In my homily on Sunday I quoted Etienne Gilson, one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century, from an essay written in 1936, entitled ‘The Intelligence in the Service of Christ’:
“We know that the battle of good against evil will end only with the world itself. What is more serious is that paganism may ceaselessly try to penetrate within Christianity itself, as in the time of Pelagius, and may succeed in the attempt. That is a never ending danger for us and one which we can avoid only with great difficulty. To live as Christians, to feel as Christians, to think as Christians in a society which is not Christian, when we see, hear, and read almost nothing which does not offend or contradict Christianity; when especially life places an obligation on us, and charity often gives us the duty of not making a visible break with the ideas and customs that we reprove, all that is difficult and hardly possible. That is also the reason why we are continually tempted to diminish or adapt our truth, in order to lessen the distance which separates our ways of thinking from those of the world, or indeed, and sometimes in all sincerity, in the hope of rendering Christianity more acceptable to the world and of seconding its work of salvation.”
Those words are just as pertinent today as when they were written. In fact, they could have been written at any time, because they describe the perennial vocation of the Christian, which is to be counter-cultural. It is not easy to live as a Christian in a non-Christian world, but as the Letter to Diognetus says: “God has assigned us such a high position, and we are not allowed to abandon it.”
Pope John Paul II said much the same thing when he called for a ‘new evangelization’ for the third millennium:
“The new evangelization does not consist of a new gospel. Neither does it involve removing from the Gospel whatever seems difficult for the modern mentality to accept. Culture is not the measure of the Gospel, but it is Jesus Christ who is the measure of every culture and every human action. The new evangelization has as its point of departure the certitude that in Christ there are 'unsearchable riches' which no culture nor era can exhaust, and which we must bring to people in order to enrich them. These riches are, first of all, Christ himself, his person, because he himself is our salvation.”
