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What is Evangelization? What is the “New Evangelization”?

Evangelization means the proclamation of Christ and His Gospel (Greek: evangelion) by word and the testimony of life, in fulfillment of Christ’s command. (Definition from Glossary to Catechism of the Catholic Church (“CCC”), Second Edition.) 

In many decades past in the Christian West, practically everyone knew the basic historical facts and doctrinal truths of the Christian Faith and followed the moral teachings of the Church (or knew it was sin not to). Most Catholics had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (we meet Him every Sunday in the Eucharist!) and sought to surrender their lives to Him and live a moral and holy life (albeit, of course, with our human failings and sin).

Today, however, the world has substantially changed. The culture is no longer Christian but secular and in many respects anti-religious. Many people no longer believe in God or are indifferent to Him and His Church, and even many Christians live on a practical level as if God did not exist and had no place in their daily lives. The culture seeks to make up its own morals based on its own relative values, spurning divinely revealed truth (e.g., Scripture), any transcendental dimension, and in many cases also spurning reason for ideology. 

Christianity is as foreign to this culture as it was to the Roman Empire in the 1st Century, to the Frankish Empire in the 8th Century, and the “New World” in the 15th and 16th Centuries. The “Christendom” of the West no longer exists.

Hence the need for a “New Evangelization” in today’s Church and today’s world. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gives the background of the “New Evangelization” this way:

The period of the New Evangelization began with the [Vatican II] Council; this was basically Pope John XXIII’s intention. Pope John Paul II strongly emphasized the “need” for it in a world that is undergoing great changes, and this is becoming ever more evident. “Need” in the sense that the Gospel must be expressed in new ways; “need” also in the other sense, that the world stands in need of a word, in the confusion and difficulty of finding the way today. There is a common situation in the world: there is secularization, the absence of God, the difficulty of approaching him, of seeing him as a reality that is relevant to one’s life.
(Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Interview with Journalists, 23 March 2012.)

Evangelization (proclamation of Jesus Christ) does take place in just about everything the Church and our Parish does, and in the witness of the lives of Catholic Christians who have a commitment to Christ and truly seek to live their faith in their daily lives. Yet all of us are immersed in our secular, materialistic culture and cannot help but be affected by it, knowingly or unknowingly. That is why Pope St. John XXIII and all the popes since have said that renewal must occur first within the Church, and then in the world.