What is the New Evangelization? (Part 1)

Last night, SPIRITUS dropped by St. Pius X Catholic Church in Appleton to attend Fr. Girotti's talk on his book A Shepherd Tends His Flock. While the talk was great and I would highly recommend his book (I'd buy it myself, if I had more spending money!), the most significant thing that happened last night for us was a great conversation we had with one of the other guests in attendance, a woman with a great love for the Catholic Church who had converted from Lutheranism and told us about several young people in her life with a great need to hear the truths the Church teaches.

This woman was looking for a place where she could send her son's girlfriend to learn about the Catholic Faith. She told us that there just aren't enough opportunities for young adults who have never heard the truth to learn it from the Church in a nonthreatening setting. RCIA is a fantastic place to learn about the Faith, but it's hard to convince a nonbeliever to go through a class that is designed with the idea that everyone who signs up for it is planning to enter the Church. And bringing a nonbeliever into Mass is tricky business at best, especially when there's a good chance that the homily is going to be about something other than basic apologetics; most nonbelievers or even Protestants would be more confused than enlightened by their first experience of the Mass!

What she really wanted was some kind of apologetics or catechesis class for adults who have neither a solid background in the Faith nor a desire to enter the Catholic Church at this point in their lives. In other words, this woman wanted to know where she could send someone who was merely curious about the truth.

The good news is that SPIRITUS now has a way to reach out to exactly the kind of person she described to us. It's called Inspire! and it's a Bible study for young adults. At Inspire! Bible studies on the first and third Monday of every month, members of SPIRITUS join other young adults in three locations (our home base at Mt. Tabor Center in Menasha, as well as locations in Green Bay and Fond du Lac) in getting to know Christ better by studying the Gospel of Matthew.

The bad news is that the woman we talked to had a hard time understanding how this would help her son's girlfriend learn the truths taught by the Catholic Church. After a Spirit-filled conversation, this is what became apparent to all of us:

1. There is a huge generation gap between the old and the young when it comes to faith and how we learn about it.

2. Old methods of catechesis aren't working on the younger generations.

3. This is largely because the youth are bombarded with so many distractions that make it impossible for them to recognize Truth when they hear it, distractions like media, materialism, and the pace of modern life. Youth and young adults today are trained to think in very concrete, rational terms. There is very little place in their lives for things they can't touch, see, and manipulate.

4. Young people are leaving and have left the Church in large numbers. They don't accept what they are told, but question everything. And if they don't feel that their questions are answered, they don't feel that they are being fed, and so they leave. Of course, many of them are trained to be so skeptical that they are barely willing to accept anything the Church says!

5. There is a huge need for what Blessed John Paul II called the New Evangelization, in which new methods are used to preach the Gospel to all peoples (particularly in areas where the Faith was once strong, but has now been weakened by secularization) in ways that they can understand and accept it.

6. The older generations of faithful Catholics don't always understand what the New Evangelization is or why it is needed.

It is this last point that I really want to address, and I'll discuss it in depth next time.

[To be continued]

-Jared