Evangelii Gaudium–Insights

The Anchor of Hope

Finally Pope Francis takes up for consideration some attitudinal factors that could drag missionaries to the grip of the missionary crisis. He refers to the “lack of deep spirituality which turns into pessimism, fatalism, and mistrust” which induces people to think “that nothing will change and it is useless to make the effort. They think: […]

‘Passion for People’

Along with personal encounter with Jesus, Pope Francis equally emphasizes ‘passion for people’ as an integral element of spirited evangelization. Even the identity of the missionary call lies in belonging to the people, says the Pope: “He (Jesus) takes us from the midst of His people and He sends us to His people; without this […]

Glory of the Father to be sought above all

After emphasising the need of “sustaining our own renewed experience of savouring Christ’s friendship” (#266) as a means to overcome the missionary crisis, Pope Francis, in his EG goes to say that even that is not final step. Ultimately it is the ‘glory of Father’ that we must seek in all our endeavours. That alone […]

Living Jesus in our Daily Life

After suggesting ‘encounter with Jesus’ as the key to sustaining missionary fervour, the Apostolic Exhortation, EG proceeds to explain how it works. This is done in two stages. Firstly, the Pope takes pain to establish that the missionary enthusiasm is based upon the missionary conviction that Jesus meets the deepest yearnings of people. Secondly he […]

Encounter with Jesus is the Key to Missionary Fervour

In the previous episode we saw that Pope Francis, after exhorting the Christians not to blame today’s hardships for their missionary crisis but to attribute it to their own subjective limitations, suggested a way out: ‘to learn from the saints who confronted the difficulties of their own day and to rediscover some of the reasons […]

“Things are not as easy as they used to be”

It is a plain fact that there prevails lack of missionary impulse in the Church today. Fully aware of this sad fact, some people nowadays console themselves saying that “things are not as easy as they used to be.” But EG rebuts such an opinion by saying: “yet we know that the Roman empire was […]

Prayer and Work

In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis speaks of both prayer and work as constitutive elements of new evangelization. According to him, “Spirit-filled evangelizers are evangelizers who pray and work” (#262). In the early history of the Church there was a kind of rift between ‘contemplation and action.’ It was St Benedict who emphasized the need to […]

The Spirit-filled Evangelization is New Evangelization

Usually something is said to be “spirited” if it has some interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity. From this one may be led to think that ‘spirited evangelization’ means carrying out a lot of tasks related to proclamation of the Gospel with great fervour and dutifulness, […]

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