In case you were too immersed in the recent flaps over whether Scott Hahn is a schismatic (TLDR: he’s not) or whether conservative American Catholics are backward-looking (we are: to Jesus and the apostles) to notice: Bishop Robert Barron and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh had their own recent dustup.
First, Ivereigh criticized Bp. Barron’s World Youth Day talks as being over-concerned with persuasion-toward-conversion rather than simple evangelization. The good bishop, in response, cautioned against a weak-sauce approach to evangelization that accompanies someone to such an extent that we leave out evangelization’s end goal: conversion to Christ and his Church.
Into the exchange stepped Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter, who knocked Bp. Barron’s approach to evangelization—marked by patient, rational dialogue and appeals to truth and beauty—as “semi-Pelagian.” He quoted approvingly Ivereigh’s follow-up charge that Barron was crossing the line from true evangelism (good) to the awful, impermissible proselytism—the most dreadful thing the Church has concocted since the Comfy Chair.
Now, semi-Pelagianism is the ancient heresy that claimed we can make the initial act of faith or movement toward God solely by our own free will, without the aid of his grace. Winters doesn’t really believe that Bp. Barron is a semi-Pelagian; he is using the term loosely to refer to an over-emphasis on human devices (to the exclusion of the Holy Spirit) in the work of evangelization. And this charge is directly connected, apparently, with that of proselytism, which means . . . well, we’ll get to that.
Let’s look at those two points real quick.
First, I’m sure that Bp. Barron would be the last to claim that conversion is properly our work, not God’s. But it’s a false dilemma to say that either a) God draws people to himself by grace or b) we draw people to God by reason—or friendship, or beauty, or charity, or anything else we do. Instead, we have a both/and. As the Catechism puts it, the work of salvation is a “cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom.”
No one can have faith unless God first gives him grace. At the same time, God wills that we cooperate with him as instruments of our own salvation and each other’s. When it comes to others, we do this in a number of ways, but we might boil them down to three P’s:
Prayer: we ask God to do for others what we can’t
Proclamation: we tell other people the Good News
Persuasion: by word or deed, we make Christ and his truth attractive and understandable
In none of these do we forget that God’s grace is the first and necessary motive power in conversion; but at the same time, in all of them we recognize that we have a legitimate role to play. This isn’t Pelagian or semi-Pelagian or three-quarters Pelagian—it’s Catholic.
Now what about “proselytism”? This has become an especially dirty word over the last decade or so, but it has never been clear to me why, since at root it just means an effort to bring someone to a new religious point of view (see: the Great Commission). Some say that Pope Benedict XVI, who warned against it in an address to a Brazilian audience in 2007, had in mind an aggressive and coercive form of faux-evangelization that seeks to manipulate people into professing belief rather than letting them come to it in freedom—as had been practiced, at times, in the missionary field and is said to occur among the “sheep-stealing” sects of Latin America and elsewhere today.
If so, that’s a good definition and a good warning. None of us should be doing that.
But to let the definition of proselytism creep so much that it now refers, in Ivereigh’s words, to “means of persuasion, strategies, theological explanations, and apologetics programs”?? That’s going way too far. As with the false charge of semi-Pelagianism, this leaves out the role of human cooperation in the work of getting people saved.
Pope John Paul II, in fact, hit this nail right on the head. In his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, he rebuked those who dismiss or decry the missionary “call to conversion” as “an act of ‘proselytizing.” Everyone, he said, “has the right to hear the Good News,” and so it’s not enough to “help people to become more human or more faithful in their own religion.”
Whose job is it to tell people about this Good News? It’s ours—the whole Church’s. And not only to tell people about it, but to model it for them in the way we live; and not only to model it, but to clear away their mental obstacles to it and help explain the tricky parts. And, ideally, to do it with a skill and zeal that Ivereigh & co. shouldn’t dismiss as mere illicit cleverness.
Catholic Answers exists to do just this job, in a specially direct and focused way. May it please God to continue allowing us to be his humble cooperators in the salvation of souls.