Vatican News: Venite ad Me: An encounter that attracts and captivates
Our Editorial Director reflects on the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document entitled “Venite ad Me: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change.”
By Andrea Tornielli – link to article
“When, in the view of many people, the Catholic faith is no longer the common patrimony of society […] only with great difficulty can the faith touch the hearts of people by means simple speeches or moral appeals, and even less by a general appeal to Christian values. The courageous and integral appeal to principles is essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him.”
When Pope Benedict XVI spoke these words in Fatima on May 13, 2010, the epochal change repeatedly evoked by his successors, Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, had long been underway, but was not yet so apparent.
READ THE FULL TEXT OF “VENITE AD ME”
Sixteen years later, Pope Benedict’s words offer an incisive summary of what it means to bear witness to the Gospel, especially in places where this proclamation has never reached, or where the transmission of the faith has broken down.
They also aptly sum up the heart of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document, Venite ad me, which reflects on how to evangelize amid an epochal change. Its purpose is to offer material for pastoral reflection that encourages every local Church, in its own particular circumstances, to explore new ways of passing on the faith.
Doctrine of the Faith: Returning to kerygma amid crisis in passing on faith
The weakening of the Christian proclamation in lands with a long history of evangelization is hardly a recent development. The very need to speak new languages in presenting the faith lay behind the Second Vatican Council, conceived through the insight of Pope John XXIII and brought to completion by Pope Paul VI.
In Ecclesiam suam, Pope Paul VI explained that the Church approaches the contemporary world with “something to say, a message to give, a communication to make,” convinced that the Gospel must be offered through a relationship of listening and encounter.
Secularization was already underway in the decades before the Council, as the most perceptive observers had recognized. One need only recall the experience of Giovanni Battista Montini, who in the mid-1950s left the Rome of the great gatherings around Pope Pius XII for a rapidly growing Milan, where significant sectors of society were beginning to display a detached indifference toward faith and religious practice. Throughout his years as Archbishop of Milan, and later throughout his pontificate, one insistent question ran through his ministry: how can we proclaim the Gospel to the men and women of today, who seem increasingly distant?
That question is even more urgent at this moment in history, marked, as the Dicastery’s document observes, by the “sovereignty of the self,” the gradual unraveling of interpersonal relationships, and the mediation of digital technology, which ends up altering—almost genetically—our DNA as human beings in relationship with one another.
The question of how to transmit the faith today concerns both the wealthiest and most secularized countries and developing nations, where the number of Christians has grown but which are certainly not immune to this epochal change. This makes the document’s inclusion of contributions and reflections from so many Bishops’ Conferences particularly striking.
The answer, clearly discernible also in the teaching of the most recent Successors of Peter, is first and foremost to return to the kerygma: the proclamation of the essentials of the faith.
This requires an awareness—unfortunately still not sufficiently widespread—that appeals to moral values and Christian principles can never take for granted what must come first: the encounter with Christ. Passing on the faith today cannot begin simply with teaching a body of doctrinal content or religious information, as might still have been possible many decades ago, when the Gospel permeated daily life in the family and society.
Yet in a time like ours, it is equally shortsighted to think that passing on the faith can be entrusted to marketing and pastoral strategies devised on paper. We live submerged in an ocean of shouted words and often unreliable information, in a world where everyone speaks and almost no one listens.
We need witnesses who let the beauty of Christian life shine through. We need to allow ourselves to be drawn by the grace of encounters that touch our hearts, wound us, and bring us closer to the merciful embrace of a God who is love.
We need living communitiesm, and living communities attract. Life is something to recognize, nurture, and accompany, rather than plan or manage from behind a desk. We need communities that introduce adults, as well as children, to the beauty of the experience of faith. In this way, we can proclaim to everyone, in new languages and drawing more fully on the liturgy, popular piety, art, and music, a Gospel message expressed through closeness and welcome.
It is a message embodied in life, one that attracts us and reaches us through the witness of those who have gone before us throughout a history spanning two thousand years. And it reminds all the men and women of our time: “Jesus Christ loves you; He gave His life to save you; and now He is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”