Day 35
Renewing the Fabric of Society
[Lay people’s] own field of evangelizing activity is the vast and complicated world of politics, society and economics, but also the world of culture, of the sciences and the arts, of international life, of the mass media. It also includes other realities which are open to evangelization, such as human love, the family, the education of children and adolescents, professional work, suffering.
— St. Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 70
The goal of the apostolate, the goal of the Church’s evangelization efforts, is to bring and constantly deepen the reign of Christ everywhere — into every human heart, family, community, and culture. We seek nothing less than to infuse every human reality with the redeeming truth of Christ’s message and the redeeming power of Christ’s grace. In Jesus’s commissioning of his Church to fulfill that mission, notice the universal scope, the unlimited boundaries of his vision:
“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19–20)
All nations are to become disciples; all that Jesus taught and commanded is to be known, loved, and followed by everyone. That’s the work of evangelization. That’s our mission.
Transforming Humanity from Within
Jesus used a simple image to describe this process of cultural transformation when he explained the nature of his kingdom: “He spoke to them another parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened’” (Matthew 13:33).
Not Just a Pipe Dream
The development of western civilization in the Christian era demonstrates that this mission is more than a fairy tale. Greco-Roman civilization and Anglo-Germanic culture were both penetrated and transformed by the Christian ethos, creating a new culture. Over the course of a thousand years, the previously pagan scale of values was overturned by the influence of the gospel and its message of human dignity, divine mercy, and everlasting life. The institutions of European society developed under this spiritual tutorship, spreading wherever the Christians went to explore and to build. Many of the ideas found in the gospel were foreign and even contradictory to much of what the Greco-Roman and Germanic peoples adhered to. Concepts like humility and celibacy, care for the poor and inter-communitary justice (equality of human rights), and natural moral law were only vaguely present in pre-Christian worldviews, if they were present at all. Through the work and lives of Christians, they came to become common presuppositions in Western mentalities and legal systems. This led to flourishing achievements in every field of human endeavor, including science and technology, education, literature and the arts, and even politics and economics.
Certainly it wasn’t heaven on earth, as some Western civilization apologists like to claim. In fact Jesus had promised it would never be so until his second coming. In the parable of the wheat and the weeds, he promised that good and bad would grow up side by side throughout the history of his Church, and the full purification from evil would only occur at the end of the earthly story (see Matthew13:37–43).
God’s Ambassadors to Every Sector of Society
God calls all of us to share in this aspect, too. The first Christians didn’t hunker down and go into hiding in the face of ancient Rome’s aggressive, anti-Christian paganism. Yes, they prudently guarded their worship services and formation activities from prying eyes in order to avoid unnecessary trouble, but at the same time they brought their faith to bear on the world in which they lived. They believed in the power of Christ’s message to transform the milieus in which they lived and worked.
Christian philosophers challenged and dialogued with pagan philosophers. Christian soldiers courageously imbued their military service with honor and moral integrity. Christian families rescued infants legally abandoned in forest clearings outside the city limits. Christian merchants and politicians battled corruption and worked to transform legal structures and economic customs in harmony with the true common good. Christian doctors and teachers defended moral truth and created new institutions dedicated to serving the underprivileged as well as those who could pay. In short, every sphere of society was penetrated not by “the Church” in the abstract, but by individual Christians whom God endowed and called to be missionaries within particular branches of human endeavor.
The new evangelization must include this same dimension; it must follow this same pattern. Imagine how different our culture would be if every Catholic — or even one in every ten Catholics — was fully aware and fully engaged in this kind of effort. We have no cause to wait for “the Church” to Christianize culture; we are the Church wherever we work and live. And we are present in every nook and cranny of society. God is eager to give us the courage and wisdom to proclaim and build up Christ’s kingdom right there. We just need to seize the opportunities, to believe, and to launch ourselves into the fray. If we don’t, who will?
Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Discussion
What idea in this reflection struck you most and why?
How firmly do you believe that Jesus really wants to convert the entire world, every single person? How firmly do you believe that he wants to work through you to help achieve that goal?
How can you better infuse gospel values in your workplace or other circles of influence with cultural implications?
God calls all of us to bring the gospel into the circles of society where we live and work, through our way of being, our words, and our works.
What will you do today to use your personal gifts for God’s glory and to further the Church’s work of evangelization?
- I will sit down with a friend and ask him or her to help me identify my top three or four personal gifts.
- I will spend some time prayerfully reflecting on the strong desires in my heart to take on a particular project or get involved in a certain apostolic activity, desires that have been resonating in my heart and may be indicating an invitation from the Lord, but which I haven’t yet responded to. I will write these down and ask God to show me how to take the next step.
- I will remember the idealistic dreams of doing something great for God that motivated me in the past, and I will prayerfully reflect on what role those dreams should play in my life now.
- (Write your own resolution) I will
Concluding Prayer
I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; whether I be rich or poor, despised or esteemed by man, God knows me and calls me by my name.
God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.
— St. John Henry Newman
