The month of November gives us much to reflect upon and prayerfully celebrate not only as Catholics, but also as citizens of this great country of ours. First, the month of November is the month that we remember those who “have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.”
We began this month with the great feast of All Saints in which we celebrate the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that is the Communion of Saints in heaven and ask for their prayers and intercession for us who are the Church on earth still continuing our pilgrim journey of faith. The feast of All Saints is unique in that it is a celebration of all the saints in heaven, not only the ones who have been officially proclaimed saints by the Church, but all the unnamed saints that are in heaven who fought the good fight and ran the race and now enjoy fullness of life with the Lord in paradise. This feast is a reminder that each of us, no matter our state and vocation in the Church, is called to be holy, to become a saint.
The following day, Nov. 2, we then celebrated the feast of All Souls in which we remember in a special way and pray for the poor souls in Purgatory or the Church Suffering, who are being purified and prepared for everlasting life in heaven. The feast of All Souls reminds us of our brothers and sisters in Christ, who are one with us in the Body of Christ, the Church, who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to bring about in God’s grace their final purification for heaven. In fact, praying for the dead and for the souls in Purgatory should be a regular part of our Catholic life as it is part of our obligation to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially those in Purgatory who are solely dependent upon our prayers and sacrifices for their final transformation in Christ. As we so often pray in our Catholic Tradition:
May the Divine assistance remain always with us, and may the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
November for us in the United States is also the month of Thanksgiving. I want to take this opportunity to wish all of you a blessed Thanksgiving, but to especially offer my heartfelt gratitude to so many of you for your dedication and service to the parishes and the work of the Diocese. We should all be very thankful to be in a Diocese that is so vibrant and growing, and all of the good work in our Diocese of building up the Body of Christ would not be possible without your generosity and dedicated work.
We also need to recall that Thanksgiving has been a part of our national heritage from the very beginnings of our history as a nation, and it is a holiday and tradition that is deeply Christian. Thanksgiving, as we all know, dates back to some of the first European settlers who colonized North America. We commemorate their great feast of Thanksgiving offered to God for the blessings of life, freedom, health, and protection as they began their new life in the New World. Thus, Thanksgiving for us today should remain the same — to take some time to thank God for the blessings of our lives, our faith, our country, and our freedom to live our faith without persecution or permission.
This precious gift of religious liberty in our country is also a reminder to all of us that we have an obligation, as members of the Church, to participate in the missionary mandate that Christ gave to the Church — and to each one of us — to make disciples of all the nations. Every member of the Church, by virtue of their Baptism, and by becoming sharers in the prophetic mission of Christ, is called to give witness and testimony to the Gospel of Jesus Christ through both our actions and words. With all this in mind, we have heard much about the call to the New Evangelization in the recent history of the Church, and that the Church, as we head into the Third Millennium of Christianity, is at the dawn of a renewed era of evangelization and dialogue with the modern world. This, of course, was one of the primary visions of the Second Vatican Council, and the call to a New Evangelization was certainly reinforced and often repeated by Blessed Pope John Paul II and our current Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI. However, there have been two recent events that seem to be hastening the arrival of the New Evangelization and signaling an even more urgent need in our modern world for a new and compelling witness to Christ. The first event was Pope Benedict XVI creating the new Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, (Ubicumque et Semper). The creation of this Pontifical Council shows that the New Evangelization is a major priority in the Church and the function of the Council is to provide the guidance, support, and resources to the Church to more fully implement the New Evangelization. In addition, the Holy Father also called for the subject of the next General Assembly of Bishops in October to be the New Evangelization and its implementation. Traditionally, this General Assembly will be followed by an Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Benedict XVI on the New Evangelization.
The second event occurred last month when Pope Benedict XVI called for a Year of Faith to be celebrated throughout the entire Church beginning on Oct. 11, 2012 through the end of November 2013. This Year of Faith corresponds with the 50th Anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and also the 20th Anniversary of the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In this Year of Faith, the Holy Father is calling upon the Church to once again rediscover the gift of our faith, particularly as expressed in the documents of Vatican II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, so that through a profound spiritual renewal, there can be a serious commitment throughout the entire Church for a New Evangelization. The Holy Father states:
“Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14): it is the love of Christ that fills our hearts and impels us to evangelize. Today as in the past, he sends us through the highways of the world to proclaim his Gospel to all the peoples of the earth (cf. Mt 28:19). Through his love, Jesus Christ attracts to himself the people of every generation: in every age he convokes the Church, entrusting her with the proclamation of the Gospel by a mandate that is ever new. Today too, there is a need for stronger ecclesial commitment to new evangelization in order to rediscover the joy of believing and the enthusiasm for communicating the faith. In rediscovering his love day by day, the missionary commitment of believers attains force and vigor that can never fade away. Faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and when it is communicated as an experience of grace and joy. It makes us fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and enables us to bear life-giving witness: indeed, it opens the hearts and minds of those who listen to respond to the Lord’s invitation to adhere to his word and become his disciples.
— Apostolic Letter, Porta Fidei, 7
Therefore the Year of Faith will not only allow all of us to more deeply learn and know our faith, but to put our faith in action. The Year of Faith will encourage all of us to become more deeply rooted in our Catholic identity and mission so that we can become more effective witnesses to the presence of Christ who is present and working in the world through the Church.
I think it is also very important that we seek to more fully understand what the task and work of the New Evangelization entails. This, of course, will be the work of the new Pontifical Council in Rome and of the General Assembly of Bishops in October, but as we move forward here in the United States and in our own local Church in Fort Worth, we need to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit to help us discern our work and activities in the New Evangelization.
Recently, Cardinal Wuerl of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. gave an excellent address to seminarians at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York that gives us some good insight. In his address, Cardinal Wuerl sees the urgency of the New Evangelization as a response to the growing threat of secularism and the increasing attempts to deny the Christian roots of our country and culture. He also sees the New Evangelization as a re-proposing of the Gospel to a culture that once had, but lost its Christian roots:
What brings a new urgency to our mission is the recognition of just how widespread and profound is the new secularism…Unlike evangelization efforts that began with the apostles and continued for centuries with missionaries going out to foreign lands where the Gospel had never been heard of, the new evangelization begins right in believers’ own backyards, preaching to “those who are convinced they already know the faith and it holds no interest for them.”
In addition, Cardinal Wuerl also noted that several decades of poor catechesis and theological confusion has resulted in a couple of generations of Catholics who are poorly catechized and who need the faith re-proposed to them with solid and clear catechesis that lays out a firm foundation for what the Church teaches and believes. He states that the New Evangelization needs to reach out to “those who have been baptized but never really evangelized…These are the people who were raised in the faith, often received their sacraments, but for whom “the Gospel doesn’t mean anything in particular.” Cardinal Wuerl’s words are important because they remind us that the mission fields for the New Evangelization are not necessarily in some far away country, or are filled with people who have never known Christ. The mission fields for the New Evangelization are here and now, in our families, parishes, schools, workplaces — the mission fields are in the midst of our ordinary lives and the people we encounter.
We live in a very challenging and exciting time in the Church, and whenever there are great challenges, the Lord always provides us with great graces and gifts. The upcoming Year of Faith is one of those great moments of grace in challenging times and will be a great opportunity for all of us in the Diocese to rediscover the gift of our Catholic faith, not only for our own relationship with Christ, but also so we can grow together in our communion of faith to become more effective witnesses of our Catholic faith and ambassadors of the New Evangelization.
On another note, I wanted to make you aware that I have begun an “envisioning” process within the Diocese that will help me evaluate the current reality of our Diocese and discern the “signs of the times” to help develop some priorities and vision for moving forward over the next five years. There will be more to come on this after the New Year, but I wanted to ask for your prayers that the Holy Spirit will guide this process and help me as your Bishop, and those who assist me in my office of teaching, sanctifying, and governing, to see the Lord’s plan for our Diocese and the work that He wishes to accomplish in our local Church.
In the meantime, I pray that you have a blessed Thanksgiving, and I look forward to celebrating with you the holy season of Advent and also the new translation of the English Roman Missal. May this time be a great moment of grace and renewal in our lives and our families.
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