The Church's Mission IS Mission: An Outward Looking vs. a Self Referential Church Part 2

 
The last time out I wrote about the need for the Church to be outward looking in it's approach, engaging the world, bringing it the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and not be caught up with internal politics and worldly concerns that makes her self-referential and irrelevant. This isn't my idea; it's been a major theme of Pope Francis' pontificate, expressed at length in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. The Holy Father is making a conscious effort to be a "post partisan" pontiff because he sees how getting caught up in progressive-traditionalist battles that mirror secular politics detracts from Church unity and distracts her from the work of reaching out to lost, wounded souls seeking the healing power of Christ, which is what the Church does best.

The Church is at her best when she is engaging the world by proclaiming the Gospel because evangelization is her mission; it is why she exists. Fr. Robert Barron has argued that the goal of Vatican II was to prepare the Church to evangelize the post-modern world, not to modernize herself, as many commentators contend. While a certain degree of updating was needed, this was not the purpose of the Council. Whatever "modernizing" the Church needs to engage in is meant to make her a more effective vehicle for proclaiming the Gospel, it's not to conform her with the values of the contemporary society. George Weigel, in his book Evangelical Catholicism, published in the last months of Pope Benedict's reign, asserted that we have long ago come to the end of the age of Counter Reformation Catholicism within the context of a Christianized culture and are now in the period of the New Evangelization in a post Christian culture. In this new era using the authority of the Church to back up an argument is useless. We need to lead with Jesus Christ, showing how what we believe as Catholics has it's origin in the person of Jesus and his Gospel.

This is no easy task. We are fifty years on from the Council and in many ways we still struggle to understand what Vatican II meant and how we are to live the reforms it initiated. We have been bogged down in partisan bickering over theology, liturgy and social action. We are too often irrelevant to he world, not because the Gospel is irrelevant, but because too many people see in us and in our squabbling a mirror of the secular political fights that rage around us. Rather than letting Jesus Christ be the criteria of how we shape our politics we have let our politics define the parameters of our discipleship. The Catholic Church is neither the Republican nor Democratic Party at prayer. If a conservative accuses the Pope of being a Marxist for his proclamation of the social Gospel and a liberal accuses him of being a medieval throwback because he reaffirms the evil of abortion and same-sex marriage, rejoice and be glad; he's fulfilling his mission well.

The word mission in all this is key. The days of the Church in the "first world" that sits back and waits for the people to come to the local parish, register, marry, baptize the babies when they arrive and dutifully plop the envelope in the basket each Sunday is over. We are no longer a maintenance Church. The people aren't following the old patterns of behavior and the society doesn't hold to the same values that were their underpinning in the first place.

We need to understand that we don't need to go halfway around the world be be in mission territory. The United States, the UK, Canada, Western Europe: we are mission territory. The Gospel needs to be reintroduced. Many of us have so identified the Faith with Western Culture (and for good reasons) that we take for grated that ours is a Christian culture and it is for the Faith to align itself with cultural shifts. While we have things to learn from the culture, the influence needs to flow, by and large, in the other direction. We need the courage to understand that now we are the counter culture. But our tools aren't rioting, bombs and guns. We are not looking to overthrow anything. We are to be like yeast that penetrates dough, influencing, causing it to rise. In this the whole loaf is influenced; it's flavor and it's texture.

This all begins with our own conversion to a deeper living of the Gospel. I was going to write about the Blessed Mother in the context of this outward reaching Church, but I guess the Spirit took me in another direction. I can see that this is good, because next time I'll be able to introduce our Lady into the conversation in a deeper way, since she is not just the model of the Church, but she offers us the model of discipleship we are called to grow into.