Are You an Evangelist or a Church Recruiter?
Pope Francis is telling Catholics to stop proselytizing, but an internet debate between two prominent American Catholics show how "the p-word" can be understood in radically different ways.
I sincerely hope that some day this week—maybe even as these words are written—Bishop Robert Barron and Austen Ivereigh toast to one another’s good health and long life in the dim light of Scholar’s Lounge Irish Pub in Rome.
I pray that the clink of beer glasses and the drone of Irish drinking tunes smooths over any hard feelings left over from their recent internet tussle,1 and that even now they sit hunched together, co-authoring on a back of a napkin a definitive treatise on the difference between evangelization and proselytization. Give the people what they want.
If you are a normal human being living a normal, happy life and thus haven’t followed +Barron and Ivereigh’s debate over on the side of the internet that cares about such things, welcome, and I’m sorry for dragging you into this, but I do hope it will be worth your time.
The crux of the argument was identifying the line between evangelization and proselytizing. Pope Francis has been vocal in his distaste for proselytization, calling it “something pagan, neither religious nor evangelical.”2 In other words, he is doing his darnedest to make proselytization a dirty word for Catholics. And rightly so.
But what, then, is evangelization, and how do we know if we are evangelizing, or merely proselytizing?
For papal biographer Ivereigh, evangelization is the work of “facilitating the encounter with Christ,” and its markers are hospitality, justice and mercy. This version of evangelization embodies a “preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words” ethos. It intentionally shies away from explicit attempts to propose Jesus or the Church to the other (as when Ivereigh favorably quotes Pope Francis, who counseled a young man interested in witnessing the faith to his non-Christian classmates, “the last thing you want to do is say something!”), instead emphasizing the power of personal encounter to make room for the Holy Spirit to work in human hearts.
Evangelization, for Ivereigh, can thus be sharply distinguished from “the bid to convert others to the Catholic Church”—this, he argues, is proselytism, a mutation of evangelization into something coercive and judgmental. He invokes several quotes from Pope Francis that warn against the attempt to “persuade” or “convince” others as if Christianity were a political ideology or a matter of mere apologetics.
As you might have guessed, Bishop Barron, who founded Word on Fire to “proclaim Jesus Christ as the source of conversion and new life” by “utilizing the tremendous resources of the Roman Catholic tradition—art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, theology, and the lives of the saints—in order to explain and interpret the event of Jesus Christ,” sees it rather differently. His position is that the welcoming, openness, and “accompaniment” popularized by Pope Francis and promoted by Ivereigh, are not properly speaking evangelization but rather pre-evangelization, and these should always be directed towards the eventual explicit offer of salvation in Christ through participation in the Church. This proclamation of Jesus Christ, says Barron, is the heart of evangelization.
I don’t want to misrepresent Ivereigh’s position by implying that he sees no place at all for teaching, preaching, or defense of the faith. He wrote a book of apologetics, after all.
But there is a clear disagreement here about what evangelization really is, what its end is, and where it becomes something unhelpful or even sinister.
I’m going to be honest, I find myself a bit baffled by this whole debate. It does seem like Ivereigh fired the first shot here by accusing +Barron of not understanding the difference between evangelizing and proselytizing. His reaction to +Barron’s comments appears to have less to do with +Barron or Word on Fire and more to do with defending then-Cardinal-elect Américo Aguiar’s July 6 statement about not being concerned with converting non-Catholic WYD attendees (see footnotes)—in other words, about not proselytizing.
So he isn’t exactly saying that +Barron himself or Word on Fire are guilty of proselytizing. It’s just weirdly implied, making it damn-near inevitable that +Barron was going to fire back.
And so here we are, having this awkward fight that ends with Ivereigh remarking that he hopes to talk it out with Bishop Barron over a beer at the Synod this week. To which I say—as I have already said—, alrighty then, cheers to that.
I have gone back and forth about whether I agree more with +Barron or Ivereigh on this issue, and I think this waffling has to do with the fact that I think they’re talking past each other - which Ivereigh himself acknowledges when he writes that +Barron, while correct about the proper role of theological clarification and apologetics in evangelization, has failed to “come to grips with the deeper challenge that Francis poses” in his ongoing rhetorical use of the p-word.
And while I find Ivereigh’s definition of evangelization a little bit slippery, I understand the basic point he’s trying to make: we can’t brow-beat others into becoming Catholic as if “becoming Catholic” is an end in itself, an unqualified good. Dante himself put lots of good Catholics in the lower regions of Hell.