HomeArticles*IssuesNew Evangelization and the 9-year program of the Church in the Philippines

New Evangelization and the 9-year program of the Church in the Philippines

Photo by Fr. Aaron Bamba OC
Photo by Fr. Aaron Bamba OC

Almost five years ago, the Catholic Bishops’ of the Philippines, whose president was then Archbishop Palma, issued a special Pastoral letter which came out last July 9, 2012. This letter described a program that was to be implemented over a span of 9 years, a journey that every Catholic Filipino has been invited to embark on. In fact, the letter marked the start of a 9-year journey to implement a new evangelization in the Philippine Church, in view of the 500th year anniversary of the arrival of Christianity on Philippine soil.

History tells us about the coming of Christianity to the Philippines on March 16, 1521 and so in the year 2021, we are celebrating the fifth centennial anniversary of its advent. The Church therefore “looks forward with gratitude and joy to March 16, 2021, the fifth centenary of the coming of Christianity to our beloved land.” We are invited to “remember with thanksgiving the first Mass celebrated on Limasawa Island on March 31, Easter Sunday March 31 of that same blessed year. . . . Indeed the year 2021 will be a year of great jubilee for the Church in the Philippines.” So the letter invites readers to embark on a nine-year spiritual journey that will culminate with the great jubilee of 2021 . . . a grace-filled event of blessings for the Church, which started on October 21, 2012 and will culminate on March 16, 2021.”

Truly, these past centuries have been full of graces. Filipinos, with the grace of God, by rejecting the “sword” of the Spanish “conquistadores,” have accepted the “cross” and today we benefit from that faith given to us and handed down by our ancestors. As we know, each year a theme is chosen for all the local churches in the Philippines to deepen. The basic over all theme is about “new evangelization” which is a “nine-year journey that has already been charted, and climaxes with the Jubilee Year 2021”. The expressions of this evangelization are: Integral Faith Formation (2013); the Laity (2014); the Poor (2015); the Eucharist and the Family (2016); the Parish as a Communion of Communities (2017); the Clergy and the Religious (2018); the Youth (2019); Ecumenism and Inter-Religious Dialogue (2020); Missio Ad Gentes (2021). These are the nine pastoral priorities of the Church in the Philippines.

New Evangelization

Is this 9-year program just an addendum to the program of the church, as if the church had to invent something to cover up the gap of not doing anything? Of course not. The world today is experiencing an epochal change. Secularization and secularism are on the rise and seem unstoppable. There is an obvious confusion about what is true, noble, good and beautiful, and this leads to a certain relativism in which the point of reference for many Christians is not something objective but something pleasing only to man. Hedonism has developed to the point that relativism seems to be the call of the day. So the letter rightly calls the church to an awareness that “in the face of a secularism which in some parts of our present world has itself become a kind of “dominant religion”, before the reality of billions of people who live in our time and who have not yet encountered Jesus Christ nor heard of His Gospel, how challenged we are, how challenged we must be, to embark on the endeavor of the “New Evangelization!” In this era, we need an epochal reformation in the church.

The new evangelization therefore is a call to us all, and our challenge. This has been already mentioned by St. John Paul II when he was then pope. New evangelization–new not in the sense of its contents, but in its transmission: to be creative in adopting new methods, new enthusiasm, and new ways of presenting to the post-modern secularist world the message of Jesus Christ as contained in the gospel. The Philippine bishops are challenging us all: “how can we not want and long to share Him with brothers and sisters around us who are yet to know and love Him, who are yet to receive the fullness of Life for which we have all been created, and without which their hearts will be ever restless – until they find Jesus and His heart which awaits them?”

This year then, let’s continue to be new evangelizers! We are invited to continuously proclaim, transmit and witness to the Gospel. We are also invited to go to the “peripheries of existence,” and not to be “self-referential” as a church, but instead to open ourselves to, and welcome other people’s lives, society, culture and history in order to let these realities enter the Person of Jesus Christ and His living community, the Church.

Of course this “New Evangelization” is primarily directed to those who have drifted away from the Faith and from the Church; but in a special way we also need to consider “the new methods and means for transmitting the Good News” more effectively to our people. The same pastoral letter challenges us to “foster in the Church in our country a renewed commitment and enthusiasm in living out the Gospel in all the diverse areas of our lives, in ‘real-life practice’, challenged anew . . . to become more and more authentic witnesses of our faith, especially to our Asian neighbors, as a fruit of our intensified intimacy with the Lord.”

Fr. Emmanuel Mijares, Ph.D.

 

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