The expression, “new evangelization,” has been around for quite some time
now. Pope John Paul II in his 26-year pontificate had been talking a lot about it, and, mind you, he was not the first one to do so.
It’s not new anymore. It’s rather old and, in my view, even tired. But the concept will always remain new and relevant. There’s no doubt about that.
Jesus Christ, who is at the center of it all, can never become obsolete. He is the one who will make everything new. He can even make the dead rise to life again. So, relax, there’s no reason to despair, no matter how bad the picture may look.
The problem is us. We are not doing what we ought to do about it. There is so much laziness, ignorance, lukewarmness, doctrinal confusion. There is mad pursuit for earthly pleasures, a veritable systematic effort to “protect” oneself from God. It’s today’s version of people building their own Tower of Babel.
And if there is some flicker of interest, it is promptly spoiled by petty quarrels, envies and a strong crab mentality, if not by sheer incompetence and naked pride and vanity. It’s really a shame.
The truth is evangelization will always be an activity of the Church, a duty of every Christian faithful, that is, the clergy, the laity and the religious. But how many realize this, and how seriously do we take it?
As St. Paul once said: “Woe to me if I don’t preach the gospel!”(1 Cor 9:16). Pope Paul VI paraphrased this by saying: “Evangelization is the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize.”
When Pope John Paul talked about the new evangelization, he wanted us, both clergy and laity, to find a new fervor, new methods, and new expressions in proclaiming and giving witness to Christ, given the rapid flow of developments nowadays. But what have we done about this indication?
The first thing to remember is that this new evangelization can only be done as a result of a vibrant spiritual life of intimate, personal relationship with Jesus. This is indispensable. There’s no other way.
How can we talk about God and his things if we don’t talk to him and earnestly assimilate his teachings?
Modern man especially has developed the knack to distinguish what is authentic from what is not, given the amount of sales talk he is exposed to these days. So we need to be authentic evangelizers, who first live by what we preach before evangelizing.
All effort at evangelization has to start with prayers, with serious study. It has to be nourished by a life of sacraments and continuing ascetical struggle, developing virtues and assimilating values in their proper hierarchy.
This is the only way to acquire some traces of credibility and to convince others that we are not simply transmitting our own ideas, but the teachings and even the very life of Christ.
Just as Christ said that anyone who sees him sees his Father who sent him, we should so live and act that anyone who sees and hears us can see and hear Christ who asks us to evangelize.
All the creativity needed in this task in the present context can and should flow only from such fount. Otherwise, all efforts will just go to waste. They cannot be expected to last nor to bear much fruit, etc.
The challenge here is how to make people feel the presence of God and realize the command of Christ. The laity especially should more keenly feel their duty to participate more actively in this task of evangelization.
In this regard, the lay people who are immersed in the world are especially expected to bring the message and spirit of Christ to all the corners of the world. That’s why they have to be truly adept in this task. That’s their challenge today.
They are especially crucial in evangelizing marriage and the family, the educational world, culture and entertainment, business and politics in all levels, from the local to the national and the international.
Aside from praying, studying and really trying to be holy, they need to know very well the social doctrine of the Church, which is that aspect of the Christian faith that impacts with man’s life and responsibilities in the world.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Saturday, September 9, 2006
The one thing necessary
By some fluke, I have been a recipient through these past few years of a number of modern gadgets that drastically facilitate my work. They open for me a bigger, wider, and definitely more exhilarating window to the world.
There’s of course the computer with its connection to the internet and other functions. Then you have the personal digital assistant (PDA) that allows you to virtually carry a whole library of books and documents in your pocket.
Then there’s the laptop and the flash drive or USB (universal serial bus) hat enable you to do instant research, study and writing practically everywhere and even in those odd moments in-between appointments and activities.
I’m left with a raging sense of gratitude to God and to many kind-hearted donors for all these. All of sudden I find myself paddling in a much bigger ocean of data and information. As they say, these indeed take my breath away.
But they also come with a price, even an exorbitant price. If we are not careful, we can lose our soul. I’ve seen cases of people falling into some kind of invincible obsessions and hard-to-cure addictions because of these gadgets.
Like any instrument, these gadgets are good to those who are good, and bad
to those who are bad. Their morality depends on their users. For one, while with them many good things are made accessible, temptations also proliferate.
Then we have to trade in our intellectual paddles with much stronger and swifter thinking tools. This is not easy to do, especially if we are already of a certain age. The capacity to upgrade our skills and to adapt to new things becomes harder by the year.
What seemed enough for us for many years, and served us quite well in our work so far, suddenly appear puny in the face of the tremendous possibilities these gadgets provide.
This is where we can stir certain dormant potentials we didn’t realize we had. We know that not all of them are good. Many need to be purified. When awakened, they need to be restrained and somehow regulated, otherwise we can get into trouble.
This is where the need to be more discriminating and to be more dominating of oneself becomes keener, because it’s very easy to get lost in the world these gadgets offer, and even to be enslaved in ways that are most subtle.
Yes, it’s quite easy to be sucked into a frenzy of curiosity and activism and to be so absorbed by them that we can easily forget our other duties, even the more important ones like praying and eating and resting.
These gadgets seem not to run out of images, icons, ideas, sounds, etc., to engage both our senses and faculties. They can knock us out, completely leaving us beaten and helpless.
The pursuit of knowledge can be so intoxicating that we can ignore what St. Paul once warned us: “Knowledge puffs up, but charity edifies.” (1 Cor 8,1) We need to constantly rectify our intentions as we plunge into the ocean of possibilities these gadgets give us.
We should not lose our sense of priority. This should be shown in the way we plan and budget our time. This is a crucial aspect of the matter. Order should be a permanent concern, because disorder can just come spontaneously. No need for invitation.
In the end, there’s only one thing that is truly necessary in our life. Let’s remember what our Lord told Martha who was doing quite well by fussing about household chores but complained about her sister, Mary, who was simply listening to our Lord.
“Martha, Martha, you are troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary, and Mary has chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her,” (Lk 10,41-42) he said.
We need to see that all this facilitated and accelerated pursuit of knowledge afforded by these gadgets truly brings us closer to God and to others. Knowledge is worthless and can be dangerous if not driven by charity and if it does not lead us to love—God and others.
There’s of course the computer with its connection to the internet and other functions. Then you have the personal digital assistant (PDA) that allows you to virtually carry a whole library of books and documents in your pocket.
Then there’s the laptop and the flash drive or USB (universal serial bus) hat enable you to do instant research, study and writing practically everywhere and even in those odd moments in-between appointments and activities.
I’m left with a raging sense of gratitude to God and to many kind-hearted donors for all these. All of sudden I find myself paddling in a much bigger ocean of data and information. As they say, these indeed take my breath away.
But they also come with a price, even an exorbitant price. If we are not careful, we can lose our soul. I’ve seen cases of people falling into some kind of invincible obsessions and hard-to-cure addictions because of these gadgets.
Like any instrument, these gadgets are good to those who are good, and bad
to those who are bad. Their morality depends on their users. For one, while with them many good things are made accessible, temptations also proliferate.
Then we have to trade in our intellectual paddles with much stronger and swifter thinking tools. This is not easy to do, especially if we are already of a certain age. The capacity to upgrade our skills and to adapt to new things becomes harder by the year.
What seemed enough for us for many years, and served us quite well in our work so far, suddenly appear puny in the face of the tremendous possibilities these gadgets provide.
This is where we can stir certain dormant potentials we didn’t realize we had. We know that not all of them are good. Many need to be purified. When awakened, they need to be restrained and somehow regulated, otherwise we can get into trouble.
This is where the need to be more discriminating and to be more dominating of oneself becomes keener, because it’s very easy to get lost in the world these gadgets offer, and even to be enslaved in ways that are most subtle.
Yes, it’s quite easy to be sucked into a frenzy of curiosity and activism and to be so absorbed by them that we can easily forget our other duties, even the more important ones like praying and eating and resting.
These gadgets seem not to run out of images, icons, ideas, sounds, etc., to engage both our senses and faculties. They can knock us out, completely leaving us beaten and helpless.
The pursuit of knowledge can be so intoxicating that we can ignore what St. Paul once warned us: “Knowledge puffs up, but charity edifies.” (1 Cor 8,1) We need to constantly rectify our intentions as we plunge into the ocean of possibilities these gadgets give us.
We should not lose our sense of priority. This should be shown in the way we plan and budget our time. This is a crucial aspect of the matter. Order should be a permanent concern, because disorder can just come spontaneously. No need for invitation.
In the end, there’s only one thing that is truly necessary in our life. Let’s remember what our Lord told Martha who was doing quite well by fussing about household chores but complained about her sister, Mary, who was simply listening to our Lord.
“Martha, Martha, you are troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary, and Mary has chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her,” (Lk 10,41-42) he said.
We need to see that all this facilitated and accelerated pursuit of knowledge afforded by these gadgets truly brings us closer to God and to others. Knowledge is worthless and can be dangerous if not driven by charity and if it does not lead us to love—God and others.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Godless Ideologies
Ideologies are not bad in themselves. They are often heroic and ambitious attempts to make a kind of world-view of things, explaining them scientifically and extensively. In a way they are an unavoidable stage in man’s effort to develop.
Going beyond the merely philosophical and theoretical, they enter into the practical world of action, with programs, strategies and a network of agencies to carry out their ends. They convert doctrine into action.
As such, they can be useful. They can serve legitimate purposes. They can do a lot of good. Today, whether we are aware of them or not, they are a part of our lives, influencing us one way or another. We need to be discerning.
It’s when they are wrongly inspired, or when they overstep their limits, oversimplifying or exaggerating things, absolutizing the relative and relativizing the absolute, that they can become bad and dangerous.
History, sad to say, is full of such harmful ideologies. A product of some questionable philosophies and ultimately of human pride and vanity, they have proclaimed, for example, that there is no God, that there are no spiritual, much less supernatural realities.
With the assertion that there is no God, the authors of these ideologies make a world mainly consisting of their own selves. The world seems to begin and end with them. In short, there is no world outside their egos.
They seem to envision a world made exclusively of material things. Reality
is simply what one sees or feels. At best, it can be what one can understand and discover. But it’s a reality that dies with man. There is no reality after death.
Some have promised utopias based simply on earthly progress. Others have pontificated total human liberation exclusively through some socio-economic or political operations. There is no mention of liberation from sin, the real evil that fully corresponds to man’s condition.
Because of this congenital defect, these ideologies can lead to terrible consequences. If there is no God, the understanding of what man is gets warped, the use of power and authority can be easily abused, prone to use force.
The relation between person and society, private good and common good, etc., get twisted. Freedom is often understood as detached from the sense of responsibility or from an objective moral law. It tends to serve merely selfish ends, and thus easily gets corrupted, with matching results.
And so we can have that endless adventure of making all sorts of assertions, questioning every element in a established culture, religion, tradition, or moral order. Theories automatically are made into laws. Suspicions are given the same treatment as facts. We quickly create a surreal world.
The objective hierarchy of values, based on the nature of man and his relation with God and with others, gets altered to suit one’s subjective preferences.
Because of these dangerous features of the Godless ideologies, we have suffered the scourges of communism and socialism where the rights of the individual person are swallowed by the rights of the state. They thrive on atheism and totalitarianism.
There are also the abuses of capitalism, where self-centered individualism and consumerism are promoted, and the inhuman practice of holding the laws of the markets over human labor is observed.
Then you have the intoxicating strange blend of liberalism where, with freedom detached from an objective universal moral law, anything can be legalized—divorce, abortion, infidelity, same-sex union, wild scientific experiments like cloning, test-tube babies, etc.
The biggest mistake these ideologies commit is when they replace faith in God with their own ideas and doctrine, and when they derive their life and strength not from a living unity with God but from some human and earthly source.
Among them, the easier to detect and overcome are those associated with the Left, as recent history has confirmed. With their often absurd positions in issues, they are easily uncovered. They take advantage of the ignorance and poverty of the people. They lure them to fanaticism.
Those associated with the Right, because they are more subtle and deceptive, will take time and a lot of inhuman crises before they get finally exposed as they really are, that is, evil. But they’ll be exposed.
Going beyond the merely philosophical and theoretical, they enter into the practical world of action, with programs, strategies and a network of agencies to carry out their ends. They convert doctrine into action.
As such, they can be useful. They can serve legitimate purposes. They can do a lot of good. Today, whether we are aware of them or not, they are a part of our lives, influencing us one way or another. We need to be discerning.
It’s when they are wrongly inspired, or when they overstep their limits, oversimplifying or exaggerating things, absolutizing the relative and relativizing the absolute, that they can become bad and dangerous.
History, sad to say, is full of such harmful ideologies. A product of some questionable philosophies and ultimately of human pride and vanity, they have proclaimed, for example, that there is no God, that there are no spiritual, much less supernatural realities.
With the assertion that there is no God, the authors of these ideologies make a world mainly consisting of their own selves. The world seems to begin and end with them. In short, there is no world outside their egos.
They seem to envision a world made exclusively of material things. Reality
is simply what one sees or feels. At best, it can be what one can understand and discover. But it’s a reality that dies with man. There is no reality after death.
Some have promised utopias based simply on earthly progress. Others have pontificated total human liberation exclusively through some socio-economic or political operations. There is no mention of liberation from sin, the real evil that fully corresponds to man’s condition.
Because of this congenital defect, these ideologies can lead to terrible consequences. If there is no God, the understanding of what man is gets warped, the use of power and authority can be easily abused, prone to use force.
The relation between person and society, private good and common good, etc., get twisted. Freedom is often understood as detached from the sense of responsibility or from an objective moral law. It tends to serve merely selfish ends, and thus easily gets corrupted, with matching results.
And so we can have that endless adventure of making all sorts of assertions, questioning every element in a established culture, religion, tradition, or moral order. Theories automatically are made into laws. Suspicions are given the same treatment as facts. We quickly create a surreal world.
The objective hierarchy of values, based on the nature of man and his relation with God and with others, gets altered to suit one’s subjective preferences.
Because of these dangerous features of the Godless ideologies, we have suffered the scourges of communism and socialism where the rights of the individual person are swallowed by the rights of the state. They thrive on atheism and totalitarianism.
There are also the abuses of capitalism, where self-centered individualism and consumerism are promoted, and the inhuman practice of holding the laws of the markets over human labor is observed.
Then you have the intoxicating strange blend of liberalism where, with freedom detached from an objective universal moral law, anything can be legalized—divorce, abortion, infidelity, same-sex union, wild scientific experiments like cloning, test-tube babies, etc.
The biggest mistake these ideologies commit is when they replace faith in God with their own ideas and doctrine, and when they derive their life and strength not from a living unity with God but from some human and earthly source.
Among them, the easier to detect and overcome are those associated with the Left, as recent history has confirmed. With their often absurd positions in issues, they are easily uncovered. They take advantage of the ignorance and poverty of the people. They lure them to fanaticism.
Those associated with the Right, because they are more subtle and deceptive, will take time and a lot of inhuman crises before they get finally exposed as they really are, that is, evil. But they’ll be exposed.
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