Now that the New Evangelisation/Year of Faith is underway I have been thinking of how best to incorporate reports along with related analysis/discussion for easier access and that may also serve as a useful reference point.
A running archive of posts / extracts /quotes/visuals etc under the logo of The Year of Faith (above) will be on my side bar. I'll start the ball rolling this week by highlighting these ones here
A running archive of posts / extracts /quotes/visuals etc under the logo of The Year of Faith (above) will be on my side bar. I'll start the ball rolling this week by highlighting these ones here
Click here for my own opening week post.
- For information on The Year of Faith in Scotland click here.
- The Irish Catholic Bishops site click here.
- USA Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website here
- Australia Bishops Conference website here
- Click here for links to Catholic Bishops Conferences from around the world.
For some pertinent first thoughts on the opening week, the Dating God blog by Fr Dan Horan has this article entitled Leadership, Embarrassment and The New Evangelisation.
He brilliantly articulates far better than I can, a lot of my own thoughts on it so far : Read extract below.
Whilst Fr Dan sometimes writes specifically about the USA, often much of what he says broadly transfers elsewhere.
"My sense of the matter is that most Catholics (and Christians more broadly) are not embarrassed by their faith. But instead, I and so many others might be embarrassed about other aspects of our faith community, particularly the actions and priorities of many of the faith community’s leaders.
Another point of embarrassment might be the perceived atrophy of certain leaders’ notion of “faith” to such an extent that, at least in some places in the United States, “faith” is equated with “sexual moral issues;”
For, far too often, these are the only subjects about which many leaders will speak in the public square.
It will be difficult, I suspect, to find a self-identified Catholic who is embarrassed by Christianity’s claim that Jesus Christ is homousious (one-in-being, or “consubstantial”) with God the Father.
But it doesn’t take much imagination to think about a self-identified Catholic who is embarrassed by bishops in various States campaigning against the rights of some US Citizens, engaging in the most divisive partisan politics, and ostensibly criticizing women religious for their care for the poor, marginalized, and forgotten in our society.
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If this Synod on the “New Evangelization” is indeed an opportunity
for the Church’s leaders to learn more about how to “speak the language”
of today in terms of technology and culture in order to live up to the
Second Vatican Council’s call to be open to the world in the spirit of Gaudium et Spes, then awesome!
But, if this is yet another attempt to “batten down the hatches” and put up walls against “the world,” in rather clear opposition to the teachings of the great Council whose anniversary of opening we are soon celebrating, then I think we have a serious problem on our hands.
What leads me to be cautious about the “New Evangelization” as its being discussed in Rome this week that lead to news reports which, in part, read:
Catholic leaders in the U.S. and Europe are also worried about a perceived rise of “aggressive” secularism, which they say wants to curtail the church’s role in the public sphere and reduce faith to a private exercise.
Qualifications like “aggressive” suggests an adversarial disposition, which threatens to re-inscribe the divisive “us-vs.-them” mentality of the pre-Vatican II church.
I am cautiously looking forward to what will come out of this Synod by way of statements, documents, and proposed actions.
Will this be a chance for Church leaders to redirect a rather poor understanding and engagement with the broader human family and international cultures toward a stance of openness and encounter?
Or will this be a rally to support Catholic isolationism, ecclesial partisan division, and ‘tests’ of who is and who is not “authentically Catholic?”
It will be interesting to see what happens."
The chairman of the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis of the USCCB, Bishop Ricken, offers these ten ways Catholics can live the Year of Faith.
Participate in Mass.
Go to confession.
Learn about the lives of the saints.
Read the Bible daily.
Read the documents of Vatican II.
Study the Catechism.
Volunteer in the parish.
Help those in need.
Invite a friend to Mass.
Incorporate the Beatitudes into daily life.
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