Gun Control Issue and the Call to New Evangelization – Held on Sunday, January 27, 2013

Personal Note on Posting Timeline

For those of you who come to this site I had hoped to post on the Tuesday, then the Wednesday following the Sunday that we had our gathering.  Obviously I haven’t been faithful to that time line.  If you come to this site by Friday at noon, I will have either posted or informed you of the status of the post.

Preview – The Challenge of the Church’s Call to a New Evangelization.

I began this session focusing particularly on the comment that Faryl had made with the goal of setting it in the context of the call for a new Evangelization [I didn’t succeed very well].  Faryl had spoken of the “closed minded politically correct” dimension of our culture.  It is obvious that she understands “politically correct” in a negative sense.  Her comments reflect the cultural conflicts that mark our society at the present.  For me the question is how do we respond to the Call to a New Evangelization in such a context.

Below is the thought of Fr. Lonergan on the task of training people for their pastoral ministry.  It is different words but the concept is the same, how do we evangelize in our changing culture.  Here is how Fr. Lonergan put it back in 1973.

“But the fundamental issue is that every class in every culture has different powers of assimilation.  Preaching the Gospel is a matter of adapting in each case to the relevant differences.  Preaching the Gospel is not a matter of imposing your culture on other people.  Christians have been trying to do that for a very long time.  It’s not a matter of putting a patch on somebody else’s culture.  And the patch tears the whole garment.  It’s a matter of finding in the other culture the virtualities, the potentialities for expressing the Christian message.  And the differences may be individual or specific or generic.  And so pastoral theology is a matter of organizing the training of preachers and the assignment of tasks so that individual differences will be met on the individual level, specific differences on the group level, generic differences on the regional level.

Pastoral theology can be just as complicated as the high command and make just as many mistakes.  It’s not a matter of listening on the suicide phone or nothing like that.  In the training of preachers there are many goals that have to be kept in mind.  But the most important is to secure a thorough understanding of the message to be communicated in all its dimensions and possibilities.  And the key element is understanding.  If you don’t understand you can repeat formula.  And the other people can repeat formula.  That’s what we’re trying to get away from.  If you do understand you can say the same thing in a thousand different ways.  You can watch people’s faces and when they’re not catching on you can change your pitch and keep changing it until they start smiling.  When they do they got it.  And that’s the fundamental element in pastoral theology.  Help people to understand.”

By “class” Fr. Lonergan is referencing the different social classes in a society; by “powers of assimilation” he means the capacity of individuals in those different classes to understand.  It’s one thing to talk with someone who has a high school education, another who has obtained a PhD.  His focus is an invitation to identify the concrete and real differences between oneself as a believer and the concrete other who is not a believer.  He reminds us that those differences can be individual, specific, or generic but he doesn’t tell us what those differences are; that is the task of the believer who is called to evangelize.  He tells us further to identify the virtualities and potentialities in the other’s culture for expressing the Christian message.  Again he doesn’t tell what those virtualities and potentialities are; he leaves that to those called to evangelize.  The heart of the matter though is not a matter of reciting formulas but of understanding the Christian message.

There are two things he tells evangelization is not.  It “is not a matter of imposing your culture on other people.”  He reminds us that “If you don’t understand you can repeat formula.  And the other people can repeat formula.  That’s what we’re trying to get away from.”  So it’s not a matter of repeating formula.

After a brief conversation on this notion, Annette raised the issue of “Gun Controls” and for the next half hour there occurred a lively conversation with strongly held positions for and against.  It took me about four times to bring the conversation to an end.  The conversation further highlighted the cultural divide.

I would really be interested in anyone who would take the time to read the two paragraphs above and attempt to apply it to the gun control issue or really any issue that reveals our different cultural values.  What I’m not interested in is your expressing your already firmly held position on gun control. To move forward is the challenge.

I will share our discussion on the Wooing of Rebekah, Gen. 24: 01 – 67 in my next post.

Your comments, observations, questions are welcomed.  See “comment” link below