The Death of Mission

By Jason Shanks – President, OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation

The pursuit of Catholic Innovation can be said to be an analysis and a focus on the “new methods and new approaches” in what Saint Pope John Paul II donned as The New Evangelization. This focus helps to ask deeper questions: What approaches and what methods draw people to Christ and His Church? How do we transform lives in new ways of outreach and service? How do we faithfully express ourselves through art, media and print to captivate the minds in today’s secular world? 

For the past three years, the OSV Institute has been asking these questions in the context of finding answers within a blue ocean strategy. Instead of asking Catholic Innovators who operate businesses and apostolates in intensely competitive and niche Catholic marketplaces to just “do better,” the challenge was posited for these faithful men and women to seek out innovative solutions that can transform our world.

This is no small request. Finding these new methods, these new approaches take grit, humility, vulnerability and fire that can only come from the Holy Spirit. In fact, any act of true evangelization requires a missionary dynamism. Not to be confused with excitement over a new idea, but rather an embodiment of the Truth –something that cannot be contained but must be shared.

This missionary impulse and urgency to share the good news is palpable. “For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel,” says St. Paul to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9:16).  Or in the words of Peter and John, “for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

And yet, when you look across the landscape of the Catholic marketplace and the Catholic Church: where are the words that communicate a sense of urgency? Where is the beating fervor of missionary dynamism? Why can’t we visibly see persons on fire with a hunger to save souls and draw people to an encounter with Jesus Christ?  Where is the renewed sense of mission?

In his book, “A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward,” Ralph Martin discusses this lack of urgency, drilling down to a central reason: what he calls the “fog of universalism.” Dr. Martin describes how universalists see the world through a lens of beliefs that undermine the work of evangelization. “Broad and wide is the way that leads to heaven, and almost everybody is going that way;” he writes. “Narrow is the door that leads to hell, difficult is the path, and few there are who travel that way.” 

What is universalism? It is the belief that all or most will be saved. Hell is empty and all are heaven-bound. The roots of this belief have been caused by confusion over “invincible ignorance,” and a lack of understanding related to mortal sin. It is to take the possibilities that those who have never heard the Gospel might be saved, and the possibilities of lessened culpability (due to personal and subjective circumstances related to mortal sin).  As Dr. Martin submits, for the universalists, possibilities have become probabilities.

The chaos that develops due to these beliefs, as Dr. Martin describes in his book, is currently the prevailing view of Catholic theology. The danger in this is the production of two different versions of the Gospel. One version state that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” and through Him, all souls can find eternal life. Therefore, as Christians, we must embody a missionary spirit to share the Truth of salvation through Jesus Christ with as many people as possible. The second version, flowing from the belief in universal salvation, negates this need for evangelization.

Believing in universal salvation deflate the air in any ballooning missionary activity and reduces Catholic innovation to merely an endeavor to improve human development. Evangelization understood through the lens of the universalist, means only presenting the Good News as a salve to deal with stress or make one’s life more fulfilling. Any efforts of evangelization are sanitized from any significant differentiation and reduced as another option in the self-actualization took kit.

In this view, evangelization might help humanity in the here and now, perhaps foreshadowing some foretaste of heaven but is ultimately stripped of any salvific significance.  Christ’s mandate to go forth to teach and baptize, would merely be for reasons to elevate minds, to bring mercy and hope against the oppressors of the day, to build a better world, but not for more. 

So, what happens to the work of the artist, the innovator or the Catholic entrepreneur? The view of the universalist would encourage creation for its own sake, not alerting these souls of their capacity to create for the sake of the kingdom. The new methods, the new strategies, through the eyes of a missionary dynamism can be seen as transformational. The work of believers cannot simply be to find new platforms to help Catholics come together in community, but rather, at its core, must have a singular, and directional focus of bringing others into a transformational, encounter with Jesus Christ found in and through the Catholic Church. 

The Second Vatican Council sought to answer who the Church was at its very core, in its DNA, and it came to describe it as missionary in nature and the “universal sacrament of Salvation” (Ad Gentes, 1). St. Pope Paul VI would come to describe the Church as “she exists in order to evangelize” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14). What rightly follows from that is that the Catholic innovator, who participates in the work of the Church, must embrace this missionary dynamism. With the same sacrifice as the missionaries of old who would traverse oceans to go to new lands to spread the Gospel, the missionaries of today must never tire to enter the fray and use innovative means to bring the truth, beauty, and goodness of our Lord to others—specially to help them find the one who can give them salvific grace. 

The Catholic Church at large needs a more honest and accountable dialogue of which version of the Gospel they preach, promote, and rely on in practice, word and action. Perhaps a charitable debate on the effects of universal salvation on the work of evangelization would also illuminate or ignite a spark on those whose fervor have yet to remain discovered.

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