Following the Lead of Pope Benedict XVI, It is Time for Christians to Engage with the World

By Deacon Keith Fournier
12/23/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

For weeks I have experienced Christians walking around like forlorn warriors

This 85 year old Pope just showed us how to effectively engage our culture. On Wednesday December 20, 2012, he wrote an editorial for the Financial Times. That's right, the Financial Times! Not a "religious publication", and not the kind of venue many would think of utilizing. Why? That, in and of itself, teaches us a vital lesson. The article was entitled "A Time for Christians to Engage with the World". It is a masterful example of apologetics, rightly understood. I offer it below for study, imitation and example:

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LONDON, UK (Catholic Online) - For weeks I have experienced Christians walking around looking, acting and speaking like forlorn warriors. No doubt, we are alive in a time of historic challenge for the Church. However, it is not without precedent. In fact, it is very much like other great missionary ages. The results will also be similar - the triumph of the truth which we proclaim - and the liberation which it brings to people, to families, to Nations and to all cultures.

For some, there is residual depression over the implications of elections past. It is time to acknowledge that the collapse of Western civilization will not be remedied by political movements alone. They are inadequate for the task. However, we cannot retreat from the culture. Part of our mission is to walk into the culture, filled with the love of God, equipped with the splendor of truth, and continue the work entrusted to us as Catholic Christians. We have been given a gift meant for the whole world.

We also need to take the risks that this new missionary age requires. It means being misunderstood, wrongly accused, disparaged and persecuted. For example, in offering the principles found in the Social Doctrine of the Church we need to be willing to be accused of being any number of the contemporary political labels being bandied about these days. What is most important is that what we proclaim really is the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. That means we have to study that body of teaching, pray through it, and then learn to articulate it properly in the public square and not simply in our own circles.

The principles and truths of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church are not liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. They are Christian. For example, the child in the home of the first human race, the womb, is our neighbor. The dignity of every human life from conception, throughout the entirety of life, and to a natural death, is not simply a religious position. It is the truth. It is revealed by the Natural Law which can be known by all men and women through reason. The humanity of our first neighbor in the womb is also confirmed by medical science. The human dignity of every human person is the basis for any insistence upon the existence of other rights. Rights are goods of human persons.

It was the Catholic Church which gave the West the understanding that this dignity of every human person is rooted in the truth that we are all created in the Image of God. From that foundation evolved the bold claim that we possess fundamental human rights endowed upon us by the God who created us and not given to us by any Civil Government. They must be recognized by Civil Government or it is an unjust government. We need to simply acknowledge that we live in a declining western culture which is increasingly hostile to the Church. Our struggle involves a clash of worldviews, personal and corporate, and competing definitions of human freedom, human dignity, and human flourishing.

Crippled by the culture of death and indoctrinated by what Pope Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism", the West has been seduced by the siren song of evil. It is deluded by the lies mouthed by a movement which purports to be progressive when it is regressive. In addition, evil runs rampant in our midst. The reality of the existence of evil became clear recently in Newtown, Connecticut when six and seven year old children were gunned down by a young man trapped in its hungry grip. We are made painfully aware of the need for the kind of hope which only comes from the God who is its source.
The Catholic Catechism warns of "sins against hope" (# 2091 and 2092).

In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI gave an address to the leadership of the Diocese of Rome. He spoke of the need for an "Education to Hope". He expressed remorse over the fact that "our civilization and our culture [...] too often tend to place God in parentheses, to organize personal and social life without him, to maintain that nothing can be known of God, even to deny his existence. But, when God is laid aside, all our hopes, great and small, rest on nothing. In order, then, to 'educate for hope' it is necessary, in the first place, to open our hearts, our intellects and all our lives to God, in order to be his credible witnesses among our fellow man."

This 85 year old Pope just showed us how to effectively engage our culture. On Wednesday December 20, 2012, he wrote an editorial for the British newspaper, the Financial Times. That's right, the Financial Times! Not a "religious publication", and not the kind of venue many would think of utilizing. Why? That, in and of itself, teaches us a vital lesson. The article was entitled "A Time for Christians to Engage with the World". It is a masterful example of apologetics, rightly understood. I offer it below for study, imitation and ...

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Bill Sr.
5 months ago
The Lord hears your cry.....LEO
When the current folks in their seventies and beyond were kids there was always talk of war and it was common belief the final war was to be a Religious War. These were for the most part people with Christian backgrounds who lived by the Word of God. The problem at the time in the 1930's most of them simply surmised erroneously this would be a clash between the Church of Rome and the rest of Christendom (actually that was an unfortunate skirmish which had taken place five hundred years earlier). Today we have before us a clear vision of a pending clash between Christendom as we have known it and an anti-Christian collation made up of several factions all of which seek the virtual destruction of all Judeo-Christian values and the Jewish nation from the face of the earth.
One should have no problem in identifying those who have vowed to perpetrate the latter threat above. The Islamic Jihad is no longer simply a slogan for Muslim radicals who have systematically begun to infiltrate all of western Europe and intend to unite behind its banner in an armed and dangerous powerful presence in the Middle East poised to control North Africa and incorporate itself with the Arab nations to the west of Israel all of whom long to see the Jews driven out of what they believe is their land. If you don't see or understand this you are not paying attention or are wearing carefully fitted biased blinders.
The other anti-Christendom factions are not militarily armed forces working feverously to acquire nuclear weapons for mass destruction. Their goals, under the protection of what they believe to be a central enlightened secular government, are the dissolution of traditional moral values and spiritual concepts which impede the rapid advancement they desire to establish a modern debased society in which individuals are released from all constraints of the moral and natural laws which formed the foundation for western civilization. These willing but spiritually unconscious and unsuspecting cultists must in return offer undying loyalty to the messianic political leaders to whom they have pledged their support.
These poor souls and their voices should also be obvious to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. They are among the young and immature who seek identity in revolutionary causes, the rich and glamorous in entertainment who know no depth to their desires for multiple relationships, career politicians who cherish power over principles using taxes to perpetuate their assumed benevolence, academics who have inflated their egos with degrees of utter idolatry giving them a false sense of infallibility, and the not to be over looked every day laity and clerical Christians in name only who were quick to abandoned the faith whenever the pressures of our new normal society threatened to isolate them from the crowd subjecting them to the ridicule of the enlightened. These are certainly the poorest of the poor for they chose to selfishly bury the talents they were given.
There truly is a religious war being raged today and it could very well be the last we are a part of before our Savior comes to renew the face of the earth because the many forces opposed to Christendom have unashamedly pronounced their distain for the Pope, Christians, Israel, Jews and seek to remove all mention of God's word from public view and our public our schools proclaiming to the world that our great country is no longer a Christian nation. Are we not to believe the spirit of the Anti-Christ is aroused, visible and actively present like never before in our world today?
Leo
5 months ago
Agree with you Bill Sr. It is very true what is mentioned in this article that to be Catholic these days: "It means being misunderstood, wrongly accused, disparaged and persecuted". Indeed, the prosecution of the Church and Christ's followers is at an all time high. It is a fact that the only religion that is what Christ meant it to be is the Catholic religion. And the WAR on the Catholic religion is rampant. The anti-Christ agents are trying to convince everyone to believe in "nothing" in an attempt to triumph over God and permanently destroy Him. Once you take God and believing in Christ out of someone's life, then they become a piece of clay which you can easily shape and manipulate anyway you want.....they become your servants. That is the big push right now all around the world. By taking away family culture, turning kids against their parents, pushing for "individualism", ridiculing those who believe in our Lord and making them feel ashamed of their beliefs, teaching the young that it is OK to act on their teenage impulses, laws to allow drug use and many other tools in use today, evil is fighting hard to win. But evil will not win. As Christians We are taught to turn the other cheek, but I think that perception needs to change. I think we should no longer give evil a chance to make us turn the other cheek.
Bill Sr.
5 months ago
Deacon Keith
Thank you for allowing a little light to shine in the darkness of the death and delusion which Evil, through the hands and minds of those who put God aside have manufactured and surrounded this poor soul and so many more of His people in recent days, by your thoughtful words and those of our Holy Father.
This has helped ease my anger making me aware of something we tend to forget when we allow ourselves to be overcome by the multitude of events which give evidence of the mounting presence of Evil in the world. That would be that, as you say, we must not abandon our mission understanding God is in control of the results.

"Part of our mission is to walk into the culture, filled with the love of God, equipped with the splendor of truth, and continue the work entrusted to us as Catholic Christians.

in order to be his credible witnesses among our fellow man."

Our job is to faithfully help BUILD the kingdom on earth and we have to leave it to the prescriptions of our almighty and merciful God to preform any justified DESTRUCTION of Evil and its minnons.

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