MAGPAS AND THE NEW EVANGELIZATION

 (Homily delivered by His Eminence Gaudencio B. Cardinal Rosales during MAGPAS 3 held at the La Salle Greenhills gymnasium on October 22, 2011 at 9 a.m.)

I like to open the reflection with the story of two young boys, blood brothers, but of completely different dispositions. The older one was a diehard pessimist and the younger one an unimpeachable optimist. So the mother brought the two brothers to a psychologist to help them grow up gracefully. The mentor lost no time to bring the pessimist to a room filled with all kinds of toys, mechanical, battery-operated with encouraging martial music piped through the corners of the room. In a couple of minutes the pessimistic lad got bored, and noisily complained on his way out. On the other hand the optimistic young one was led to a smelly stable with all the dirt and dung that assailed anyone’s sense of smell. The young optimist jumped shouting in glee, “Aha, there must be a horse nearby…”

I should be pardoned for using the analogy of the optimist and the pessimist as an approach to evangelization, illustrating the fact that what one gets from evangelization depends on what s/he brings to an encounter with the good news that is Jesus. The personal disposition of mind, heart and psyche defines one’s response to the pedagogy of evangelization, if ever there was one.

Pope Benedict XVI said after the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops that, “what was often underlined was the need to offer the Gospel anew to people who do not know it very well or who have even moved away from the Church.” The Good News of the Father’s love in Jesus, His Son, our Savior, must again and again be offered in any moment and manner of evangelization.

Manners of learning, as learning itself, have changed as cultures are muted by the latest tools and ways of communication, doing business and entertainment. Faith in a transcendent being, we know as God, remains seriously challenged today by materialism, the result of the so-called progress offered humans by the advances of science, but more so very insidiously defied by what the Holy Father calls the “dictatorship of relativism” that recognizes nothing as having ultimate value, thus allowing only the individual and his options or wishes to be final arbiter or right and wrong, good and bad. 

The new evangelization cannot and will not change the content of true evangelization. It will always preach the Kingdom of God, our Father, and the Salvation offered in Jesus Christ to all humans of all races, cultures and conditions of life. How to evangelize using today’s tools of communications, their language and with who can be grouped as our companions on the way back to our Father remains as one of the challenges in sharing the good news with today’s generations.

In the MAGPAS vision that has been crafted by experience as guided by Spirit, we believe that we are directed towards where the Father has called us in Jesus Christ to fullness of life by witnessing to the Kingdom of God, a key word of Jesus in Evangelization (E.N.,10). What the Church will continue to preach in the new evangelization, we will consistently pursue as we have been doing in the past as the peak of all our teaching and seeking, because we have placed God as our Father highest in our scale of values, in our manner of choosing at the point where He has no rival or competitor in our lives. God is always without equal.  

Will the new evangelization make the acceptance of the Good News of God’s love in Jesus, the Christ, easy? What do you think?

We do not anticipate that the new evangelization is going to be easy, and that it will remove the challenges and the cost of accepting salvation in Jesus Christ because the price of evangelization is crucifying effort as the late Pope Paul VI wrote in Evangelii Nuntiandi.

"The Kingdom and this salvation, which are the key words of Jesus Christ’s evangelization, are available to every human being as grace and mercy, and yet at the same time, each individual must gain them by force—they belong to the violent, says the Lord (Matthew 11:12), through toil and suffering, through a life lived according to the Gospel, through abnegation and the Cross, through the spirit of the Beatitudes. But above all each individual gains them through a total interior renewal which the Gospels call metanoia; it is a radical conversion, a profound change of mind and heart.”

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is aloes at hand” (Matthew 4:17). 

In the MAGPAS we accept, and we pray, that we may remain faithful to the direction and motivation of our vision, that our witnessing to the Kingdom of God is by living the Paschal Mystery. And the Paschal Mystery for us is to transit from suffering through death unto arriving at new life. Some pain is necessary in order to achieve a harvest or success, or, as the saying goes, “no pain, no gain.” And in this difficult or painful process of growing in holiness with Jesus there is no accepted palliative or balm except the love that God shows us in the Lord and the same love we give back to him.

Surprisingly, the manner of accepting the good things and the holiness in evangelization remains still a difficult and demanding way. But the Lord Jesus taught the disciples and those who listened to Him that the Kingdom of the Father is likened to a mustard seed, a pinch of leaven, and the desired crumbs of bread. Or the road to salvation is narrow, but passable. The many small things will add up to the great one, he meant to tell.

If evangelization, then and now, is difficult and challenging because humans are going to accept Jesus as our savior and the Kingdom will bring us to the love of the Father through many Paschal Crossings, then what we are trying to do now in MAGPAS and PONDO NG PINOY with the littlest thing of good we do, can assure us that the joy of the kingdom will be ours. We rehearse our way to the Kingdom through the little things we know we can easily give and do.