Benedict XVI and the Future of the West By George Weigel
This seems to be relevant to the New Evangelisation agenda:
Evangelical Catholicism takes its ecclesiology, its idea of the Church, from Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, as interpreted by John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer). In this ecclesiology, the Church does not so much have a mission (as if “mission” were one among a dozen other things the Church does); the Church is a mission. Everything the Church does, the Church does to propose Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life. Everything the Church does, the Church does in order to offer friendship with Jesus Christ as the true means of satisfying the deepest longings of the human heart. Evangelical Catholicism takes John Paul II’s injunction in the 2001 apostolic letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte [Entering the New Millennium], to heart: it sets sail from the stagnant shallows of institutional maintenance into the deep waters of post-modernity, preaching the Paschal Mystery as the central truth of the human condition, while building communities of integrity, decency, solidarity, and compassion—Eucharistic communities of supernatural charity capable of nurturing genuine human flourishing.
Evangelical Catholicism is thus both culture-forming and counter-cultural. It is culture-forming, in that it takes the formation, nurturance, and maturation of a distinctive culture—the Church—with utmost seriousness. And it does not look to the ambient public culture for suggestions as to how this distinctive ecclesial culture, this distinctive mode of life called “Christian,” is to be structured and lived. Thus it is no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that the emergence of Evangelical Catholicism has been concurrent with the liberation of the Catholic Church from the Babylonian captivity of ecclesial establishment, with its evangelically unbecoming nexus between the power of the state (however that state might be organised politically) and the life of the Church. This liberation has been a fruit of the Second Vatican Council and its Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae); it has been codified in ecclesiastical law by Canon 377, which bars governments from any direct role in the nomination of bishops. Evangelical Catholicism is, then, post-Constantinian Catholicism. It does not seek the favour of the state. Rather, it asks of the state, and if necessary it demands of the state, the free space in which to be itself: a community of Eucharistic worship, evangelical proclamation, and charity. And it does so in order to ask the state (and society, and culture, and economics) to consider the possibility of their redemption.
