Archbishop: To evangelize, be inspired by first missionaries

Sitting on the front rows of a packed auditorium at Loyola Marymount University, Jesuit Father Dorian Llywelyn --- LMU’s director of Catholic Studies and associate professor of theology --- said he was attending the inaugural Hispanic Ministry and Theology Lecture to be challenged. And challenged he was.

Offering a “detour” on Church history in the Americas starting with the devotion to St. Joseph, Archbishop José Gomez urged the audience, mostly students, faculty and staff of the Catholic university, to “recover the sense of wonder and mystery of the first missionaries” in order to become the spiritual leaders of the new evangelization.

Citing Pope Benedict XVI, he stressed the need for connecting faith and reason to win the unfaithful or doubtful, especially in university environments. A first step to draw people toward God, he said, is intellectually engaging them in understanding that they are beings with a body, soul, senses, emotions and passions.

“If they don’t understand who they are, it’s very difficult for them to see the need for an organized church,” Archbishop Gomez said during his Oct. 11 presentation "Inaugural Hispanic Ministry and Theology Lecture 2011" “Greater America: The Hispanic Mission and the New Evangelization,”  held as part of LMU’s Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations.

The event was sponsored by the Latino Theology and Ministry Initiative --- a joint project of LMU’s Department of Theological Studies and the Center for Religion and Spirituality --- which seeks to assess and respond to needs and concerns of the growing Hispanic Catholic population in the United States.

It is important, Archbishop Gomez pointed out, to see the U.S. and all the Americas today through the eyes of the first missionaries --- “to remember that these lands were once seen as the ‘ends of the earth,’ the final frontier of the Church’s universal saving mission.”

The archbishop explained how Spanish missionaries, Jesuits among them, started developing in the early 1500s a devotion to St. Joseph, which had remained very minimal during the 13th and 14th centuries. The devotion to St. Joseph and the Holy Family “is the first contribution that Americans made to the theology and devotion of the universal Church,” Archbishop Gomez remarked.

After narrating how the first church dedicated to the saint was built by Franciscan missionaries in Mexico in the 1520s and how he became that country’s Patron Saint, he said the devotion to St. Joseph grew exponentially in the Nueva España (New Spain), giving way to artistic expressions depicting the saint (portrayed as the father of the New World) and the Holy Family (portrayed as the “earthly trinity”).

“The missionaries and their new Indian converts seemed to sense that in the Americas God was doing what the biblical prophets called ‘a new thing,’” the archbishop said. “We need to recover the sense of wonder and mystery these first missionaries experienced, and we need to have our hearts inflamed with their sense of personal duty for the salvation of souls and the coming of God’s Kingdom.”

In order to carry out the task of evangelization, Archbishop Gomez said the Church should understand what God is saying in each historic moment, such as stated by Vatican II. But the missionary work begun half a millennium ago, he observed, is fading, giving way to a land that no longer knows Jesus Christ, where people are losing hope.

“The new evangelization of America must be our only task for Hispanic theology and ministry,” he said, “indeed our only task for all theology and ministry in our Church.

“This is our work, too, my friends,” he told the audience, which included religious and some high school principals. “Jesus didn’t give that mission only to bishops, priests and religious brothers and sisters; everyone who is baptized shares responsibility for the Church’s mission. That is the beauty of the Second Vatican Council.”

Everything done within the Church, he noted, is to be measured by what it contributes or does not contribute to proclaiming the Gospel with the same “energy and drive” of the first missionaries. He cited as an example Franciscan Father Antonio Margil, known for walking barefoot 40 or 50 miles a day to evangelize the New World in the early 18th century, establishing churches in Central America, Mexico, Louisiana and Texas.

Archbishop Gomez noted that Catholics were already worshipping and preaching in Spanish in churches established in Texas and Florida many years before George Washington was born, a century before William Bradford and the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Rock. The archbishop said Americans are the product of both the Protestant Reformation prevailing in England and the Catholic Renewal or Counter-Reformation centered in Spain and Rome.

“America needs our witness as Hispanics and as Catholics,” he said. “All of us in our Church are children of the Hispanic mission to America. And America needs our witness now more than ever, in order to understand her national character and place in history. Especially her place in God’s plan for history.”

As the Church embarks on the new evangelization, he suggested keeping a vision of America as El Camino Real, the King’s Highway (the legacy of Blessed Junípero Serra), a metaphor for a “Hispanic-Catholic vision of mission, theology and ministry: pilgrims in our Christian lives, immigrant missionaries along the road to our Father’s house; strangers with no lasting city, who know our true home is in heaven.”

He said there is a need to commit to building a “culture of charity and truth, mercy and justice and along El Camino Real live as a holy family with people of every color, race, nationality and language.”

Addressing immigration, the archbishop said it should be seen not as a problem, but as an opportunity. He suggested writing letters to elected officials to find solutions to “this reality.” Although happy for the recent approval of the DREAM Act in California, he said it still needs to get approved nationwide.

Asked about how to address those issues at parishes, he suggested holding town hall meetings and installing justice and peace committees. He admitted the archdiocese still needs to do more work on that regard.

In his introductory remarks, LMU’s president David Burcham said partnering and serving the archdiocese is an integral part of the university’s mission. More than 150 graduate LMU students are preparing to become lay ecclesial ministers serving parishes and working with the Hispanic community, he said.

The Center for Religion and Spirituality has an annual enrollment of 150 students in programs conducted in Spanish and about 50 percent of the students in the English language certificate program that focuses on church ministry are Hispanic Catholics.

In the past ten years LMU has prepared more than 1,300 teachers and principals for L.A. Catholic schools.

For more information about LMU’s Hispanic Ministry/Theology Lectures, visit bellarmine.lmu.edu/latinotheology. LMU will host the 2014 Symposium on the Present and Future of Catholic Hispanic Ministry in the United States, the follow-up to a 2009 symposium at Boston College.