In His First Lenten Homily, Father Cantalamessa Reflects on Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation and on the Concept of the Personal Encounter with Christ Rome, February 27, 2015 (Zenit.org) Luca Marcolivio | 445 hits

The theme of Father Raniero Cantalamessas first Lenten homily is Evangelii Gaudium, in which the Papal Household Preacher points out first of allthe thread that unites several post-Council Popes on the subject of evangelization.

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis reminds that the starting point of any sort of evangelization is Baptism: an affirmation that is not new said Blessed Paul VI in Evangelii nuntiandi, and Saint John Paul II in Christifedels laici, while Benedict XVI emphasized the special role of the family in it.

However, in Evangelii Gaudium there is a new element, which is evangelization understood as an encounter with a person, Jesus Christ. This concept, by now somewhat absorbed by post-Conciliar Catholicism, is not, however, entirely taken for granted.

There was a time, in fact, when the idea was favored of an ecclesial encounter, which occurs, namely, through the Sacraments of the Church, whereas the expression personal encounter had to our Catholic ears vaguely Protestant resonances.

For his part, Pope Francis is not thinking obviously of a personal encounter that substitutes the ecclesial; he wishes to say that the ecclesial encounter must also be a free, desired, spontaneous encounter, and not purely nominal, juridical or habit-bound, said Father Cantalamessa.

The Papal Household Preacher then reviewed Christian initiation in the course of the centuries, where early Christianity, underground and persecuted for at least two centuries under the Roman Empire, made the choice of Baptism in adult age, with the catechumenate, and it was the fruit of a personal decision, in addition also risky because of the possibility of martyrdom.

During the Middle Ages, with the coming of the first Christian kingdoms beginning with Clovis Franks Christianity itself was affirmed with the relative inculturation of the masses and Christianity became the hegemonic religion, practiced by almost the totality of the population and transmitted with Baptism, from early childhood, no longer being the consequence of a personal choice.

The advent of modernity, which began with humanism and evolved with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, marks the progressive process of secularism, with the lost of faith or at least of religious practice in ever larger sectors of the population.

Hence the urgency of a New Evangelization, namely of an evangelization that moves from bases different from the traditional and that takes into account the new situation, putting the men of today in conditions of making a free and mature personal decision, precisely as the early Christians who were baptized as adults, thus being real and not just nominal Christians.

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