Catholicism understood itself as a societatis perfectæ—a perfect society.  But the Church is no such thing. We are sinners who have experienced mercy, and we have the responsibility of showing the rest of the world the path to the same mercy we have found.  Protestantism—if I may interject into the summary I have been presenting thus far—has always had great evangelical fervor, and those born into the Catholic Church have a great deal to learn from our separated brothers and sisters in that regard, as well as from Protestant converts.

It used to be, Mr. Weigel said, that the Church could rely on the culture to transmit the faith. But that luxury does not exist anymore. Not only is the culture not transmitting the faith, it is actively hostile to the faith.  At such an time, every Catholic has an evangelical responsibility to the world.  Mr. Weigel cited two encyclicals by John Paul II in support of this truth: Redemptoris Missio (1990; here) and Novo Millennio Ineunte (2000; here).

John Paul II understood that the Catholic Church does not have a mission; it is a mission. “Freely you have received; freely give” (Matt. 10:8). The more you give the faith away, the more it will be your own. Catholics must “put out into the deep.”  That means we must engage the culture where it is. We must go out to it; it will not come to us. Easy Catholicism, as cultural habit, will not work in a culture hostile to the faith.

NEW EVANGELIZATION

So what to do? What is the heart of the New Evangelization? Mr. Weigel lists its five arteries.

I.  Regular reception of the sacraments.

II.  Daily prayer.

III. Eucharistic adoration.

IV.  Being a lifetime learner.

V. Actively sharing the faith with others. That means we have an obligation to learn the faith and to learn it well and to keep learning it.

It is not enough to say you believe all that the Church teaches; Catholics must actively live their faith and actively engage a hostile culture with the faith.  That is not easy, but it is necessary in the culture we find ourselves in. We cannot be insular, and we cannot wish ourselves back to another time.

It was an important talk; and Mr. Weigel has written an important book. If you have not read it, you should drop all else to do so. I have some thoughts of my own on what the New Evangelization means, and I will be sharing them soon. Specifically, since my main area of interest is rhetorical, I have some thoughts about what the New Evangelization means for Catholic writers, critics, and thinkers. I suspect we need to start imagining bigger than we have practiced, however much value our practice has had thus far.

The New Evangelization is, I believe, the most important teaching to come out of Vatican II. Vatican II was not about compromising with modernism, as some radical traditionalists in the Church like to pretend. It was about engaging modernism. One cannot engage this wicked culture from afar; the culture is not going to come to us. We must go to it. We must meet people where they are.

That is what the Church is telling Catholics that they must do now. We all have a responsibility to the faith we profess. If we believe it, we must know it and live it. But then we must express it and share it. We may not remain on the shore while others are pushing out into the deep. We must go out and be fishers of men. We cannot cling to our own salvation and spurn the world. We must desire the world’s salvation too.  That is what the New Evangelization is about.

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