EG 35: That Which is Most Necessary

Vasnetsov_Maria_MagdaleneWe’ve heard and seen something of this already from Pope Francis, but in Evangelii Gaudium, it gets a concise summary:

35. Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed. When we adopt a pastoral goal and a missionary style which would actually reach everyone without exception or exclusion, the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary. The message is simplified, while losing none of its depth and truth, and thus becomes all the more forceful and convincing.

I’ve known a few intelligent Catholics who are all over the place on an enormous variety of church teaching. The presentation of the faith becomes an exercise in personal cleverness, not the introduction to a person, Jesus Christ. Evangelization is about Jesus, not the Church, or even worse, a church.

About catholicsensibility

Todd lives in Minnesota, serving a Catholic parish as a lay minister.
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