In mid-May, I spent two intense days in Lisbon, where a new Portuguese edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic was being prepared as a catechetical resource for World Youth Day-2023. In and around that wonderful city, I had the pleasure of meeting with Catholic educators from all over Portugal; I was hosted for talks at two vibrant parishes; and I got a whirlwind tour of World Youth Day GHQ: a former military commissary, where a different kind of army — a regiment of energetic young Catholic activists — was handling the logistics of an international gathering that would tax the capacity of the most expensive society “event planner.” In each of these encounters, I found a great hope that WYD-2023, under the maternal protection of Our Lady of Fatima, would energize the New Evangelization in Portugal and perhaps throughout western Europe.
So I cannot imagine that my Portuguese friends were replete with pentecostal joy when the coordinator of World Youth Day, Lisbon auxiliary bishop Américo Aguiar, said in a July 6 interview that, at WYD-2023, “we don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all.” Rather, WYD-2023’s goal was to create a situation in which each young person could say, “I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life in a different way, but we are brothers and we go together to build the future.”
This striking renunciation of the Great Commission — “Go and make disciples of all nations…teaching them all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20) — might not have resonated beyond Portugal had Pope Francis not announced, three days later, his intention to create Bishop Aguiar a cardinal on Sept. 30. The usual Internet brawl ensued, and the Lisbon auxiliary, evidently feeling some pressure, explained that his words had been taken out of context; all he was saying was that there would be no “proselytism” at WYD-2023.
What the bishop and cardinal-designate did not explain was why fulfilling the Great Commission through evangelization and catechesis — hitherto understood to be essential components of any World Youth Day — was “proselytism.”
Pondering this latest example of Catholicism dumbed down to the Religion of Nice, I remembered a radically different approach to explaining the relationship of the Lord Jesus to the yearnings of young hearts. It was the approach taken by Pope John Paul II at Tor Vergata in Rome, during the night vigil before the closing Mass of World Youth Day-2000. There, the pope put Christ at the center of an immense gathering of Catholic young adults with these memorable words:
It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.
Such robust Christocentrism is not, I submit, “proselytism. It is a Christian witness to Christian truth. It’s an affirmation that combines conviction with compassion. It’s an explication of the basic confession of Christian faith: Kýrios Iēsoûs, “Jesus is Lord.” And that Christocentrism is what has inspired millions of the young Catholics who have attended World Youth Days since 1984 to be the missionary disciples they were baptized to be.
As for this tiresome psychobabble about walking together into the future, Bishop Aguiar and others who indulge it might reconsider St. Luke’s beautifully crafted story of the two disciples walking to Emmaus on Easter Sunday afternoon (Luke 24:13-35). They were walking together. But they were walking in the wrong direction until they encountered the Risen One. Then they started walking together again, but now in the right direction: toward a Jerusalem transformed by the Resurrection, from which they and the others who had met the Lord Jesus would be sent throughout the world to invite others to “the city of the living God” (Hebrews 12:22).
That is the “walking together” that World Youth Days should inspire: a walking together that leads to Christ and to mission.
(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)
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Thank you Mr Weigel for your inspiration to call us to Christ. My son is one of these young men, empowered to seek Jesus and hear his voice in his life and the life of his brothers and sisters in Christ as he journeys to WYD. Yours sincerely, Michael Dougherty
Good article. But I would not accept that proselytism is a bad thing. The online dictionary gives the definition of proselytism as “to convert or recruit to a new religion…” What is wrong with that?
Crusader, go back and read it again.
I took your recommendation and read it again.
I was referencing the following paragraph:
“What the bishop and cardinal-designate did not explain was why fulfilling the Great Commission through evangelization and catechesis — hitherto understood to be essential components of any World Youth Day — was “proselytism.”
What is your point?
A clarifying question…
So, the point is that “proselytism” can be made to look like something imposed, while evangelization and catechesis are clearly something proposed, educational, and an invitation.
Thank you,George, well done!
Leadup commentaries on to the World Youth Day in Lisbon propose a possible mix of both an interreligious dialogue and the Catholic Faith. Some even mention Fratelli Tutti which, problematically, ends with a “Prayer to the Creator.”
So, how to advance openness to BOTH God—for Jews, Muslims and Christians—AND to the very nature of the self-revealing Triune One? For some of the speakers, here are three messages waiting to happen…
FIRST, this on dialogue among “persons” rather than among the religions as such:
“Equality, which is a presupposition of interreligious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ—who is God himself made man—in relation to the founders of the other religions” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus (The Lord Jesus), 2000, n. 22).
SECOND, this on wasting time, from the former Pope Benedict:
I am urging people to realize that a war has indeed been declared on the West. I am not pushing for a rejection of dialogue, which we need more than ever with those Islamic countries that wish to live in peaceful coexistence with the West, to our mutual benefit. I am asking for something more fundamental: I am asking for people to realize that dialogue will be a waste of time if one of the two partners to the dialogue states beforehand that one idea is as good as the other (“Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam,” 2006, p. 45).
Ahmad al-Tayyeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar and co-signer of the Abu Dhabi Declaration and supporter of Fratelli tutti, is said to have 150 million Muslim followers…but what of the other 90 percent (!) of the globes 1.5 billion followers of Islam?
THIRD, the difference between Fratelli Tutti’s Creator God and the self-disclosed Christian God is more than a conceptual obstacle to be possibly marginalized by, yes, greatly needed human fraternity:
“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of WHY Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be. ONLY THE FACT IS AFFIRMED IN THE TWO RELIGIONS, NOT THE WHY. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (von Balthasar, “My Work in Retrospect,” 1993, italics as caps).
Isn’t the Trinitarian and self-revealed “WHY”—the gratuitous overflowing of divine love—the only real foundation of any deeply human “fraternity”? The needed message for youth set adrift by post-Christian modernity and relativism?
Yes Peter without it everything else will fail
The Pope has a problem with conversion. Effectively, he seems to holds it is sufficient to be a good Muslim, Protestant, Buddhist, atheist etc suggesting that there is no need for the True Church. What does that say about his understanding of Catholicism? Just be a good person and you require nothing else isn’t even Christian. Universalist possibly?
Evangelical Protestants are in the active business of conversion, those whom Catholic priests dismissively turn away find among them a friendly open door. In many parts of the world Evangelical Protestantism is the face of Christianity.
Does this Jesuit pope regard the proselytising fathers who went for instance to China and Japan and suffered for their beliefs as an aberration?
Islam it should be noted has no problem with the notion of conversion.
George. Bravo. “Dumbed down to the religion of nice”. Yes, this has been the problem not just in the church but in all facets of life. The refusal to allow discussion about biological reality as the secular world rushes to mutilate children in support of Trans ideology, ditto the acceptance of wanting to “bless” gay unions. The eradication of American history , replaced by a false history as in the 1619 Project. Woke ideology placed on an altar while anti white racism receives approval. But above all, be nice, even if such niceness requires acceptance if something morally disgusting. Its time to stand up for catholic belief and western civilization. If others find that not very nice, who cares??
Amen to that! Enough of these false shepherds and their confusing dialogue. I refuse to follow that! I do not recognize his voice!
“When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.”
I cannot understand why Catholic Leaders don’t want to share Eternal Life with the world.
John 17:3
Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
John 6:68
As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
John 3:36
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.
Wonderful George.
Paradoxically, WYD will have masses of young pilgrims witnessing their bold love of Christ with the leadership.
Thank you, George. Catholicism dumbed down to the Religion of Nice. So aptly stated.
Today is the feast day of the Martyrs of Cordoba. Some of whom converted from Islam and all of whom practiced their Christian faith openly. Should have been nicer and less offensive to their Islamic neighbors. May they pray for us and the Church to fulfill the Divine Commission.
George was very clear! Thank you, George. Put Jesus Christ in the center. I trust in Jesus, before and above everything.