Faith and Culture

Paragraphs sixty-eight through seventy of Evangelii Gaudium speak of the need to blend our culture and our faith together in order to provide a fertile field for sowing the Word of God.

I suspect that most of us, including me, grew up in a very Catholic culture. My parents introduced us to our faith through their own lives of piety and devotion. Even though I was younger than six years old, I still remember learning to pray the rosary while my mother stood at the ironing board pressing the family laundry. We attended Mass every Sunday, went to Catholic grade school, prayed the rosary together after supper, and attended devotions to our Mother of Perpetual Help on Tuesdays. During the summer when school was not in session, my mother sent us to the church on the Friday before First Friday in the months of July and August so that we got to confession once a month. I am sure that much of this nourished my vocation to the priesthood.

Pope Francis acknowledges the reality of the Catholic culture in countries where the majority of the people are baptized, especially in countries where Catholicism is still the predominant religious expression of Christianity. At the same time, he recognizes that our increasingly secularized society has created a situation in which that culture is disappearing. When he and his predecessors speak of "new evangelization," they are not speaking of a new Gospel. Rather they are speaking of preaching the Gospel in a new fashion that will permeate the barriers that society and culture sometimes throw up as roadblocks. These roadblocks have diluted or have stifled the effect of the Gospel. Many have turned from the culture of faith-based lives to a culture which glorifies consumerism, self-aggrandizement, and hedonism.

Consequently, a new missionary spirit is needed even in countries which are nominally Christian or Catholic. If people will not hear the Gospel preached on Sunday, the Church needs to find a new way to preach that Gospel. If popular devotional practices have drawn attention away from the core elements of our faith, then we need to find a way to recognize that devotion and piety are poor substitutes for the message that Jesus came to announce. We need to look beyond our church doors after we have gathered to pray and find a way to make the message heard again. To iterate the Holy Father's words, we need to find a way to overcome the breakdown of our religious culture by overcoming: the lack of opportunity for dialogue in families, the influence of the communications media, a relativistic subjectivism, unbridled consumerism which feeds the market, the lack of pastoral care among the poor, the failure of our institutions to be welcoming, and our difficulty in restoring a mystical adherence to the faith in a pluralistic religious landscape.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator