Podcast

The Mission of the Church – Continuing the Council’s Exhortation

Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium makes alive and practical the lessons of the Second Vatican Council. “With Christ, joy is constantly born anew“. The Mission of the Church depends on believing Christians living out the joy of the Gospel in a real and tangible way. This joy is not merely “giddiness”; but rather an enduring certainty that we are infinitely loved. Christians are called each day to renew their encounter with Christ, so that our lives and the lives of others may be changed by God. The problems of our affluent world afford us many excuses to suppress this joy. 

The Mission of the Church – Impediments to Mission

Mission is vital to the gospel. Each of the gospels ends with a directive to a mandate to mission. The mission is not based on our abilities but rather on the power of the Holy Spirit that we shine forth. We must respect other religions in that we must respect man in his search for answers and the Holy Spirit who is driving that man. Fatigue, factionalism, de-Christianization, and indifference all make mission more difficult. To combat this, we must be focused on practical witness. We must not, however, ignore real problems in the Church while giving witness.

Vatican II directed the Church outward, through Ad Gentes and echoed 25 years later in the encyclical Redemptoris Missio, which describes an intentional trajectory of where the Church believes that Christ wants us to go in mission. Evangelization is the duty of all Christians, and it brings us closer to Christ. There has been, however, a decline in missionary activity in the church.

This mission comes directly from the Trinity, so it is imperative that all Christians share this love, as the love of God is what gives man his dignity. We must allow others to see how our lives have a vertical interaction with the things that are above, not just horizontally with that which is around us, and permit others the free choice that this knowledge allows.

The encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi instructs us that the teaching of the Church is unchanged and irreplaceable. The task of evangelizing all people is the essential mission of the Church, but the Church has a need to be evangelized herself. This is the spiritual liberation, not a human liberation, as secular humanists and modern atheists might advocate.

The techniques of evangelization must be relevant to the modern world, and centered in witness, but they cannot be updated in such a way that perverts their ultimate aim or ignores the fact that this gift comes from the Holy Spirit.

The Second Vatican Council’s center was missionary and evangelistic, engaging the world in more positive and effective ways, addressing the decline in faith in the western world.

After John XXIII began the council, Paul VI continued it, perhaps as a much more significant council than John envisioned. Events from the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, the civil rights movement, the rise of the drug culture, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, all produced a tumultuous time.

The council reaffirmed the teaching of the Church for all time, but there were many contrary trends that Paul VI had to combat.

This is an exciting time to be Catholic.” This episode picks up the rousing theme where the last left it off. Vatican II stressed the Church’s need to engage with the modern world. The popes that followed have, with unrelenting urgency, urged every Christian to take up the task of mission. This episode sounds the call anew – in the words of Pope St. John Paul II: “the moment has come to commit all the Church’s energies to a new evangelization.”

The goal of this series is to equip Catholics to live out the mission of the Church, which is to proclaim Christ to the whole world. We will explore what this means for the faithful laity using the documents of Vatican II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The documents of the Second Vatican Council will be examined through the hermeneutic of continuity, which was championed by Pope Benedict XVI among others. This council has continued what the Church has always said, but stated with a new vigor and a focus on reaching out to the modern world. Vatican II was a council of reform, not a radical break with the past. The next six sessions will explore several important Papal Encyclicals and other Church documents from Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Francis. These documents will help us grow in faith and learn to share our faith with others.