Vatican City, 29 May 2015 (VIS) –
“New evangelisation means becoming aware of the Father's merciful
love so that we too may become instruments of salvation for our
brothers”, said the Pope this morning, as he received in audience
the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council
for Promoting New Evangelisation, dedicated to the relationship
between evangelisation and catechesis. Francis has entrusted the
preparation of the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy to this dicastery,
so that it “is made clearer that the gift of mercy is the
announcement that the Church is called to transmit in her work of
evangelisation in this time of great change”.
These changes represent a “happy
provocation” to respond to “the signs of the times that the Lord
offers to the Church, so that she is able – as she has been for two
thousand years – to bring Jesus Christ to humanity in our times.
The mission is always identical”, the Pope observed, “but the
language used to proclaim the Gospel asks to be renewed, with
pastoral wisdom. This is essential both for it to be understood by
our peers and to enable Catholic tradition to speak to cultures in
today's world and to help them open up to the perennial fruitfulness
of Christ's message. These are times of great challenges, which we
must not be afraid of making our own. Indeed, only to the extent to
which we are able to take them on will we be able to offer answers
which are coherent by virtue of being elaborated in the light of the
Gospel. This is what people expect of the Church today: that she
knows how to walk with them, offering the company of witness of
faith, creating solidarity between us all, and especially the
loneliest and most marginalised”.
This awareness, which is sown into the
heart of every Christian from the day of his or her baptism, “wishes
to grow, along with a life of grace … and it is here that we find
the great theme of catechesis as a space within which the life of
Christians matures as it experiences God's mercy. This is not an
abstract idea of mercy, but rather a concrete experience by which we
understand our weakness and the strength that comes from above. …
The help we invoke is already the first step of God's mercy towards
us. … The Holy Spirit, the agent of evangelisation … opens the
mind of the disciples of Christ to understand more deeply the
commitment required and the forms by which substance and credibility
can be given to witness”.
Therefore the question of how to
educate in faith “is not rhetorical, but essential. The answer
requires courage, creativity and decisiveness, to follow at times
unexplored paths. Catechesis, as a component of the evangelisation
process, needs to go beyond the merely scholastic sphere in order to
educate believers, since childhood, in encountering Christ, living
and working in His Church. It is the encounter with Him that inspires
the desire to know Him better and thus to follow Him so as to become
His disciples. The challenge of new evangelisation and catechesis
therefore hinges on this cardinal point: how to encounter Christ, and
the most coherent place to find Him and follow Him”.
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