The Key to the Christian Life BY LORENZO ALBACETE

According to Cardinal Ratzinger, today’s Man is someone for whom Christianity is a past that does not concern him. It is not that the Christian faith’s contribution to history is not acknowledged (approvingly or disapprovingly). Many still see the Christian faith as an important source of values, ethical behavior, and religious or artistic inspiration.


What is seen as irrelevant or as unnecessary is the point of departure that defines and specifies the Christian reality, namely, the historical events of the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. These are considered “ways” of expressing Christian spirituality and ethics that have essentially been surpassed by other, more credible ways of saying the same thing. The key word here is concern. The historical events at the origin of the Christian claim are no longer of concern.


When something happens that shows how true it is that we live in such a post-Christian world (in spite of surviving and even impressive manifestations of Christian “folklorism”), we are tempted by two possibilities. Some insist on the need to promote or recapture Christian doctrinal orthodoxy, that is, the need to emphasize and teach the intellectual convictions that properly proclaim the Christian faith. For others, what matters is promoting and defending Christian morality as an ethical orientation (“liberal” or “conservative”), a system of “moral values” to guide our behavior. From this perspective, the relationship between the Christian faith and contemporary culture is seen as a culture war to be won, or a cultural contribution to be made by looking for a common point of departure for dialogue. Both “tactics” are in fact useless.


As Father Giussani has written, Christian evangelization is destroyed when we embrace the illusion that a non-Christian culture (where Christianity’s originating events are of no concern) should be confronted and overcome by a Christian culture (cf Dal temperamento un metodo, p 53). This, he says, is a deadly “fundamental error” that can tempt us, but which must be firmly rejected.

We cannot place our hopes on the creation of a “Christian culture,” and even less on going back to an idyllic past where Christianity maintained cultural hegemony. Such historical developments are not for us to design or plan. We do not know and will never know the “time plan” which the Father has for human history.


Instead, we must place our hope not on cultural proposals but on the event of Christ, on something that has already happened. Evangelization is to give witness to the fact–to the verifiable fact–that this event can and does still happen today because it has happened to us as something unforeseen, something amazing that surprises us, something that is not the result of our efforts or our particular ethical and spiritual predispositions. It is this that gives rise to concern, because an event is something that touches the heart, that changes us, that gives us a new vision of life’s possibilities.


Evangelization within a non-Christian culture is a matter of what St Augustine, writing about his own conversion, calls confession. Augustine wonders why God “made him” read the books of Plato (cf Confessions, VII, 20, 26). He concludes that the reason was so that after his conversion he could tell the difference inter praesumptionem et confessionem, between presumption and confession. To believe that one becomes a Christian through the proper philosophy, theology, spirituality, morality, or cultural project, is a presumption; it is to see our efforts as the cause of our belonging to Christ. Instead, we become Christians because the Incarnation happened in history, because the Paschal Mystery happened, because Pentecost happened, and because those events continue to happen in the world today. They happen now because they happened then and because the Church exists in the world as the life of a communion of persons created by these events, and making them present today through the sacraments. They happen because Christ has risen from the dead and can be encountered today with exactly the same results experienced by Andrew, James, John, Peter, Mary Magdalen, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Zaccheus, and the criminal at the cross next to His. Something happened to them. It was an event. The key to the Christian life, the point of departure, is not an intellectual or cultural proposal. It is this event. This is what creates the concern which post-Christian man has so tragically lost. Evangelization is to give witness of our amazement at this unimaginable event. Evangelization is confession.