The future of Roman Catholicism: Evangelical Catholicism

David Virtue

Here’s an interesting headline from the National Review magazine: Evangelical Catholics: The future of the Catholic Church.”Lukewarm Catholicism has no future; submitting to the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit is no longer optional,” George Weigel writes in his new book, Evangelical Catholicism. We live in a time when “religious faith, commitment to a religious community, and a religiously informed morality can no longer be taken for granted. . . . Evangelical Catholicism calls the entire Church to holiness for the sake of mission.” Weigel talked about Evangelical Catholicism, the current cultural moment, and more in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. Here is an excerpt.

LOPEZ: There was a recent book called Catholicism published by Image Catholic and now here you are with your latest book called Evangelical Catholicism. Are these about the same Church?

WEIGEL: Father Robert Barron, author of Catholicism, and I have a very similar view of the Catholicism of the 21st century and the third millennium – a Catholicism that has met the Risen Lord and received from him the Great Commission; a Church that has rediscovered how to introduce men and women to the true and the good through the beautiful; a Church that understands that the truth it proposes is liberating, not confining; a Church that’s a culture-forming counterculture, challenging the culture of the imperial autonomous self to a nobler view of human possibilities under grace; a Church that’s moved beyond the who’s-in-charge-here cat-and-dog fights of the past 40 years; a Church that affirms that everyone has a unique vocation, and that challenges everyone to live his or her unique vocation in an evangelical, mission-driven way.

Then Weigel said this: “I think there are some important things that evangelical Catholicism can learn from evangelical Protestantism throughout the world: the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (“friendship with Jesus” being perhaps the key theme in the preaching of Pope Benedict XVI); the absolute centrality of Baptism in each of our lives; the determination to see every place we go as “mission territory.” From the evangelical Protestant encounter with Scripture, Catholics can also learn to read the New Testament again with the eyes of faith: not as an ancient text to be dissected, but as a living book that describes God’s ways in the world with remarkable salience for our own times and lives.