The Gospel is the ever new proclamation of the salvation brought by Christ to render humanity a participant in the mystery of God and in His life of love and to open it to a future of sure and strong hope.
At this moment in the history of the Church in Malta we are called to intensify our work of evangelisation since, as Vatican Council II had said, an entirely new set of circumstances has arisen. The Conciliar Fathers had been farsighted and saw on the horizon the cultural changes we are going through today.
Precisely these changed circumstances, which have created an unexpected situation for believers, requires particular attention to the proclamation of the Gospel, to support one’s faith in situations that are different from the past.
The crisis being experienced in our country along with others, on different levels, bear traces of the exclusion of God from people’s lives, of a generalised indifference toward the Christian faith itself, to the point of attempting to marginalise it from public life. In past decades it was still possible to discover a general Christian sense that unified the common feeling of whole generations, growing up in the shadow of the faith that had moulded the culture.
Today, unfortunately, we are witnessing the drama of a fragmentation that no longer consents to a unified point of reference; moreover, we often see the phenomenon of people who wish to belong to the Church, but are strongly moulded by a vision of life that opposes the faith.
Today the proclamation of Christ as the only saviour of the world seems more complex than in the past; but our task remains the same as at the dawn of our history. The mission has not changed. The Holy Spirit is today moving the Church in a renewed proclamation of hope to the people of our time.
A dynamic continuity exists between the proclamation of the first disciples and our own. In the course of the centuries the Church has never ceased to proclaim the salvific mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that same proclamation today needs a renewed vigour to convince people today, who are often distracted.
Even in people who remain linked to their Christian roots, but live the difficult relationship with modernity, it is important to make it understood that being Christian is not a sort of uniform to wear in private or on particular occasions, but is something alive and all-encompassing, able to take up all that is good in modernity. Because of this, we have to find methods to make the proclamation of salvation more effective, without which personal existence remains in its state of contradiction, deprived of the essential.
I hope we will be able to formulate a plan that reflects the urgency for a renewed proclamation of the Gospel in our present situation by taking care of formation, in particular of the new generations. This should be combined with a proposal of concrete signs able to make evident the answer the Church intends to offer in this peculiar moment.
The words of the late Pope Paul VI are particularly useful in these circumstances: “It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church will evangelise the world, in other words, by her living witness of fidelity to the Lord Jesus – the witness of poverty and detachment, of freedom in the face of the powers of this world, in short, the witness of sanctity” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, 41).
The above is adapted from the address Pope Benedict gave last Monday to members of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelisation. He could have been sending us a message 24 hours after the publication of the referendum results. The direct references to Malta are mine, not his. The Lord works in strange ways, doesn’t He?.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt