The most powerful and effective method of evangelisation is to live according to what one teaches and preaches, Pope Francis said.
“I can recite the Creed by heart, I can talk about everything we believe in, but if your life is not consistent with that, it will get you nowhere,” he told people at his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square on May 31.
What attracts people to the Gospel, he said, is seeing consistency in the way Christians live, seeing that “we, Christians, live the way we say and do not pretend to be Christians,” who, instead, live a “worldly” life.
The pope continued his series of talks about “zeal” for evangelisation by focusing on Jesuit Fr Matteo Ricci, a 16th-century Italian missionary who spent 28 years evangelising in China and bringing Western science to the continent. He died in Beijing in 1610, at the age of 57.