Bound in Love

Christendom is a term that means different things to different people, so it will be important that we define it for our purposes and for the purposes of understanding Monsignor Shea’s message.

Let’s consider world history from a very high perspective. In the ancient world, there were many dominant civilizations tied to pagan religions. The Chinese, Indian, Greek, and Roman civilizations had distinct cultures that included a religious component to support their other cultural and legal institutions. There was certainly some sharing, and the Roman civilization in many ways built upon the older Greek culture.

Hidden within the other pagan cultures was a nation set apart by God to bring forth into his creation the good news of salvation. Set in the land of Canaan, this culture and civilization remained distinct even as pagans from Assyria, Persia, Greece, and finally Rome oppressed it. From within this Jewish religious culture came the Christian Church, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises to the nation of Israel extended to include anyone who would believe. See this quote from the Acts of the Apostles.

The early days of the life of the Church were a difficult struggle in the midst of a dominant civilization that either ignored or persecuted Christians. After about 300 years, the Church won over the leaders of the pagan civilization and we entered the period we can properly call “Christendom.” For over 1000 years, the mind of the Church and the mind of the broad culture were aligned. A fracture occurred in the 16th century, and over the past 500 years have seen a slow corrosion and corruption of Christendom so the term has lost its clarity and its potency.

The Need for a New Evangelization

Msgr. Shea notes that there has been a bit of conversation in the church about the “new evangelization.” Pope Paul VI wrote about it in an encyclical, Pope John Paul II spoke about it often, and Pope Benedict XVI established a Vatican dicastery for the new evangelization. All of this, according to Shea, is the result of papal recognition that Europe had somehow become missionary territory. An honest historian cannot tell the story of Europe without constant reference to Christianity and the Catholic Church, but by the mid-1970s even the popes in Italy in the heart of Europe, in the heart of Catholic Europe, had noticed that things work the way they had been previously.

The author says that this new evangelization is different from regular evangelization in that it is really a call back to something that your audience has discarded.

• Perhaps you’re not talking to long-time-ago fallen away Catholics.
• Perhaps who you’re talking to is people who have been Protestants for generations, and their attachments are different but deeply ingrained.

Shea says we are attempting to bring back to the church those knowingly or unknowingly in the grasp of apostasy. The English author CS Lewis once described that challenge as the difference between a man courting a young maiden and a man winning a cynical divorcee back to her previous marriage.

Many times what the evangelist is facing is people who have abandoned Christianity and have embraced an entirely different understanding of the world, yet they call themselves Christians. You might be familiar with the mega church pastor who is on TV named Joel Osteen, and he claims to be a Christian pastor but much of what he preaches is barely recognizable to an orthodox Catholic Christian.