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Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and our new Holy Father, Francis, have exhorted our Church to embark upon a new evangelization.

Clearly, to be disciples and evangelists in our day is no easy task.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read of Paul's farewell to the Church at Ephesus. He warns that, after his departure, "savage wolves will come among them and will not spare the flock. Others from within the flock will come forward to pervert the truth and draw away members of the flock."

Paul, therefore, warns this nascent faith community to be vigilant.

Quite frankly, it sounds like Paul is describing the Church in our day. Our Church has been rocked severely by the scandal of clergy sexual abuse and its mishandling by Church authorities like myself. We see divisions created by church closings - with some so angered, they have chosen to stop the practice of our faith or have joined another Christian denomination.

Catholics converting
The evangelical churches have made great inroads among many Catholics. In April, Time magazine ran a cover story on the great attraction of evangelical churches to the growing number of Hispanic Catholics in our nation.

Religious practice in the United States has declined significantly. Ninety million Americans are unchurched. One out of every five Catholics no longer identifies as such - and, of those remaining, only 24 percent of Catholics within our Diocese of Albany attend weekend Mass on a regular basis.

A recent survey also indicates that only 24 percent of the people in our Capital District region identify themselves as strongly religious, the lowest of any metropolitan region in the United States. Twenty percent of Americans now declare as "nones" when it comes to religious affiliation and six percent of our population now self-identify as atheists or agnostics.

Yes, in our day, wolves have scandalized the flock, perverted the truth and drawn people away from our faith community through apathy and indifference toward religious practice, through abandoning our Catholic faith community for another or through shedding religious belief altogether.

Why leave, why stay
There are all kinds of reasons for this: disagreement with Church teaching; a negative experience with a priest or other representative of the Church; and the cultural forces of secularism, individualism, narcissism, consumerism and moral relativism, which are so pervasive within our society and often so antithetical to the communal nature and moral and spiritual values of our Catholic Christian tradition.

How do we cope with this reality? In an article in America magazine, Rev. Robert Imbelli, a theologian from Boston College, suggests that we must recapture the centrality of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the documents of the 1960s' Second Vatican Council. Those documents proclaim that Jesus must be the center and focus of our lives. He is the living incarnation of God's plan for us. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

However, Father Imbelli posits that the primacy of Christ in our Catholic faith has frequently either been taken for granted or suffered benign neglect. Too often, bishops, priests, deacons, theologians and catechists fail to communicate how Christocentrism is at the core of everything we do in the Church.

In the liturgy, for example, while responding to the call of the Second Vatican Council for full, active participation of all the faithful in the liturgy, we have devoted an inordinate amount of time to developing the liturgical roles and responsibilities of lectors, communion ministers, servers, musicians, artists and decorators - but, in the process, we have forgotten the teaching of the Council that the focus of the Eucharist must always be on the paschal mystery: "reading in all the Scriptures the things referring to Christ; giving thanks to God for His unspeakable gift in Christ Jesus; and offering praise and glory for our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit."

Need for Scripture
Another desired outcome of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council was its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation ("Dei Verbum"), urging that the Scriptures become more central to the lives of Catholics.

Thus, in contrast to the pre-Vatican II liturgy, which contained a one-year Sunday cycle of two Scripture readings, the revised liturgy offers a two-year cycle for weekday Mass and a three-year cycle of three Scripture readings for weekend liturgies with passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles and the Gospels. There is the expectation that homilies be based upon the scriptural readings of the day.

However, while Scripture scholarship has grown over the past half-century, unfortunately for most Catholics the Scriptures have not become a more integral part of our lives as envisioned in the Council document on the Word of God.

Before his retirement, Pope Benedict lamented that many Catholics "never read the Bible" and noted that "it remains unknown to most people, even good Christians."

This is not just a problem for Catholics. In March, the American Bible Society issued its annual State of the Bible, which revealed that 57 percent of those surveyed read the Bible less than five times a year.

The report concludes that moral and spiritual values are declining in the United States - and the Bible's collective spiritual wisdom, moral guidance and vision for a meaningful life is the major contributing factor to this decline. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed say they don't want wisdom and advice from the Bible.

Social teachings
A further area Father Imbelli suggests for recovering the Christocentrism of the Second Vatican Council is in approaching the social teachings of the Church. For example, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, "Gaudium et Spes," states: "for the word of God through whom all things were made, was made flesh so that, as perfectly human, He would save all human beings and sum up all things. The Lord is the goal of human history, the point on which the desire of history and civilization turn, the center of the human race, the joy of all hearts and the fulfillment of all desires."

Action on behalf of justice, therefore, will only find its deepest meaning and surest orientation when informed and transformed by the knowledge and love of Christ.

If this is not the case, then our Christian service and advocacy on behalf of social justice will become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, creating a false sense of security rooted in the fickle and fleeting ideas, fads, fashions and movements of the moment, but failing to communicate the life-giving power and strength that only comes from trust in the Lord God and the Good News revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

I hope, therefore, that during the Year of Faith, wherein we commemorate the inception of the Second Vatican Council, we will heed the admonition of Father Imbelli by recovering the Christocentrism of the Council documents and make the person of Jesus the motivating, animating and sustaining influence in our lives.[[In-content Ad]]

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