in fact it is the duty of every Christian.7 Following the Council, Blessed Pope Paul VI wrote an apostolic letter in which he affirmed, “Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize.”8
John Paul II coined the term “New Evangelization,” explaining that it is new not in content — it is the same gospel that has been preached for two millennia — but “in ardor, in method, and in expression.”9 It is new in ardor in that all Catholics need to be rekindled in a fire of zeal to proclaim Christ to others in both word and deed. It is new in method in that we must use methods adapted to our own time, including new and creative means of reaching people as well as up-to-date technologies. It is new in expression in that we cannot simply repeat formulas from the past but must speak in ways that touch the hearts and minds of this generation.
In 2001, John Paul II expressed the urgency of this task:
Over the years, I have often repeated the summons to the new evangelization. I do so again now, especially in order to insist that we must rekindle in ourselves the impetus of the beginnings and allow ourselves to be filled with the ardor of the apostolic preaching which followed Pentecost. We must revive in ourselves the burning conviction of Paul, who cried out: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).10
When Pope Benedict took office in 2005, he ensured that the New Evangelization would remain a long-term top priority for the Church, first by establishing a new Vatican department devoted to it, the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, and then by making it the theme of the 2012 World Synod of Bishops.
Pope Francis has given the call an even stronger urgency. In his apostolic letter The Joy of the Gospel, the follow-up document to the 2012 synod, he wrote:
The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love. Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries,” but rather that we are always “missionary disciples.”11
Pope Francis insists that the call to evangelization demands a complete retooling and re-visioning of the way parishes and other church institutions function. All are to become completely mission-oriented. “In all its activities the parish encourages and trains its members to be evangelizers.”12 From now on “we ‘cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings’; we need to move ‘from a pastoral ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry.’”13
It would be hard to imagine stronger exhortations from the Church’s pastors. Yet it must be admitted that the New Evangelization has yet to take hold in a truly radical way. While many parishes and dioceses have made diligent efforts in responding to the call, often these efforts have resulted in relatively meager fruit. In some areas, the faithful do not yet know what the “New Evangelization” is. In others, it has become simply the latest catchphrase. Evangelization is sometimes interpreted to mean simply “everything we’re already doing,” and New Evangelization means simply “more of the same.” In many areas of the western world, the number of practicing Catholics continues in rapid decline.
Clearly, something is missing; something more is needed to awaken the Catholic Church. What will light a fire of evangelistic fervor in the hearts and minds of Catholics of the twenty-first century and enable them to proclaim the good news in a convincing way to the people of our time?
The First Evangelization
This question can only be answered adequately by taking a closer look at the first evangelization — the explosion of Christianity in the ancient world — and learning how it was that a tiny, ragtag band of Christians “turned the world upside down” for Christ (as was literally said of Christians in Acts 17:6). How did this little community of former fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, slaves, and ordinary people, while being subjected to waves of violent state persecution, so convince the world of the gospel that by the time Christianity finally became legal, and thus safe, in the early fourth century, Christians were already nearly a quarter of the population of the Roman Empire?14
The beginnings of this first evangelization are recounted in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels and Acts. These books give us the divinely inspired account of what the Church’s mission is meant to look like. The New Testament is not only a source of doctrine or of interesting historical data about early Christianity, but also the blueprint for the life and mission of the Church today. The apostolic Church contains the DNA, so to speak, for the Church in every age. Awakening Catholics to their evangelistic mission today therefore means taking a closer look at what Scripture itself reveals about that first evangelization.
Another reason the apostolic Church merits closer attention is that today we find ourselves in a cultural situation that is in some respects more like that faced by the early Christians than it has been at any time since. There is growing hostility to Christianity and intense social pressure to keep our faith to ourselves and stay out of the public square. Vast numbers of people are living an essentially pagan, hedonistic lifestyle. Many are completely ignorant of the gospel. This fact was vividly brought home to a religious sister I know who walked into a drugstore one day wearing her crucifix. Seeing it, the girl behind the counter innocently asked, “Oh, who’s the man hanging on that bar? My grandmother had one of those.”
In some ways we face an even more challenging situation than the early Christians did. Many people today have been exposed to just enough Christianity to be inoculated against it. They think they know essentially everything there is to know about Jesus and the Church. They have been influenced by a constant media barrage of references to Christian violence, colonialism, hypocrisy, hostility to science, and sexual crimes — some accurate, and many exaggerated or false. They rarely hear anything about the vast amount of good Christians do. People formed in these circumstances are far more difficult to reach than those who have never heard of Jesus.
In the biblical account of the first evangelization, one factor that is immediately obvious is the prominent role played by healings and other miraculous works of God. For Jesus and his first followers, the preaching of the good news was inseparable from the signs and wonders by which God himself corroborated the spoken message and convinced the hearers of its truth. As the letter to the Hebrews puts it, while Christians preached the word, “God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his own will” (Heb 2:4). Through these miracles done through faith in the name of Jesus, countless people personally witnessed Christ’s power and came to believe in him.
Are people today any less in need of an encounter with God than the people of the first century? In a world that has lost a sense of the transcendent, healings and miracles are all the more needed to demonstrate that God is the living God who acts in history and in human lives. They are a balm for the gaping spiritual wound in contemporary society: the wound of the absence of God. Healings convince even the most hardened and broken hearts that God has not left us orphans but is present and active and rich in mercy toward us. At the same time, they remind believers that evangelization relies less on human resources than on the Holy Spirit, the principal agent of evangelization.15 Healings are part of God’s providential answer to the spiritual darkness of our times.
Prayer for Healing
Most Catholics are used to praying for the sick. We do so at the liturgy, at special events, and in private whenever we hear of someone who is ill or injured.
But
