Meditations on Evangelization and the Charity of Christ
+Daniel E. Flores
Bishop of Brownsville
(Foundations of the New Evangelization Conference, Detroit, Michigan)
11 October 2019
Prologue
I do not intend to offer a complete scheme of evangelization, nor even an argument about a particular aspect. I will offer a few word-drawings. I invite you to consider calmly either a particular point, a quoted text, or a provoked image. My hope is that fragmented stained glass also admits light. The meditations are seven in number, with an epilogue at the end saving space for the eighth day;
- What is grace?
- Grace and Charity
- The Response of Love
- The Eucharistic Interruption
- The Evangelization of the Poor and Being Evangelized by Them
- A World that Questions Us
- The End of History
Epilogue
- What is Grace?
In a simple but profound sense, in the human experience grace is something that is given without having to. It is something not deserved, not bought, not contracted: it is a gift freely given. It does not seek payment, nor does it care about claiming debts. Grace is as spontaneous as a smile, or an embrace between friends. We have all lived the greatness of the completely free gift, of the donation given without requiring anything. In the natural course of life, realizing that we have received a grace generates within us a spontaneous desire to want to respond in some way: to return the smile, return the embrace, to say thank you. Thus, grace shows forth its own dynamic, much like friendship does. Grace engenders grace.
Nevertheless, confronted with the generosity of others, we have also lived the experience of surreptitiously asking: What does this person want from me, giving me so much? We learn as children that not everything that comes with the countenance of grace is given free of charge. It is the cynicism that entered with Original Sin that has taught us to suspect that what is presented as a gift, can soon turn into indebtedness. The devil was presumptuous enough to offer Jesus the kingdoms of the world, but the offer concealed a debt incurred: tomorrow you owe me. Despite the bitter experience of a business deal hidden behind a face of grace, the invitation of authentic grace retains its own splendor, one which calls us to breathe an air beyond sales and payments. By recognizing that we have received freely, grace asks us to give freely, as the Lord Himself says (Mt 10: 7-8).
Speaking of grace, as we will see throughout these reflections, Pope Benedict favored the word gratuitousness, and Pope Francis speaks incessantly of grace as a self-giving (entrega). In a vigorous yet no less simple theological sense, grace is what saves us through this dynamism of generosity generating generosity.
- Grace and Charity
In order to follow this thread of grace, I would like to highlight a text of Saint Thomas taken from the third part of the Summa Theologiae. In question 46, article 3, the Saint asks about the why of the Passion of the Lord. Why did the Lord want to accept the Cross in order to save us? The question provides him an opportunity to summarize the teaching of the Scriptures on the work of Christ and the grace that saves us.
In the first place, by this means man knows how much God loves him and by this he is provoked to love Him in return, in which consists the perfection of human salvation. Thus, the Apostle says in Rom 5, 8-9: God proves his love for us in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.*
The passion of the Lord Jesus shows forth the love of God freely offered. According to Saint Thomas, it is the effective sign of the gift that is the Incarnation and life of the Son of God. Through this sign we know the love of God the Father. Of course, the sign of the Cross admits of a variety of interpretations. Not everyone sees in it the extreme love of God directed towards us. It is a grace to be able to see the Cross and understand what we see.
Catholic anthropology presupposes that in the encounter with the Lord Jesus, grace insinuates itself as a light in the mind, giving us to perceive what we could call the author’s intention while offering himself in this way. The Scriptures testify to this intention understood by the first disciples. The mind perceives by grace the essentials of this grand display as a manifestation of love freely given, of complete self-surrender, of charity poured-out. As the Dominican Olivier-Thomas Venard says (The Poetic Christ: T&T Clark, 2019): On the cross the incarnate Word speaks the most meaningful language there is when it comes to love: not the language of words, nor that of acts, but the language of the body.
Grace manifests itself as something given for us to understand through the language of the crucified flesh of the Lord. Faith believes in this love, and it is a presence in the soul. Faith contains within itself the dynamism of grace. It engenders within us a spontaneous and completely free desire to want to give love in return, in which consists, St Thomas says, the perfection of human salvation. This desire is provoked through the charity manifested on the Cross and is identical with receiving the love of the Holy Spirit poured out into our hearts.
It is significant that in this context Saint Thomas invokes the authority of Saint Paul, Romans, chapter 5. If one consults the commentary of Saint Thomas on that chapter, you will discover that this is where he explains in great detail the relationship between the death of Christ on the Cross, faith in this manifestation of gratuitous love, and the movement of the Holy Spirit within us. The response of the soul to Christ is the response of love, the fruit of that love poured into our hearts.
Grace saves us. God gives us his love by giving us his Son; faith captures the reality of this love under the sign of the Cross, and the Holy Spirit reaches the heart to save us. Grace saves us through an interior renewal which capacitates us to love Christ as he has loved us. This love, the culmination of God's grace, the participation in God’s own life, is called charity.
Let us recall the words of Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, 37, where the Holy Father, quoting Saint Thomas tells us: The foundation of the New Law is in the grace of the Holy Spirit, who is manifested in the faith which works through love (ST, 1-2, 108, 1).
- The Response of Love
In the visible source of the Cross, Christ reveals in a way accessible to us that the love of God is a grace of love offered, recognized and returned: 1 Jn 4,16: We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. Evangelization proposes to the human being the grace of Christ, inviting us to recognize in the Crucified One the manifestation of the charity of God, and in his resurrection our hope born of this charity. It is necessary to emphasize, especially today, that faith does not reach its end if it does not engender within us the same charity poured out: we respond to the Lord with grace and in grace. The charity of Christ does not save us by being recognized, it saves us by being returned; it saves us through our charity put into play within history. 1 Jn 3,16: The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
The laying down of our lives, referenced by St. John gives concise expression of what the Lord commands and asks concerning the form of our response to him. On this point, Pope Benedict tells us in his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate 5: As objects of God’s love, men and women become subjects of charity, they are called to make themselves instruments of grace, so as to pour forth God’s charity and to weave networks of charity. And in Evangelii Gaudium 10 Pope Francis expresses himself in this way: For here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure it is offered up in order to give life to others. That is definitely the mission.
In the new life of grace, the very dynamic of the free gift of Christ requires us personally to formulate within ourselves the most exigent question of our lives as Catholics: Lord, where are you that I might respond to you, to be able to love you as you have loved me? The Lord himself indicates precisely the where of his presence, the where of our deepest longings as believers. When he spoke of the Eucharist, the Lord Jesus identified his real presence in his surrendered body and in his blood poured out at the supper of his own sacrifice. Furthermore, and with no less clarity, he personally identified himself with the poor: Truly I tell you that what you did to one of these littlest ones, you did to me (Mt 25:40).
Within this question that arises spontaneously from the dynamics of the grace of Christ, and from within the responsive outline the Lord offers, we find what we could call the grace of the encounter offered by God: with God himself sacramented among us, and with God present in the people with whom we share the human path. I stress again that this opening to the encounter is not presented as an option among options in the life of a Catholic; it is as essential as faith itself because it is the way of the response offered back to Christ. Faith itself, working through charity, seeks Christ with a hunger to respond to him. His charity urges us.
The Catholic faith, expressed in the Tridentine council, and in contrast to Lutheran doctrines, does not profess sola fides, a doctrine that teaches that by faith alone we are saved. I do not think that many Catholics would present themselves today to advocate for the sola fides, but I do think that in this age of comfortable individualisms and lifestyles, we run the risk of living faith with indifference, leaving aside the proposal of charity. In practice, we can live as if we only need to believe and profess the faith in order to be saved.
Such a way of appropriating faith reduces the horizon of salvation to the paltry space of my own life; that is to say, to thank God for making me know his love, but to worry little about the condition of those who walk with me on the paths of life, or to take lightly the importance of participating in the Eucharistic sacrifice. It is as if we were to say, I have faith, I wish others had it. We can live the faith with a condescending attitude mixed with a vague and distracted desire to promote the good for others. The grandeur of charity can be reduced to inoperable sentiments, when in fact it is the action of God within us enabling us to respond humanly, generously, gratuitously to the person who appears on our paths of life. Grace engenders grace or it dies in the stony ground of self-preoccupation.
The evangelical reality is otherwise. The grace of charity received invites us insistently to seek Christ in order to love him in return, within which is found the perfection of human salvation, as Saint Thomas says. To that seeking the scandal of the Cross provokes us. The work of Christ reveals the open heart of God where churns the Spirit of gratuitous communion and life-giving surrender. Only grace immerses us in the transforming waters that move us out of ourselves, to seek, find and taste this love that smells of Christ.
This provocation of the Cross is suitable for us precisely because without it we cannot develop a taste for the Kingdom. As Blessed Cardinal Newman, who this weekend is canonized, said: we live in this world to learn, by grace, to taste the things of God, and to savor what God savors (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Sermon I : Ignatius, 1987). If we do not learn to enjoy the taste of the charity of Christ while God grants us life, it is difficult to imagine how we could enjoy the eternal charity of God. Charity saves us by changing what and how we love.
If we do not learn how to come out of ourselves to love Christ in the communion of his Body-Church around the altar of his Body-Sacrament, neither could we enjoy the eternal communion of saints. In the same way, if we cannot savor the self-gift of Christ in his mission on behalf of the rejected of this world, neither would we have hope of truly enjoying their heavenly company. In such cases, the eternal communion of the Saints around the Lamb who was slain would become a hell for us. Grace guides us to love what Christ loves, and through this transformation it makes us fit for glory. This point is also a basic element of the Catholic faith.
- The Eucharistic Interruption
Here it would be good to pause for a moment to acknowledge the grandeur of the Eucharist in the life of a Catholic wishing to live the fullness of the life of grace. In divine worship we receive the charity of Christ poured out from the altar. The Mass communicates the mystery of the love given by Christ in an intense narrative, using material signs and canonized words to make present the unfolding of the Trinitarian work on our behalf. It is the Father who sends us his Son through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Mass is a complete recapitulation and actual re-presentation of that saving work. The love of God is not communicated to us as something in the past, it is transmitted now through the language of the body, that language of which Venard spoke: Body and Blood present in the act of offering itself. Just as faith captures the charity of God under the sign of the Cross, this faith captures the same work of Christ interrupting time to be present in the elevated Host and in the Chalice presented to our sight. The few sacred words pronounced before the elevations effect what is silently manifested.
By presenting ourselves as recipients of his gratuitous self-giving, the Lord offers us communion in his charity. Manifesting himself as charity is one thing, but offering himself to be taken-- living body entering to give life to those who need it most-- is the unsurpassable sign/presence of the dynamics of God's grace: life given, for charity’s sake, that we might have life within his own charity. This enables us to be his life-giving-over people. The Eucharist is the sacrament of Charity just as the New Testament itself is the revelation of charity poured out. This is what St. Thomas teaches, and what Pope Benedict explains in Sacramentum Caritatis.
But it would be a distortion if we do not understand that the action of the altar urges us to charity with the same force and vigor as the historical fact of the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord. It asks us for a response to the Lord enacted in our lives, and unleashed in today's world. This dynamic is the same one Saint Thomas explained when discussing the reasons for the Passion. The Lord presents himself in this sacramental way precisely to provoke and renew within us the response of love. This grace saves us if we allow it to bring us to its intentional end in the charity of Christ operating within us.
The charity of Christ makes us subjects, (agents) of charity, and from this charity arises the pressing concern of the Church and of every Christian to announce the Gospel and to serve the poor. We could say that if the Eucharistic mystery does not move us to go out and look for the Christ to whom we can offer a response of love, then we have been little touched by what we have seen in the Christ lifted up, and with little benefit have we received his offer of communion. Grace saves if we let it move us.
- The Evangelization of the Poor and being Evangelized by Them
The ecclesial renewals initiated by the grace of the Holy Spirit have always arisen through an evangelizing impulse, and aimed in different ways to announce the gospel with clearer reference to the Lord Jesus, recognizing that his lifestyle and his mission completely coincide. Undoubtedly, the reform movements in the history of the Church born of an evangelical spirit confirm the decisive importance of the poverty of Christ as a point of reference. The Franciscans and the Dominicans are outstanding examples of this, although not the only ones.
I recommend to you a novel entitled La confesión: El diario de Esteban Martorus, (Jus, 2008; Debolsillo, 2016) written by the Mexican novelist Javier Sicilia. It is a provocative novel written with profound Catholic sensibility. It presents the poverty of Christ as an essential light for the Church today. The priest Esteban Martorus, the protagonist of the novel, is a poor curate, quite limited in his abilities; he is, though, a dedicated priest. In the first section I will cite, the priest is received by his cardinal archbishop. The cardinal has decided to send the priest to a village in the mountains, a poor and peripheral village. Within what is a dialogue between poverty and power, the priest says the following to the cardinal:
Do you know what amazes me [Eminence] about the Incarnation? -- I continued--, that it is altogether contrary to the modern world: the presence of the infinite in the limits of the flesh, and the fight, the fight with no quarter, against the temptations of the devil’s excesses. You do not know how much I have meditated on the temptations in the desert. “Take up the power”, the devil told him; that power that gives the illusion of being able to disrupt and dominate everything. But he maintained himself in the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard. Our age, nevertheless, showing a face of enormous kindness, has succumbed to those temptations. “They will be like gods, they will change the stones into bread, and they will dominate the world”… to such an age we have handed over the Christ, and we do not even realize it.
What is most actual about Javier Sicilia’s analysis is the clear identification of poverty with limitation and lack of power. It is the opposite of the cultural current of excess that seeks to overcome the inherent limitation of the human condition; the culture of excess seeks to establish a limitless condition that can define and constitute its own reality. We have ordered having to the purposes of power, and power to ends of self-sufficiency. The relentless pursuit of potent freedom is largely the pursuit of total independence. Not having to depend on anyone, and not having to suffer that others depend on us, has become the ideal of socioeconomic progress. Poverty disturbs the conscience of the world that today enjoys its economic and political power. However, if we are honest, the poverty of material resources horrifies us precisely because the limitations of not having are limitations of power, and remind us of the interdependence of humanity, the need for the relationships without which we cannot survive.
In contrast Sicily identifies the poverty of Christ with the condition that embraces the limited and powerless state, unable, in the end, to overcome the interrelated dependence of the human being. It is a poverty that does not consider the limitations of the flesh to be a curse. On the contrary, God the Father decides to save the world through the poverty of his incarnate Son who renounces the path of manipulative power: altogether contrary to the modern world. And the culmination of this poverty (the dark light) is his death so poor, so miserable, so hard. Christ asked the Samaritan woman for water and he asked for it also from the Cross. Christ in his poverty, (what St. Paul says makes us rich), gives of himself precisely by offering himself as needing something, and from this limitation, he gives us life. This man, wounded and vulnerable, who is God, appeals to our conscience, seeking how to provoke in us a response of charity. The mystery of not being self-sufficient beings, being able to respond to this condition in our neighbor opens us to salvation through exposing us to the possibility of freely receiving and freely giving.
If Father Martorus gives the cardinal a lesson about the dignity of the poor Christ and that of his people, later in the novel the priest receives a lesson from a trusted friend, an elderly woman religious living in the poverty of the peripheral village. She says the following:
If misery exists, Father, and the statistics do not lie, it is because the dream of the rich has contaminated the dreams of the poor. At the bottom of things, poverty no longer exists, dear Father. The only thing that exists is wealth and misery, ... Do you know why? I know well that you know ... Because they have been made to believe that their poverty is a shameful disease, a wound unworthy of the world. Never before has humanity, and here, excuse me, Father, I also included our Holy Mother Church, spit so much on the face of Christ, as if his poverty were a filth, that unclean filth that they hung from the cross and which we, as did his detractors, make fun of.”
The dream of the rich has contaminated the dreams of the poor, she says, indicating that poverty and misery are different conditions. The dream of the rich is to dream of being able to manipulate everything, to have everything, to dominate everything. It becomes misery precisely when limitation shows itself as resistant to the dream of control and dominance.
Poverty of resources is not a disease, a plague that should cause us to flee from the poor. The world blames the poor for their poverty as if we had no responsibility. Meanwhile, a world culture dedicates itself to sustaining the dream of the rich, that is, a culture unmeasured in its consumption of the goods of the world. Remedies exist to improve the condition of the poor, but they start with seeing the poor as a human beings, and not seeing their suffering as collateral damage that the world of measureless consumption laments even as it continues pursuing its dreams.
It turns out, then, that the coldness and indifference of the human being when faced with the need of the poor is the poorest possible condition for us as human beings; the indifference eclipses the opening to that love that wants to see the neighbor and respond with grace, humanely and gratuitously. Perhaps this point helps us to understand what Pope Francis means when he proposes in EG 198 that it is necessary that we all let ourselves be evangelized by the poor: We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the center of the Church’s pilgrim way. The saving force of their lives is the force that calls us to respond to suffering with a heart of flesh and not of stone. Without this opening, faith cannot save us.
The poor know one thing for certain: without the help of others they cannot survive. Speaking with immigrants who have survived an extremely dangerous road, leaving Honduras, for example, and crossing all of Mexico to reach McAllen, Texas, one constantly hears how the help of people or the lack of help has determined the course of their journey. In this sense, the immigrant, representative of a human reality of suffering and rejection that many in the world do not want to recognize, is, in his person, dignified and in need. The poor offer us a grace, an opportunity, perhaps the last, to respond gracefully and overcome the indifference that is killing us.
- A World that Questions Us
A key text on evangelization in the modern era is the apostolic letter of St. Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi. I would like to direct myself to a particular text where he speaks of a new evangelization. In number 3 of the letter, he says the following:
On June 22, 1973, we said to the Sacred College of Cardinals: "The conditions of the society in which we live oblige all of us therefore to revise methods, to seek by every means to study how we can bring the Christian message to modern man. For it is only in the Christian message that modern man can find the answer to his questions and the energy for his commitment of human solidarity.”
I do not wish to focus on the question of methods and means, but on the simple and concise way in which the Holy Father describes the Christian message. He refers to the kerygma and to catechetical formation in grace when he says: it is only in the Christian message that modern man can find the answer to his questions and the energy for his commitment of human solidarity.
Speaking of questions and solidarity, the Pope develops the thread of the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes. For example, his words echo the language of Gaudium et Spes 3:
Though mankind is stricken with wonder at its own discoveries and its power, it often raises anxious questions about the current trend of the world, about the place and role of man in the universe, about the meaning of its individual and collective strivings, and about the ultimate destiny of reality and of humanity. [...] For the human person deserves to be preserved; human society deserves to be renewed. Hence the focal point of our total presentation will be man himself, whole and entire, body and soul, heart and conscience, mind and will.
People today have many questions. Now then, there are questions of the intellect and questions of the heart. The mind affects the heart and the heart affects the mind. It is necessary, therefore, to avoid a restricted interpretation that sees the Gospel as offering a response to only intellectual questions. Even the question about the existence of God is not simply an intellectual question; much less questions about salvation. The question about God and salvation arises from within the historical moment. And although one admits that human beings have an enormous capacity to forget what has been lived in other times, and for that reason think that our doubts are original, even so today's questions touch on new circumstances, requiring adequated responses.
There are many studies on the historical movements, cultural phenomena and intellectual roots that have come together to create the historical, cultural and intellectual air we breathe today. Among those studies I greatly appreciate the description of our era offered by George Steiner (Real Presences: University of Chicago, 1991), when he says that we have entered the time of the epilogue: Throughout, my question is: what is the status and meaning of meaning, of communicative form, in the time of the ‘after-Word’? I define this time as that of the epilogue (again, the term houses Logos).
The time of the epilogue accepts the deconstructive critique (even without examining it thoroughly and critically), and despairs of the possibility of knowing the truth. It is the time that distrusts the truth of words; it is the time of the Word exiled from the city. This time coincides with the time of words multiplied meaninglessly, and of the word manipulated. The aggressive cynicism of today sees every expressive elaboration as a game of power and control. The diagnosis of Steiner and others is not far from the sense expressed by Javier Sicilia in the texts I earlier quoted, where the specter of power eclipses every other human aspiration.
It is worthwhile to note the actual response of the magisterium in recent years. I believe that we have been seeing a hermeneutic develop addressed to persons living in the time of the epilogue, of the after-Word, that is, of signification torn apart.
Pope Benedict published two encyclicals on the theological virtues with the intention of publishing the third. He began with charity (Deus Caritas Est), and continued with Spe Salvi concerning hope. The third was already in preparation, on faith, when he made the humble decision to renounce the papacy. Pope Francis, also with humility, reviewed and published this third encyclical, Lumen Fidei, by his own authority. The great schematic of these encyclicals affirms that the human being today has difficulties capturing faith in response to his questions if he does not first confront his identity as a human being in relation to other human beings, and if he does not face the root of the spontaneous human desire to sacrifice for and receive a worthwhile future.
The order of presentation of the encyclicals shows a deep continuity with what Pope St. Paul VI teaches in Evangelii Nuntiandi about the human questions to which the Gospel is directed. The papal magisterium has well diagnosed that doubts and confusion about the reason for love and the reason for hope afflict us deeply today. Without facing these, we cannot really understand what the gift and faith offers us. The sustained reflection on charity and hope before considering faith suggests something significant about today's path to Christ. Charity and hope are expressions of grace that give credibility to faith, and by extension give credibility to the meaning of meaning, to use Steiner's phrase.
St. Thomas clearly teaches that hope and charity are the fruit of the dynamic encounter with the Crucified and Risen Christ, and that the coherent movement of grace within the human being begins with faith in God's love manifested in Christ. The order itself of the three encyclicals tells us that today we need to attend to the credibility of this dynamic of grace. Today's circumstances suggest that some cultures with a long Christian presence within them have lost the sense of the unity of this dynamic of grace. Instead of being seen as a coherent development within the believer, faith, hope and charity are perceived and appropriated by individuals in fragments and pieces. Likewise, there is little appreciation of the impact of the grace of theological virtues within society.
We could say that today the path to the truth of faith begins with addressing the credibility and the need for charity and hope in human life. As human beings, love and hope preoccupy us more in concrete life than does the truth. Obviously, the truth ought to preoccupy us more, but today's indifference in the face of the question of truth dominates the cultural space in much of the world. We are not in a position to recover a healthy concern about the truth without, at the same time, saying and manifesting something about love and hope, charity and pathways to the future.
The human crisis today is not only a crisis of the credibility of faith; the human crisis today is worse than that: the human being no longer believes in love. This is quite grave. Evangelization, then, requires a sustained focus on the credibility of love. In particular it requires a focus on love as more than a game of power and control, disguised behind beautiful words. The gift of self, the free surrender in favor of those who cannot repay us, as the Lord tells us (Luke 14:14), is the path to the future of faith.
Obviously, an effort to evangelize in this social environment needs to recover the saving power at work in the lives of the poor. I will conclude this section by quoting Pope Francis again. EG 195: When Saint Paul approached the apostles in Jerusalem to discern whether he was “running or had run in vain” (Gal 2:2), the key criterion of authenticity which they presented was that he should not forget the poor (cf. Gal 2:10). This important principle, namely that the Pauline communities should not succumb to the self-centred lifestyle of the pagans, remains timely today, when a new self-centred paganism is growing. We may not always be able to reflect adequately the beauty of the Gospel, but there is one sign which we should never lack: the option for those who are least, those whom society discards.
- The End of history
Gaudium et Spes 39:
Hence, while earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God. For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in His Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured, when Christ hands over to the Father: "a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace."On this earth that Kingdom is already present in mystery. When the Lord returns it will be brought into full flower.
The kingdom which it is said to be present in mystery is the kingdom of grace, of the charity of Christ forging bonds of communion and self-gift within history. The parables of the Lord speaking of the end times, like the apocalyptic vision of St. John, commit us to this vision of communion. Visions of the Holy Ones around the Lamb, images of the eternal banquet, of the wedding feast of the Son, and of the woman clothed with the sun, announce a transformation of the world from within.
This eschatological vision remains on the periphery of the current conversation about evangelization. The human horizon reduced to the individual who believes he is self-sufficient to build his future, cannot do more than reduce the few thoughts he gives to eternity to a mere pittance. Even if the human being living in the epilogue thinks of eternity, it is imagined as a perpetual state where he can fulfill his personal desires and whims. An eternity conceived in this way becomes the perpetual boredom adumbrated by Sarte and other anxious existentialists of the twentieth century.
In this sense it is urgent for us to recover the sense of evangelization as a mission of the Spirit and of the Church intimately united with the end of time. I use the phrase end of time in two senses: the time that will come to an end, a terminus, and the end in the sense of its intentional purpose or finality. God moves history to an end, that end of charity and communion announced in the Gospel itself.
Evangelization prepares this end precisely by unleashing the force of the Gospel within history. The charitable work of a people evangelized is the effective sign in time that already participates and thus announces what God has planned for creation transformed.
The teaching of the Church after the Council has moved to express itself more clearly about evangelization as a force and event in history, and about its relation to the scriptural eschatological vision. Specifically this clarification manifests itself in the recent development of the social doctrine of the Church. I could cite several examples in the teaching of Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis. Each speaks of the relationship between evangelization, social doctrine and the eschatological vision in terms beyond what Gaudium et Spes says. As an invitation for you to look further into teachings of this line, I will only cite a few examples.
One aspect of this advance in the Church's social doctrine is the way Pope Benedict speaks the political path of charity. The evangelical mission of the Church, the mission of charitable service in the world, and the final goal of history are tightly linked here:
Pope Benedict CIV 7: When animated by charity, commitment to the common good has greater worth than a merely secular and political stand would have. Like all commitment to justice, it has a place within the testimony of divine charity that paves the way for eternity through temporal action. Man's earthly activity, when inspired and sustained by charity, contributes to the building of the universal city of God, which is the goal of the history of the human family.
Pope Benedict in CIV 19, commenting on the contribution of the Populorum Progressio of Paul VI, says the following:
Underdevelopment has an even more important cause than lack of deep thought: it is “the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples”. Will it ever be possible to obtain this brotherhood by human effort alone? As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers. Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity. This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.
These texts, and many others in Caritas in Veritate, advance Paul VI's teaching on the strength necessary for the commitment to human solidarity. The issue of the necessity of grace touches the issue of societal relations precisely here. Yes, there exist aspirations and impulses in the lives of human beings and society that encourage us toward solidarity and hope. These human efforts aimed at inculcating relationships and conditions favoring common association and fraternity beyond family ties have always existed in the cultures and histories of the world. Nevertheless, Benedict XVI's teaching notes that the human aspiration seeking to establish fraternity is weak and fragile without that charity which is manifested in the concrete application of gratuity, mercy and the spirit of communion. In addition, the Pope continues, without fraternal ties based on charity, not even justice can be achieved.
Number 38 of Caritas in Veritate, in fact, resonates with extraordinary force when he says the following: Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone, and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State. While in the past it was possible to argue that justice had to come first and gratuitousness could follow afterwards, as a complement, today it is clear that without gratuitousness, there can be no justice in the first place.
Even in a social context where the Church is perceived as a minority, the charitable work of the community is still enormously important for the evangelizing mission. Charity has the smell of Christ, and can gradually infiltrate the social dynamics of the world. Communities and peoples counting themselves as unbelievers cannot fail to be influenced by this grace. Of course, in particular times and places this work inspires rejection and even persecution; but still we see that it can inspire cooperation and great common efforts in favor of the poor and suffering. This reality is an essential part of the mission, since in a latent and mysterious way it tends to the final triumph of the Lamb who was slain and of his charity.
And here, Pope Francis, in EG 279: It may be that the Lord uses our sacrifices to shower blessings in another part of the world which we will never visit. The Holy Spirit works as he wills, when he wills and where he wills; we entrust ourselves without pretending to see striking results. We know only that our commitment is necessary. Let us learn to rest in the tenderness of the arms of the Father amid our creative and generous commitment. Let us keep marching forward; let us give him everything, allowing him to make our efforts bear fruit in his good time.
In the end, while we work to share the grace and charity of the Gospel, and while promoting justice sustained by charity, we must maintain the ecclesial vision of the end, of a world transformed by charity, the gratuitous gift of self. This is the very same grace poured out upon believers through the Passion of Christ and the Holy Spirit infused in our hearts: May he make our efforts bear fruit in his good time
Epilogue
I appreciate being invited to share these thoughts with you; it has been a great grace for me.
Before finishing, I would like to give the last word to the Saint Oscar Romero. The martyr is the premier eschatological sign. The martyred archbishop gave his life for Christ. His life, his preaching and his martyrdom are a response of love to Christ, and at the same time a response given with love to the disquiets and tragedies lived in our time. His life and teaching testify to the intimate relationship between the Lord’s life and gift, the Mass, the poor, the social doctrine of the Church, and the eschatological vision of the Gospel itself. I ask the Saint for his intercession frequently, asking him to help me, the bishops of the country, and of the whole world to give a faithful witness.
I will cite two texts taken from his liturgical sermons (Homilías y discursos, 1977-1980: Vaticanoterzo, 2015). The first is taken from his sermon at the funeral Mass of Father Rutilio Grande, SJ, celebrated in the Cathedral of San Salvador (March 14, 1977). Father Rutilio was killed shortly after the arrival of Monsignor Romero to the archdiocese.
The social doctrine of the Church [that] tells men that the Christian religion is not a solely horizontal, spiritualist sense, forgetting the misery that surrounds it. It is a gaze at God, and from God a gaze at the neighbor as a brother and to sense that "everything you did to one of these you did to me". A social doctrine that hopefully the movements sensitized on the social issue would know about. They would not expose themselves to failures, or to myopia, to a myopia that does not see more than temporal things, the structures of time. And as long as there is no living of a conversion in the heart, a doctrine that is illuminated by the faith to organize life according to the heart of God, everything will be flimsy, revolutionary, passing, violent.
And then, a month later, on the II Easter Sunday 1977, of the sermon preached in the parish of the Resurrection, in the village of Miramonte:
[We seek] To make pilgrimage (with the Lord) so that this Paschal Feast that is celebrated every year in the parish might be an invitation to work to make this world more human, more Christian; but to know that there is no paradise here on earth, not to be seduced by the redeemers who offer paradises on earth — they do not exist — but rather [to seek what] is beyond, with a very firm hope in the heart: to work the present, knowing that the reward of that Easter will be in the measure in which we have here also made the earth, the family, the earthly, happier.
Saint Oscar Romero,
Pray for us.
Amen.
+df
*Primo enim, per hoc homo cognoscit quantum Deus hominem diligat, et per hoc provocatur ad eum diligendum, in quo perfectio humanae salutis consistit. Unde apostolus dicit, Rom. V, commendat suam caritatem Deus in nobis, quoniam, cum inimici essemus, Christus pro nobis mortuus est.
