The Timeless Tradition of the New Evangelization

Faithful Catholics, especially those who have either witnessed or experienced the liturgical and theological abuses of recent memory, understandably flinch when the word “new” is used in any reference to teaching or living our Faith.  After all, the Church’s nature is such that it teaches unchanging, unfailing, and infallible truth.  But the word “new” in and of itself denotes a sort of essential change: what is now [being taught, being done, etc.] is different somehow than what came before - it breaks with tradition.  Surely, they would thus assert, the words “new evangelization,” understood as an operation of the unchanging Church, is a contradictory term?!  As understandable as this assertion born from wounded experience may seem, it is however far from the truth of things.  The “new evangelization” is an act of tradition; it preserves rather than creates, for it communicates to new ears that which has not changed in over 2,000 years.

“The human person,” begins Stanislaw Grygiel in chapter 3 of his book, Discovering the Human Person, “doesn’t need evangelization.  He desires it… The restless human heart speaks of God, and the desire of this restless heart creates poetry and goodness (p. 83).”  This brief quote has a lot to unpack, and unfortunately we do not have time to address it all here.  Specifically, I lament that we do not have the space to explore the nature of human as creating being, who needs to make something new in the face of his fulfilled (or thwarted) desires.  No, we must content ourselves with pointing out the language he uses of Man’s desire, restlessness, and human heart speaking.  These are all phrases which echo a previous post of mine introducing Anamnesis as the operation “reminding” Man of what he truly desires.  In this case, Grygiel establishes that the echos of every human heart desire God as an essential operation of his soul.  No matter the age, the culture, the external circumstances, or the political pressures, Man seeks an encounter with God and longs to recognize Him within that encounter.

We are not talking about robots, however.  Our claim would be much easier to back up if we were able to make wide-sweeping generalized statements about human preferences like we could about birds or non-sentient creatures.  No, we are talking about subjects, individuals who are themselves subject to their external stimuli and have their perspectives, personalities, and preferences shaped by their environments.  Nevertheless, in spite of changing external stimuli and evolving cultural and mechanical developments, “Neither God, the Lord of Time, nor the desire of man’s restless heart is subject to change.  Only the circumstances change in which the human person asks about God and seeks Him.  [Though the circumstances which inform human desire constantly change, and can even] suffocate its voice to the extent that it no longer resembles a heart but rather a hardened mass… changing circumstances never have so much influence that they force the heart to cease to be itself.  In other words, they never force it to stop taking its orientation from its restlessness for God (p. 83).”  Turns out, desire for God is that one wide-sweeping generalization that we can make about human preferences.

So, if changing circumstances do nothing to change the inner orientation of the human heart towards God, shouldn’t our evangelization efforts remain the same, too?  After all, God and the Truth is never changing.  With this reasoning, we should grant some forgiveness to our brothers and sisters in Faith who reject the New Evangelization based on the word “New,” and who see in every major development and innovation the potential of modernizing the Church, forsaking her nature as unchanging.  But the fact is that those who reject the New Evangelization as some novel, Church-changing agenda are woefully mistaken.  Remember: the external stimuli which inform the human heart change constantly, which in turn means that the human heart is able to recognize truth and God only in the language of the time in which man exists.  All this to say: the New Evangelization is precisely an exercise which truly makes the timeless truths of the Faith timeless.  It is presenting unchanging truths to new minds in ways they understand, so that rather than handing on so many formulaic rituals and blindly memorized creeds (which quickly devolves into historicism), the Faith itself is preserved and entrusted to the next generation of humans.  This is, if we are to accept Pieper’s definitions of Tradition, a true act of Tradition: handing on that which must be preserved in a way that it is unchanged from the beginning, and yet accepted and communicated to those who would accept it.

The world is a volatile place.  Especially in our modern age, which sees no name, custom, or creed as sacrosanct and above the touch of change to fit modern sentiment, it is understandable for otherwise well-intentioned Catholics to recoil from anything considered to be “new.”  And yet, Christ Himself came to make all things new.  He is ever present because He is, in a sense, always new.  He is constantly applicable to every age - but we, His missionaries, must take the time to present Him to every age.  Only then can we truly fulfill our own mission to bring Him to every corner of the earth, in every age.