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Twenty-First Sunday of the Year
24 August 2008
Dear Friends in Christ,
Five years ago—after ten years of priestly ministry in five parishes, three campus chaplaincies, and one seminary—I drafted the Principles of Evangelical Catholicism to help shape our common life as a spiritual family. In the original draft, I listed seven principles which touched on evangelization, preaching, catechesis, and the discipline of the sacraments, and I have since added an eighth principle to describe our approach to the sacred liturgy. These principles are arranged to work together in moving us towards right worship, right belief, and right living, and they touch every area of parish life.
“Evangelical Catholicism” is not meant to be a movement within the Church or a sub-set of Catholicism. Rather, Evangelical Catholicism is simply a way of understanding the vocation of every Christian to be a faithful disciple of Christ and of thinking about the things essential to the Church’s life as they have been explained by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the papal magisterium of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. During the nearly twenty-seven years of his pontificate, John Paul the Great summoned the Church to the urgent task he called the New Evangelization, the proclamation of the timeless truths of the Gospel in the new circumstances of our time. Another way of expressing our commitment to the work of the New Evangelization is to say we must become Evangelical Catholics, and this in turn means that we must let go of cafeteria, casual, and cultural Catholicism by accepting the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a complete, coherent, comprehensive Way of Life. To live as true disciples of the Lord Jesus, we must surrender our entire lives in the obedience of faith to the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, and this in turn means that everything about us must be measured and guided by evangelical truth—our thoughts, words, deeds, relationships, spending habits, political convictions, religious beliefs, leisure activities, lifestyle choices, business decisions…in sum, everything. And instead of the constriction of liberty the world expects to find in this obedience, the Christian finds freedom: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8.32)
In the next eight bulletin columns, I will list and discuss each of the Principles of Evangelical Catholicism in the hope of making our pastoral practice here at St. Mary’s more easily understood by all. The complete list and a fuller discussion of these principles can be found on the parish website at www.stmarysgvl.org and on my personal website at www.jayscottnewman.net. I realize that the shape of parish life in other places is different in many respects from what you experience at St. Mary’s—sometimes dramatically so, but these differences are not the result of personal taste or arbitrary whim; rather, the choices we make to shape our common life are guided by the principles of Evangelical Catholicism. I encourage every parishioner of St. Mary’s to study these principles carefully and then shape your life and that of your family by the liberating truth of the Gospel.
Father Newman