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The Catholic faith is spread not by proselytising but by “attraction, by witnessing, by preaching”, Pope Francis has told a congregation including Vatican employees.
True evangelisers build bridges, to meet people wherever they are, rather than building walls to protect the Church, he said.
“A Christian must proclaim Jesus Christ in such a way that he is accepted,” the Pope said.
Using the example of St Paul preaching to pagan Athenians at the Areopagus, he said: “St Paul was a real ‘pontifex’ — a builder of bridges and not of walls.”
He said Paul’s attitude was: Build a bridge to their heart, in order then to take another step and announce Jesus Christ.
The Pope emphasised that evangelisation entails a willingness to listen to everyone, to become acquainted and establish relationships with everyone.
This was the way Jesus preached, he observed. Jesus “dined with Pharisees, with sinners, with publicans, with doctors of the law. Jesus heard everyone, and when he said a word of condemnation, it was at the end, when there was nothing else to do.
“Christians who are afraid to build bridges and prefer to build walls are Christians who are not sure of their faith, not sure of Jesus Christ,” he said.
“When the Church loses this apostolic courage,” the Pope continued, “it becomes a stalled Church, a tidy Church, nice, very nice, but without fertility, because it has lost the courage to go to the peripheries, where there are so many victims of idolatry, of worldliness, of weak thinking.”
Pope Francis recalled that as a child, he sometimes heard Catholics say that they could not visit certain neighbours because they were not married in the Church, or were socialists or atheists.
That attitude, he said, “was a defence of the faith, but with walls”. In contrast, he said, “The Lord built bridges”.
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Image: Slate.com
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