Intervention of George Cardinal Alencherry, the Major Archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church on 13 October 2012 in the XIII General of the Synod of Bishops (7-28 October 2012)

New Evangelization for the Transmission of Faith

and the New Way of Living the Christian Vocation

Most Holy Father, Dear Brother Bishops and other Participants in the Synod,

For the understanding of those who don’t know much about the Syro-Malabar Church, I would like to say that it is an Oriental Church hailing from the preaching of St. Thomas, the Apostle.  Therefore, it is a Church as old as the Roman Catholic Church.  Our Church has at present Four Million Catholics living in India and in many other parts of the world.  We have 30 dioceses, 29 in India and one in the United States of America.  By the grace of God our Church has been supplying Bishops, priests and men and women of consecrated life to the Latin Church and to certain other oriental churches.  At present there are 21 Bishops including 3 Nuncios, hundreds of priests and thousands of consecrated women of Syro-Malabar origin working mainly in the Latin Church.  Bishop Alexander Thomas Kaliyanil SVD of Zimbabwe, who is a member of this Synod, is a son of the Syro-Malabar Church.  My own brother Fr. Francis has opted to work in the Latin Church and is presently a Salesian Missionary in Bangladesh.  We hope to continue this cooperation, but we will be able to do so by the grace of God only if our confrere Bishops of the Latin Church recognize and encourage the large concentrations of our emigrant faithful to grow in our ecclesial traditions wherever they are present and thereby helping us to foster vocations from our own communities.

My following intervention is based on numbers 37-40 of Instrumentum laboris of the section ‘New Evangelization and Church Renewal.’

Jesus Christ is God’s own message and self-gift to humanity.  He continues His mission of being the message and gift of God in the Church through the power of the Holy Spirit and the commitment of those who believe in Him.  The continuation of this work of Christ in the Church is evangelization.  In this sense, only if the Church, as the body of the faithful, becomes empowered to act in the person of Christ, she can be an effective agent of Evangelization.  It is through the Word and the Sacraments that the faithful individually and as a body get empowered to represent Christ and do the work of evangelization.  From this perspective it becomes clear that the Christian as a Member of the Body of Christ has to be transformed to the person of Christ so as to continue His mission.

New Evangelization calls for a self evaluation within the Church.  It is a fact that there are many in the Church who do not know who Christ is and what cost they have to pay to be his disciples.  The Church has to become more and more a communion of persons who have encountered Christ and thereby volunteer by the power of the Grace of God to pay the cost of discipleship of Christ.  The universal call to holiness has to become a fundamental awareness for all the Christian faithful.  The uniqueness of Christian faith and the ever-renewed commitment to Christ in the Church has to become the driving force for the life of every Christian.  Jesus Christ the unique saviour is the one who works both in the evangelizer and the evangelized.  He has said of himself: “I am the truth, I am the light, I am the way, I am the door, I am the bread, and I am the life.”

What is true of the Christian faithful is more true regarding we Bishops, the priests and the religious too. All the chosen leaders and prophets of the OT are persons who deeply encountered God in their lives.  The Apostles of Christ, the Fathers of the Church and all the Saints in the history of the Church are persons who encountered God through Christ in His Spirit.   They were all transformed into the person and mission of Christ.  This transformation is the pre-requisite for the making of a good evangelizer.  An evangelizing Church has to be authentically a Christ-like reality, a communion of persons filled with the Spirit and Mission of Christ.  This requires a new way of being and living the Christian reality in the Church and the Society.  The priests and men and women of consecrated life who are to be in the forefront of evangelization need the inner urge of a ‘cannot but preach the Gospel’ as was evidenced in St. Paul and the great array of missionaries of past decades.  

During the 50 years after the Vatican II, the renewal of the Church has been multifaceted and highly productive.  At the same time the lives and ministry of priests and men and women of consecrated life have become more functional than spiritual and ecclesial.  It would seem that the present day formation of priests and the religious personnel tend to make them functionaries for different offices in the Church, rather than missionaries inflamed by the love of Christ. Even in places of ad gentes missions of the Church, functioning through institutions have made the priests and the religious lose the impelling force and strength of the Gospel to which they are committed by their vocation.  Secularization has impacted the lives of individual Christians and also of ecclesial communities.  New Evangelization demands a thorough renewal of the lives of individual Christians and the re-evaluation of the structures of the Church to empower them with the dynamism of the Gospel values of truth, justice, love, peace and harmony.

The transmission of faith is always through the traditions of the particular churches and Churches sui iuris.  These traditions include celebration of the sacraments, especially the offering of the Holy Eucharist, the catechesis, the custom of daily family prayer, small Christian communities, observance of abstinence and penance in Lent and other periods of fast, the celebration of feasts, pilgrimages, practice of charity at all levels, people-friendly and family-oriented pastoral care and the participation of the laity in the administration of the church.  Whatever traditions have proved to be successful in transmitting the faith in the particular and sui iuris Churches require more and more encouragement and support from all quarters of the Universal Church.  Lack of clear vision and understanding of the communion ecclesiology visualized by the Council Vatican II is making the potentialities of evangelization and pastoral care of certain individual churches uncreative in some communities of their emigrants, especially those of the Oriental Churches.  In recent years, there are signs of improvement in this sphere.  The communion ecclesiology very much emphasized by Holy Father Benedict XVI has to become the ecclesiological vision of all of us Bishops in the Catholic Church.  New evangelization for the transmission of the Christian faith has to initiate new measures for the freedom in evangelization and pastoral care for all the Churches sui iuris under the guidance of the Apostolic See.

May Mary Mother of God and all the Apostles intercede for us in our task of new evangelization!  Thank you very much.