To Give a Defense
Readers who expect with each new book to find Scott Hahn’s trademark puns in the subtitles won’t find them here. I admit that was the first thing I noticed about Evangelizing Catholics
The title of his new book—Evangelizing Catholics, now available from Our Sunday Visitor—might make one think that it is all about whipping pick-and-choose Catholics into shape, whether they be of the right or the left. And to be sure, Dr. Hahn does include this very harrowing figure:
Statistics tell us that 85 percent of the young people who are confirmed will leave the Church within the next fifteen years. Most of them will leave the Church in college, where 70 percent of the students who enter practicing their faith leave not practicing the faith.
Those are large numbers; imagine that: The Catholic Church keeps only one quarter of it its members past the age of thirty. That needs to be addressed. That needs a mission manual.
But Evangelizing Catholics is not merely about bringing others to the Church, or back to the Church, or shaping up those weak and sloppy Catholics. It is—in part; for Dr. Hahn does point out the “overabundance of Catholics who don’t know the faith to which they’re called to bear witness.” But the New Evangelization is also, at bottom, about evangelizing ourselves.
[T]ransformation is the heart of the New Evangelization. It’s what a life of ongoing conversion—of falling ever more deeply in love with God—is all about. It’s also the goal, both for ourselves and for those we week to reach.
God’s grace will get us to that goal. Only grace can make the transformation possible. But we participate in that process through the use of our intellect and well. It falls to us to strive to know what we proclaim as Catholics, and it falls to us to cooperate with the grace God gives us to live by these truths. It falls to us to strive to grasp the depths of the Gospel.
It falls to us: Dr. Hahn knows how to use the anaphora.
Evangelizing Catholics is divided into three sections.
In section 1, Dr. Hahn writes about what the New Evangelization is and why our popes, since Vatican II, have said that it is the primary mission of the whole Church. This is not an apologetic tfor Vatican II, addressed to skeptics, but a call to the laity to do what the Church says is our primary duty in the world. Dr. Hahn tells us why it is not just for Protestants to preach Christ to others, but Catholics too.
In section 2, Dr. Hahn writes about “models and methods for the New Evangelization”: the first evangelists and early Church, our own homes and families, and our individual apostolates. (A key distinction that Dr. Hahn explains in this section is between an “apostolate,” which the laity have, and a “ministry,” which priests have.) And he writes about how the family is the “epicenter” of the New Evangelization. As they say, so does Dr. Hahn: It begins at home.
Finally, in part 3, Dr. Hahn writes about the “content” of the New Evangelization: the nature of sin, atonement, the covenant family of God, and transformation of the self through the Eucharist.
But the true center of Evangelizing Catholics is this truth, which Dr. Hahn first read in Pope St. John Paul II’s 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (online here): “The Eucharist thus appears as both the source and the summit of all evangelization.”
At first, as Dr. Hahn tells it, he did not know what the pope meant; he still was prisoned by the Protestant way of thinking about evangelization. First you say that God loves us but we have sinned; then, that Christ died for us and we must respond with faith. The end. But later Dr. Hahn read similar words from Cardinal George: “All evangelizers proclaim who Christ is. Catholic evangelizers proclaim a Eucharistic Christ.” Dr. Hahn also quotes Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger) to the same effect.
The point, as Dr. Hahn explains it, is that you evangelize the Gospel, and the Gospel is Christ, and Christ is the Eucharist. Christ is the sacraments. All evangelization starts from the sacraments and points back toward the sacraments. The Eucharist is the life of the faith because Christ is the life of the faith.
Scott Hahn has the rare gift of making complex ideas simple; he is a scholar who takes scholarship and opens it up, simply, for all readers. That is seldom more true than in this fine book. Evangelizing Catholics is the New Evangelization explained as only he can do so. If you’ve not read it, get it today.
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