NEW EVANGELIZATION AIMS AT THE
EVANGELIZATION OF THE BAPTIZED
COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE LOST
THE LIVING SENSE OF THE FAITH, OR
EVEN NO LONGER CONSIDER THEMSELVES MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH,
AND LIVE A LIFE FAR REMOVED
FROM CHRIST AND HIS GOSPEL.
of MST and the preferences of some MSTs to long
for pastoral ministries or to continue in the pastoral
work, are observed, there are at least some who
raise the question – Is MST deviating from its
purpose of mission ad gentes (C. 2)?
What is evident from the above skepticism is that
although we might consider whatever we do
as part of the mission of Christ, the conceptual
variants like – mission ad gentes, evangelization,
new evangelization and pastoral work – carry
different thrusts/orientations. If we say that
‘everything’ we do is mission, then of course
nothing is mission, because the deviations from
the thrust of mission cannot be justified at the
expense of the genuineness of the core-orientation
of mission which has specific functional charge
in the history of salvation. So is the case with the
ad gentes purpose of MST. Since the Catholic
Church in general is being taken by the waves
of the invitation to facilitate new evangelization,
it is essential that the MST constituted for the
purpose of mission ad gentes, be aware of other
variants with similar but varying purposes, so that
we will be faithful to our commitment. Hence
my attempt here is to disclose conceptual and
theological clarity on doing new evangelization,
while holding fast to the purpose of mission ad
gentes of MST. Towards this task, I will try to nuance
certain major missiological variants to differentiate
their functional and theological significance in the
missionary activity of the Church.
TOWARDS NEW EVANGELIZATION:
HISTORICAL NUANCES OF MISSIOLOGICAL
JARGONS
Although missionary activity was the main concern
of the early Christians, the communities were
more kerygmatic than missionary, in the popular
sense the word ‘mission’ as we understand today.
According to John F. Gorski, for about first 15
centuries the word ‘mission’ was not used to refer
to this activity.1 Also, the New Testament speaks
of evangelizing or announcing the Gospel, but
the noun ‘evangelization’ began to be used by
Catholics only about 50 years ago from Vatican II
Council.
In its modern sense ‘mission’ apparently goes back
to St Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century. By the
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SANTHOME MISSION
fourth ‘vow of the mission,’ certain Jesuits were
sent to non-Christian lands (or to countries lost to
Catholicism during the Protestant Reformation)
as agents vested with the authority of the Pope
to propagate the Catholic faith.2 Those sent soon
came to be called “missionaries” and the places
they were sent, “missions”.
From the 16th century, the concept - ‘the missions’
was closely associated with the practice of
European (and later American) colonialism. The
idea supposed that the ‘established churches’ of
Western Europe had a duty to transplant their form
of Christendom to the previously non-Christianized
nations colonized by their countries. It implied
the superiority of the old Christendom and the
inferiority of the peoples colonized. The religious
mission was normally combined with the secular
enterprise of ‘civilizing’ these peoples, in other
words, transplanting Western cultural models. Thus
the term ‘mission’ came to mean the complex
of activities by which the Western ecclesiastical
system was extended all over the world.
As we read in the Church history, during sixteenth
to seventeenth century, the missionary activity
was mainly instrumentalized by the Padroado and
Patronato. When the Portuguese and Spanish
empires were weakened and new colonial powers
came to control the ‘Third World’ (Africa, Asia,
South America,