Pope Francis to New Evangelization: we are made for
mission
Pope Francis with the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelisation, Archbishop Rino Fisichella. |
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis received the
participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical
Council for Promoting New Evangelisation on Friday.
In remarks prepared
for the occasion, and delivered to participants during the course of an
audience that began shortly before noon in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic
Palace in the Vatican, Pope Francis reflected particularly on
the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy that ran through 2016,
under the direction of the Council, calling the Holy Year a “moment of grace that
the entire Church lived with great faith and intense spirituality.”
The Holy Father went on to say that the
present moment is one in which to harness the energy of that grace-filled year.
Harnessing the energy of the Year of Mercy
“We cannot permit,” he said, “that so much enthusiasm be
diluted or forgotten,” noting also that the whole People of God felt the gift
of mercy strongly, rediscovering in particular the Sacrament of
Reconciliation as a privileged place in which to experience the
goodness and tenderness of God, along with His boundless foregiveness.
Speaking specifically to the mission of
evangelization, Pope Francis stressed that it is one, which
belongs to the whole People of God and to each individual Christian, according
to his or her state of life in the Church, and with special regard to the
contribution that the individual peoples and the respective cultures offer
to the journey of the People of God.
Power of the Gospel to transform and renew cultures
“From every people towards which we go there emerges a
wealth that the Church is called to recognise and value to bring to fulfilment
the unity of ‘all the human race’ of which it is a ‘sign’ and ‘sacrament’,” he
said, invoking the Dogmatic Constitution of the II Vatican Council on
the Church, Lumen
Gentium.
Pope Francis also explained that the
evangelising nature of the People of God – and of every people
transformed and penetrated by the Gospel of Christ – brings with itself an
awareness of an appeal that transcends individuals, who find themselves and the
message of which they are carriers inserted in a complex weave of interpersonal
relationships, “which enables the experience of the profound unity and humanity
of the community of believers.”
“[T]his,” he said, “applies in a particular way in a period
such as ours, in which we are forced to face a new culture, the fruit of
technology that, while it fascinates us for the conquests it offers, it makes
equally evident the lack of a true interpersonal relationship and interest in
the other.”
Recovering missionary élan
The Holy Father concluded his remarks with
a reflection on the urgency of the task of recovering the missionary élan in
which the Church was founded.
“Dear brothers and sisters,” he said, “the new phase of
evangelisation that we are called to journey through is certainly the work of
all the Church, the people journeying towards God: rediscovering this horizon
of meaning and concrete pastoral practice will be able to promote the impetus
to evangelisation itself, without forgetting its social value, for a genuine
integral human promotion.”
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