A new mission

Pope Benedict dominated headlines in the secular and Catholic press in 2010. Some of these were welcome, while others most certainly were not.

The treatment Pope Benedict received over the sexual abuse scandal at times was manifestly malicious. It is right that the press should ask questions of the head of the Catholic Church, and issue criticisms where appropriate. But it did not always play out that way. The press held the pope responsible for covering up abuses, a notion that did not correspond with the facts, and accused him of being silent on abuse when demonstrably he hadn’t been.

Gradually it is emerging that as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he had tried to act on abuses, generally and in specific cases, but his efforts were rejected by others in the Roman curia. As Pope Benedict, he is now facing the backlash for exactly that which he had tried to address. Alas, the new insights into the pope’s attempts to handle abuses are not receiving headline treatment in the secular press.

And so the public—including many Catholics who do not avail themselves of the Catholic media—is being presented with a distorted image of Pope Benedict.

Many presumed that this image and the perceived inexorable process of secularisation was going to derail Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in September. The Vatican itself was greatly concerned about the reception the Holy Father would receive, while the Church’s critics gleefully anticipated pratfalls and a wholesale rejection of the pope and his message.

As we know, the pope was warmly and enthusiastically received and gave his critics no cause for Schadenfreude.

Long before his pontificate began, Pope Benedict had made the revival of Catholicism in Europe a priority. This year he established the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation to “find the right means to re-propose the perennial truth of the Gospel”.

The cheering crowds in Britain, many of them young people, will have given the New Evangelisation project a massive kick-start. The World Youth Day in Madrid next August doubtless will reinforce an appreciation that many young Europeans are open to receiving the Gospel message of the Church.

After the experience of the papal trip to Britain, New Evangelisation might well become a running story even among those media that had previously found it not newsworthy when popes drew hundreds of thousands of people to World Youth Day Mass in Paris, Rome, Cologne or Sydney.

In a way, the coverage of the abuse scandal has revived interest in the Catholic Church and its supreme pontiff. Unwelcome though the distortions that accompanied some of that coverage were, the increased fascination with the Catholic Church may well aid the New Evangelisation.

While the New Evangelisation mission is directed mostly at traditionally Christian Europe, which has experienced drastic cultural shifts in the past decades, and North America, it will also have application in some traditional mission territories. This includes South Africa, where in some strata of society we are facing what Pope Benedict has called “the eclipse of a sense of God”.

In a December 2000 address to catechists, Cardinal Ratzinger said: “Everyone needs the Gospel; the Gospel is destined to all and not only a specific circle and this is why we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.”

And this obligation applies to all Catholics as the Church seeks to reawaken the faith of people who have lost it.