Announce. Proclaiming the Good News from Ad Gentes to Laudato Si

As you know we are gathering here to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the inauguration of Ad Gentes, The Second Vatican Council's Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church.

In it the Church, as we have heard, reflected deeply on her contemporary missionary self-awareness. In being a missionary Church what was She tryingt to do as She went out of Herself ad gentes, to the nations. In the past the answer was fairly easy. We had the fulness of truth in the Person of Jesus Christ and we were coming to bring its saving proclamation to those who did not have it and who were lost without it. The Council profoundly unsettled this powerful, if somewhat unrefined, conviction.

Lumen Gentium, the Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Church, had already inspired a more humble Church, not afraid to recognise its weak humanity intertwined with its divine origin as ‘warp and weft’ and, therefore, its readiness to admit mistakes and imperfections and learn from them. At the same time, in Gaudium et Spes the People of God had begun to appreciate again that there was a substantial goodness to the world outside full of the activity of the Holy Spirit’s and that the world was not to be seem first and foremost as nasty and as enemy of the Gospel. There was a lot of good in it to be discovered by the Church. Each of these insights played into both the profound thoughts and the practical strategies of the Council’s missionary decree, Ad Gentes. If Oscar Wilde was right that, ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple, a good instance of this is the nuanced conclusion of the decree, whose implications were far from the erstwhile tableau of black and white missionary postures.

From Ad Gentes onward the Church would realise that her evangelising dynamic was no longer a one way street. The Church went out to encounter pagan cultures, certainly, with a desire to preach the Person and Gospel of Jesus Christ but now she was just as ready and willing to learn something, too, from those cultures and to be ingratiated by their richness, even as She was passing on the faith as She had Herself received it. Her missionaries were going out to find the Holy Spirit already active in the cultures of the world as well as to preach the Gospel of the Lord Jesus to them. In fact, living with the people, listening, learning from and absorbing their ways and cultures was the only way really to bring Jesus to them and them to the Lord in the fullest and most salvific way. The missionary was not there to westernise but to evangelise and to learn to find new cultural colours to make up the rich tapestry of the new Creation brought by the Resurrection.

‘Not an easy balance to achieve in the mind and life of the missionary on the ground. Was s/he to bring Christ to the pagan or to find Him already there? Were our ideas of dogmatic theology and rubrical liturgy just western ideas that should be set aside in favour of a reincarnation of Christ in these pagan intuitions? Were our traditional, first world Catholic imaginings now to be caught up into a wider faith synthesis? Did the missionary go out to bring Christ or to find Him and, if it were both, how did one achieve a faithful and authentic balance when ‘the rubber hit the road’.

And if these cultures already had Christ’s salvation in their own ways, what was the missionary doing there in the first place, apart from disrupting their ages long and exquisitely nuanced cultural heritage.

Not surprisingly, in this rarely pure and never simple’ vista missionary ardour seemed to fade away, somewhat, in life and confidence of the Church. The imagination of the young Catholic boy or girl seemed less fired as it had once been by the Crusader magazine and its adventure stories of brining the Gospel to the heathen for the salvation of their souls in a drama for their eternal destiny. Why bother when, quite evidently, they are saved already, thank you very much, before the little lad ever got out of shorts, never mind arrived on the scene to upset the incultured applecart.

The acceptance of Rahner’s ‘anonymous Christianity’ was happy to provide the wider hermeneutic key for the intuItions of Ad Gentes. all human beings were born with an implicit or innate knowledge of Jesus Christ and benefitted from His redemption simply by being human rather than by being explicitly evangelised. This meant that Christ had already done the work ‘from the word go’ without the need of a Church mission, and evangelism was a thing of the past consigned to the dustbin of proselytisation.

This is part of the backdrop, as you know, of pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation, Evangelii nuntiandi of December 1975 where he felt compelled to restate those famous words, ‘ There is no evangelisation without the explicit proclamation of Jesus as Lord’.

This was a timely intervention on two fronts. Firstly, as has been said, the pendulum had, perhaps, swung too far the other way in the direction of a tendency simply to ‘find’ and recognise Christ, as it were, anonymous or in disguise, among the diverse and varied gods, rites and forms of worship of indigenous cultures. Evangelisation had then ceased to be about the explicit proclamation of the historical figure Jesus from Nazareth in Palestine as Lord and Saviour and had become an affirmation and worship of him incognito in the likes of Ashanti, Krishna or Buddha. If that is taking things too far there had, at least, arisen what you might at least call a certain squeamishness in talking about Jesus Christ in favour of letting the light of our general Christian goodness attract other good and likeminded pagans just by our example. This was the idea of St. Francis, that Christians should ‘ preach the Gospel always and, if you have to, use words’, except that St Francis never said it.

Evangelii Nuntiandi, sought to redress the balance. It was not, however, some reactionary text and to see it so missed all the good inspiration of Ad Gentes, which EN affirmed without qualification. EN was more of an instruction manual on how to use AG in order to get the best out of it.

It also, importantly, built upon and developed its theology of missions. AG had called for better coordination of the Church’s mission work through agencies as well as new cooperation with other groups and organizations within and outside the Catholic Church. The direction of travel was that mission and evangelisation were not just marginan issues of a few religiosu congregations in the Church but mission was the very identity, configuration and structure of the whole Church and so the Church needed to find a joined up, plugged in approach to mission at every level of Her life. EN build up this idea by affirming that mission was the responsibility of every Christian, by baptism, and not the exclusive preserve of ordained priests and consecrated nuns.

When, in 1990, Saint John Paul wrote Redemptoris Missio , his encyclical on the missionary activity of the Church, on the occasion of the twenty-firth anniversary of Ad Gentes, and subtitled it " On the permanent validity of the Church's missionary mandate", you could immediately that the concern of Paul VI had not immediately disappeared and still lingered on. As well as reiterating Paul VI’s challenge,’ no evangelisation without the explicit proclamation of Jesus as Lord’, he introduced the idea of the ‘urgency’ of missionary activity and invited the whole Church to a renewal of her missionary commitment.

In an age of the cult of personality where Catholics are quite comfortable to say, I like Pope John Paul, but not Benedict or Benedict but not Francis or Francis but not John Paul, one of the many areas where it is not possible to make too much of a distinction among them is their united sense that the Holy Spirit is calling the whole Catholic Church urgently to a new missionary outreach, or a new evangelisation. Indeed Pope Francis’ truly first and programmatic apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium affirms from the ‘get go’ " the Church's primary mission of evangelization in the modern world”. Anyone who has read EG cannot fail to be unsettled by its radical challenge to a Church grown insular and flabby, all too comfortable and complacent at every level.
Following from the line of recent popes, Francis fingers mission as the very identity and essence of the Church.

For Francis Church renewal and new evangelisation are but two sides of the same coin. Calling for an "ecclesial renewal which cannot be deferred’, he highlights the first step in renewal not as a step into ourselves in reflection but as a step out of ourselves in mission. For example:
We cannot leave things as they presently are. Mere administration can no longer be enough. Universally we must be permanently in a state of mission. But there are ecclesial structures which can hamper evangelisation and, because of this, ecclesial renewal cannot be deferred. This renewal will be characterised by an orientation towards a 'missionary option', a missionary impulse capable of driving everything so that the Church's ways of doing things, its language and structures are channelled for the evangelisation of today's world rather than for her self-preservation.

Francis’ own characteristic take on mission and evangelisation does, though, have notable novelties, at least of emphasis. Among the many, three are worth mention.
Firstly he sets priorities in missionary outreach and the first priority is that mission should go first of all and preferentially to the excluded and the poor. Secondly it must challenge not just individuals but whole structures of economics, politic and legislatures in order to afflict the comforable.

And thirdly, mission can be hindered as much by the Church ‘shooting herself in the foot’ as by negative forces prevailing against us in the world. And for Francis the anti-missionary forces in the Church are not the usual suspects. For him they are the likes of over-centralization in the Church, or poor preaching or excessive emphasis on doctrines. For Francis a missionary turn in the Church will demand conversion of Catholic culture from a dogmatic pose to a pastoral outreach, or what he calls ‘pastoral conversion. It will be characterised not by the caution that says, ‘we better not’ but by the boldness that says, ‘why not!’
Indeed boldness, or parrhesia, is one of the Pope’s favourite words. It means, courage, or –better- daring, to try everything without holding back and by extension the obligation to try something not countenanced before even at personal risk. So, Francis again:

Missionary sprit goes beyond the attitude that says "we have always done it this way' and I invite everyone to be 'bold and creative in rethinking the goals, structures, styles and methods of evangelisation in their particular communities' and encourage everyone to apply the guidelines of the apostolic exhortation generously and courageously, without inhibition or fear.

Fourthly, mission is not ‘all singing, all dancing’. It does not say, ‘the train’s leaving the station so get on it’. Rather, mission is characterised as meek and gentle, humble, understanding and compassionate, making every allowance for where people are. This is perhaps what Jesus meant in his direction to the disciples not to move from house to house, even when the poor soul in the place where you are seems a million miles from the light and where the grass of conversions seems much greener on the other side of the fence. As Francis says,

A missionary heart is aware of the limits of our struggling world and makes itself weak with the weak, everything for everyone. It never closes off, never retreats into its own insecurity, never opts for rigidity and defensiveness. It does what good it can, even if in the process its shoes get soiled by the mud of the street.

It is a development of Ad Gentes very much in line with the papal magisterium of the last fifty years since the Council if with the Francis swagger. But who can say it is not a sense of a missionary Church which is equally thrilling and more than ever compelling! Who could fail to be moved by the Pope’s vision of the kind of Church we can be at the end of this missionary or evangelical rainbow! He says:

I prefer a Church that is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security
and he goes on.

We should be moved less by fear of going astray and more by fear of remaining trapped in structures that give a false sense of security, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: Give them something to eat.

So, fifty years after Ad Gentes, the sense of mission is never stale but ever new and refreshing. Reading papal Magisterium inspired, as it has been, by Ad Gentes fifty years ago is as captivating, exciting and thought-provoking as ever. It is good to follow the Church as she has ‘talked the talk’. Now the challenge, the only one that counts, is for us to get out there and ‘walk the walk.